But that night, the seas calmed down enough to permit luminous plankton to cast an eerie green pall across the Urania’s battered hull. “The marine phosphorescence gave us a surprising show,” Sajnovics recalled. “It was like our ship was cutting through fiery foams.”
On October 8, the Urania reached the tiny settlement of Hamningberg—less than fifteen miles from Vardø. But unforgiving winds and an unaccommodating shoreline left the boat with practically nothing to secure it to land. “We threw in three anchors waiting terrified for what fate would bring next,” Sajnovics wrote. “The wind was raging terribly throughout the night and we were expecting the ropes to be torn at any minute. But lo and behold, we saw the dawn! The two main anchors had fallen on cliffs, so they barely held anything. But one that was most worthless sunk in close to the shore, and it was the only one that resisted the attacks of the [waves] and the winds.”
VARDØ, NORWAY
October 11–November 20, 1768
Any European of the age who enjoyed adventures, hazards, and perils could scarcely go wrong buying a book about the arctic. Readers vicariously venturing into the far north could expect to discover “the bleak and chilling prospects in the Arctic seas” or that “les vents y sont en toute saison d’une impétuosité qui rend la navigation trèspérilleuse.”41 (“The winds are so forceful in every season that they make travel by ship very dangerous.”)
Yet as Sajnovics discovered, the dangers now facing his expedition had drawn themselves out into something so continually mortally humbling that the experience couldn’t quite be expressed in words.
One final storm front followed Urania into Vardø, and this gale too nearly sunk the boat. “Only he who knows the sea can know the dangers of the sea,” Sajnovics later wrote in a letter. “There was one enormous wave that was angrily chasing our ship, splashed above it, and . . . in its anger it hit the cabin, penetrating through the windows and the cracks, it filled up the whole room.” Fortunately, angry seas also meant swift waters, so Urania arrived in Vardø “in two short hours that seemed very long,” as Sajnovics noted. “No sooner did we get off the ship than the wind started screaming again, the sky darkened and a veritable tempest started that kept raging for a whole day; they all agreed that we would have perished, had the tempest caught us at sea. Beg the Lord to keep us safe the next year too.”
Little wonder, then, that the military officials manning the remote Norwegian garrison at Vardø were surprised when Hell and Sajnovics arrived. Sailing in mid-October through the Barents Sea was a calling that fell somewhere on the recklessness spectrum between crazy and suicidal. Nature’s fury in the stormy season was, as Sajnovics had seen firsthand, something bordering on unnatural. And as nature’s annual payment for being the summertime land of the midnight sun, daylight would be quitting the region in a month.
Hell and Sajnovics saw their safe deliverance as the kind of beneficence that called for deep reflection and prayer. “We set up the altar in the neighboring small room, and we expressed our gratitude to God,” Sajnovics wrote on October 12, the day after their arrival in Vardø. “We received visits from [Israel Olai Sigholt] the commander, [Peder Fischer] the lieutenant, [Raskvitz] the exile, and [Voigt] the barber—who did not actually know how to cut hair.”
A mostly torch-lit procession of trips back and forth to the ship followed. And out of the snow, in stakes and twine, emerged the beginnings of the observatory that the two astronomers had already sketched out. Their new building, near the village center, would be an annex to a house of one of the local officials, the Fogdens hus.42 The next day, Sajnovics and Hell took lunch at the vicarage. “The sky was covered in snow clouds,” Sajnovics recorded. “Our hunger and thirst were amply settled with noodles, lamb stew, and Schneeballen red [ice] wine.” Table talk centered around the poor fishing season that had just ended and the outbreak of scurvy that Vardø had endured the last time such meager stocks supplied the long winter. So during the coming darkness, reindeer meat would be the new staple.43
Days of porting chests and timber through bracing winds gave way to insomniac nights kept restless by mice chewing on the visitors’ lodgings. Hell and Sajnovics installed their Niebuhr quadrant—the one they’d already tested on the road to Trondheim—and measured the sun’s altitude through intermittent breaks in the clouds. On October 13, Hell ordered a day’s expedition to a nearby island to collect moss that would serve as the observatory’s insulation. The next day, through a thick layer of snow, they laid the stone foundation.
On October 27 and 28, a raging arctic blizzard battered the island, blowing bitter winds through the cracks in the walls and keeping the shivering travelers up most of the night. Beer and water stores froze and burst their containers. “We took the wine to the pantry of the commander, lest it suffer the same fate,” Sajnovics wrote.
Some of the men were still quartered on the Urania, anchored near shore. Fierce, towering whitecaps crashed onto the ship and tossed it around like a toy boat. “Had it not been for the rope holding it down on the other shore, the wind would have definitely thrown our ship out into the open sea together with the two sailors sleeping on it,” Sajnovics wrote. “In the evening the waves became strong again, so the captain made the soldiers pull the ship closer to land.”
Those measures weren’t enough. A fortnight later, on the night of November 8, Sajnovics noted that “the remarkably big waves had thrown our ship against the shore, having ripped apart the ropes that were used to secure it. It was filled with water. The captain was crying and whining.” 44
The days grew progressively shorter and dimmer. On November 18, when the sun rose at 11:32 AM and set at 2:06 PM, three soldiers and a peasant from town set out in the captain’s boat to fish.45 “Suddenly,” Sajnovics recorded, “an unexpectedly strong east wind started blowing and raved with fury throughout the day, to such an extent that we lost all hope of ever seeing those men again.”
Although the fishermen miraculously survived the night and made it back to shore the next morning, their return also marked a dark day on the local calendar. November 19 was to be the last day of sunlight for 1768.
“When we saw the sun rise in the south on 20 November and soon after go down in the same place, at that point it said good bye to us for a very long time,” Sajnovics later wrote to his Father Superior. “The light was replaced by darkness, indeed a fabulous and Egyptian darkness.”46
Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche (b. 1728) was a French polymath astronomer with a keen sense of wonder, a flair for drama, and an instinct for cutting-edge science. Chappe’s observations of the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769 provided some of the best data to answer one of the age’s greatest scientific problems: How far away is the sun? Engraving from Voyage en Californie, pour l’observation du passage de Vénus sur le disque du solei by Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche (1772)
The Scottish astronomer and instrument-maker James Ferguson presented a series of lectures in early 1761 that projected the path of the planet Venus as it would be crossing the sun on June 6 of that year. Through nineteen pages of complex geometric calculations, Ferguson offered his readers, he wrote, a way “to trace this affair through all its intricacies [but] to render it as intelligible to the reader as I can.” Diagram from Astronomy Explained by James Ferguson (1764)
On his Venus transit voyages to Siberia and present-day Mexico, Chappe took regular observations of everything from ocean currents to atmospheric pressure. Here he delights at lightning discharges during a thunderstorm while his less enraptured servants and Russian hosts take shelter. Engraving from Voyage en Siberie, fait par ordre du roi en 1761 by Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche (1768)
In 1763, the British ship’s master Archibald Hamilton wrote out a manuscript account of his ocean travels. On the cover page he drew this image of a master’s duties—tracking positions of sun, moon, and stars with his “quadrant” and chronicling it and other data in the ship’s log. Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum
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p; The Rev. Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811) was an astronomer and fierce advocate of navigation at sea via “lunars”—longitudes determined by the moon. Maskelyne was Astronomer Royal of England from 1765–1811. Smithsonian Museum
Naval Lieutenant James Cook, later Captain Cook, headed up a Venus transit expedition to Tahiti that set sail from England in August 1768. Cook commanded a refitted collier called Endeavour. National Library of Australia
Key figures in the Endeavour’s 1769 Venus transit expedition to Tahiti: (l. to r.) supernumerary Joseph Banks; former Lord of the Admiralty, John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich; Lieutenant James Cook; botanist Daniel Solander; and chronicler John Hawkesworth. National Library of Australia
The Endeavour in Australian waters in 1770. “A better ship for such a service,” her captain James Cook wrote, “I never could wish for.” National Library of Australia
The Hungarian Jesuit father Maximilian Hell, who along with his assistant Joannes Sajnovics, traveled to an island in northernmost Denmark (today Vardø, Norway) to observe the 1769 Venus transit. Engraving by Johann Gottfried Haid from a painting by Wenzel Pohl
Endeavour’s artist Sydney Parkinson made a thousand drawings during the ship’s voyage, including sketches of the encampment that Cook had built at Tahiti for Venus transit observations. This engraving is based on Parkinson’s “Fort Venus” sketches. (Parkinson himself died of dysentery on the journey home.) National Library of Australia
A former Jesuit mission outside the town of San Jose del Cabo (in present-day Mexico) served as the site of Chappe’s 1769 Venus transit observation. An epidemic of typhus was also decimating the region at the time of Chappe’s journey here. Courtesy of Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques
Chapter 8
SOME UNFREQUENTED PART
MADEIRA ISLAND
September 12–19, 1768
The harsh light of a cloudless morning brightened the palette of tan, purple, and greenish tones to the northwest. Britain’s HM Bark Endeavour pulled round a hilly landmass to meet her maiden voyage’s first port of call—the Portuguese-occupied Madeira, an island of cliffs and pinnacles that shoots up out of the ocean like a tiny Dover.
Chief astronomer Charles Green had manned his sextant on Endeavour’s approach, measuring the angular altitude of the sun throughout the day and concluding their latitude was 32 degrees and 42 arc minutes.1 “When you first approach [Madeira] from seaward it has a very beautiful appearance,” the Endeavour’s gentleman naturalist Joseph Banks recorded in his diary. “The sides of the hills being entirely covered with vineyards almost as high as the eye can distinguish, which make a constant appearance of verdure—tho at this time nothing but the vines remain’d green, the grass and herbs being entirely burnt up except near the sides of the rills of water by which the vines are water’d.”2
As soon as Endeavour had been authorized to anchor in Funchal bay and conduct its business onshore, Lieutenant James Cook—supernumeraries onboard called him “captain”—authorized Banks and his assistant botanist Daniel Carl Solander to land and represent the ship to Madeira’s English consul. The two were eager to explore the island, having discovered new species of both marine and bird life during the ship’s approach.
Cook had his own business to attend to onboard. The night of their arrival, September 12, the rope attached to the stern anchor had slipped, unsteadying the ship’s mooring. At 6:00 AM the next morning Endeavour’s quartermaster Alex Weir launched a boat to help raise the anchor, refasten it, and throw it back in the water. As the ship’s gunner Stephen Forwood wrote in his diary, Weir’s party had “hove [the anchor] up and carried it out again to the eastward, where Mr. Weir’s mate, having charge of the boat, by heaving the anchor out of the boat, got fore of the buoy rope.”3 As Sydney Parkinson, the ship’s artist—hired by Banks to sketch the many specimens and natural settings on the journey—recorded, “The buoy rope happen[ed] to entangle one of [Weir’s] legs, he was drawn overboard and drowned before we could lend him any assistance.”
A blanket of clouds and rain descended on the afternoon, darkening the mood appropriately for the first death of an Endeavour crewman. Typically a dead crew member’s mess mates—the four- to six-man unit assigned to take their meals together—prepared the body for burial. The men wrapped their mess mate’s corpse in a patch of canvas, drawn from the material used to mend sails, and threw in two cannonballs to send the cloth casket straight to the bottom. The sheet was sewn together, with the final stitch passing straight through the deceased’s nose—both to ensure the man was truly dead and to keep the body fastened to its shroud. The next day, a pinnace lowered into the water, bearing a detachment that would drop the late quartermaster overboard. “[We] sent the boat into the offing,” Green recorded. “To bury the body of Mr. Weir which we had found entangled in the buoy rope of the kedge anchor.”4
Onshore, Banks and Solander had taken lodgings with one W. Cheap, British consul to Madeira. In spite of the late season, after which many flowers had already blossomed for the year, the two naturalists collected 246 plant specimens as well as 18 types of fish. They watched the locals prepare wine from the local vineyards—and were unimpressed. The method, Banks recorded, “is perfectly simple and unimprov’d.” Vineyard workers, after removing their stockings and jackets, jumped into vats with the grapes and stomped around. The pulp, Banks said, was then “put under a square piece of wood which is press’d down by a lever, to the other end of which is fastened a stone that may be rais’d up at pleasure by a screw. By this way and this only they make their wine, and by this way probably Noah made his when he had newly planted the first vineyard after the general destruction of mankind and their arts—tho it is not impossible that he might have used a better [way], if he remembered the ways he had seen us’d before the flood.”5
Despite Banks’s disapproval of Madeiran viticulture, Cook sent Endeavour’s casks to shore to be filled with water and with 3,020 gallons of the island’s famous wine.6 Madeira wine was well suited for a long-haul voyage because brandy was added to the final product, upping both alcohol content and shelf life.
Cook also ordered his storeroom to be stocked with, as he wrote in his captain’s journal, “fresh beef and greens for the ship’s company.” During the Madeira stay, Cook even had a seaman and a marine whipped for “refusing to take their allowance of fresh beef.” Cook also loaded up with fresh fruits and onions. Every man on Endeavour was issued thirty pounds of Madeira onions—and expected to incorporate it into his daily rations.7
Scurvy had long laid waste to ship’s crews at sea. And while no one at the time knew exactly what caused the disease, Cook would be testing new foods throughout his three-year circumnavigation that were thought to prevent scurvy. Such prophylaxes included sauerkraut, a lemon-orange concentrate, and water boiled with a sticky brown bouillon—“portable soup”—made from beef offal, salt, and vegetable stock. Before advancing to the newer curatives, though, Cook would first be fouling the stench of every Endeavour crew member’s breath. As one treatise on scurvy at the time advised, “Every common sailor ought to lay in a stock of onions, for they are a great preservative at sea.”8
Unburdened by officers’ duties, Banks and Solander had free rein on the island for nearly five days. They ventured into the hills outside of Funchal to visit a doctor who gave them samples of the island’s guava, pineapple, mango, banana, and cinnamon tree bark. Another day took them into a Franciscan convent, where Banks recorded his observations on the local climate, population, architecture, and religious culture. “The churches have an abundance of ornaments, chiefly bad pictures and figures of their favorite saints in lac’d clothes,” he wrote. The duo visited a nearby convent, where, Banks said, “the ladies did us the honor to express great pleasure in seeing us there. They had heard that we were great philosophers, and expected much from us.” The guests regaled the sisters, by their request, with scientific theories about thunder and ways to divine new sources of water. The exchange w
ent both ways too. “While we stayed,” Banks wrote, “I am sure there was not the fraction of a second in which their tongues did not go at an uncommonly nimble rate.”9
On one day the island’s governor waylaid Banks and Solander at their quarters, while he talked their ears off. Like many gentlemen of his age, the governor enjoyed keeping current with the latest scientific technology—no small sample of which Banks and Solander had in their possession. The governor’s fascination centered around an “electrical machine” built by the London instrument maker Jesse Ramsden. It was an eight-inch-diameter glass disc that was spun as it pressed against a leather pad, generating little lightning discharges from an attached metal rod. With learned organizations around the world, like London’s Royal Society, providing public demonstrations of spark-producing whirligigs like Ramsden’s device, polite society produced its own quiet hum about the zaps and jolts such machines produced.10 Researchers such as Benjamin Franklin, William Watson, and Henry Cavendish had each recently advanced the field with discoveries about lightning, circuits, and conductors. Journals and books enthused over possible medical uses of “the electric fluid.” One prominent London book published the year before Endeavour’s launch, for instance, detailed numerous cases in which “medical electricity” had allegedly helped patients with their ailments. “It has seldom failed,” one account read, “to cure rigidities or a wasting of the muscles—and hysterical disorders, particularly if they be attended with coldness of the feet.”11
The Day the World Discovered the Sun Page 14