The Endeavour could not spare four months. Even four weeks spent turning this corner of South America from one ocean to another, and the mission might miss its entire purpose—perhaps still wandering the Pacific as Venus made its brief voyage across the sun’s disk.
On the night of January 6, Joseph Banks held fast to his swinging bed, its brass holdings creaking with each sway. Banks and the mission’s other supernumeraries, encased in webbed rope beds hung from the rafters, followed the ship’s each sway and jolt.37 “The evening blew strong,” Banks recorded, shivers running through the spines of his words. “At night a hard gale, ship brought to under a mainsail; during the course of this my bureau was overset and most of the books were about the cabin floor, so that with the noise of the ship working, the books etc. running about, and the strokes our cots or swinging beds gave against the top and sides of the cabin, we spent a very disagreeable night.”38
These were days that tested every man. The captain, as taxed by the elements as any of his crew, had opted for this stormy route. Endeavour could have just struck out to sea till it hit 61 or 62 degrees south latitude—a parallel that lay safely beyond the hidden shoals and mast-splintering tempests that made the far end of South America infamous. The ocean to the west, in fact, took its name from the pacific calm it welcomed all sailors with who had survived the Cape Horn crossing.
However, Cook later wrote, “As to running into the latitude of 61 or 62 degrees before any endeavour is made to get to the westward, it is what I think no man will ever do who can avoid it, because it is not southing but westing that is wanted. This way, however, he cannot steer, because the winds blow almost constantly from that quarter [i.e., the west].”39
Moreover, the coast of Tierra del Fuego offered supplies, giving the captain yet one more reason to hug the dangerous coastline. It was no Garden of Eden like Madeira, but the extreme tip of South America would be the last landfall Endeavour might reasonably expect to make before she arrived at Tahiti. Who knew how many months thereafter the ship would be living off the rations in its stockrooms?
On January 11, Endeavour sailed into view of Tierra del Fuego—an island separated from the South American mainland by the Straits of Magellan. The calm weather welcomed the sub-Antarctic island’s guests. “We could see trees distinctly through our glasses and observe several smokes made probably by the natives as a signal to us,” Banks wrote in his diary. “The captain now resolved to put in here if he can find a convenient harbour and give us an opportunity of searching a country so entirely new.”40
Four days later, after tacking back and forth between Tierra and the nearby Staten Island, the winds and weather permitted a resting place in calm waters. Endeavour anchored in the Bay of Good Success, an inlet on the eastern end of the Cape Horn gauntlet. Banks and Solander rowed ashore after the noon meal and, armed with trifles, greeted the natives. “Dr. Solander and myself then walked forward 100 yards before the rest and two of the Indians advanc’d also and set themselves down about 50 yards from their companions. . . . We distributed among them a number of beads and ribbands which we had brought ashore for that purpose, at which they seem’d mightily pleased.”41
Cook noticed the locals’ familiarity with the Europeans’ guns and dyed goods. “They were not at all surprised at our fire arms,” Cook wrote. “On the contrary seem’d to know the use of them by making signs to us to fire at the seals or birds that might come in the way. . . . They are extremely fond of any red thing and seemed to set more value on beads than any thing we could give them. In this consists their whole pride; few either men or women are without a necklace or string of beads made of small shells or bones about their necks.”42
Finding as welcoming a rest stop as could be hoped, Cook gave Banks permission to venture farther inland to collect specimens while Endeavour’s crew restocked the ship. The next morning, January 16, a sunny summer day in the sub-Antarctic, the ship’s three scientists plus a support crew set out to explore Tierra del Fuego.
Banks, Solander, Green, two assistants, four servants, two seamen, and a midshipman pushed inland from the beach into a thick grove of trees, on an ascending path. “Neither heat nor cold was troublesome to us nor were there any insects to molest us,” Banks recorded.43
Once they’d reached the top of their summit, however, only mire awaited. Low birch bushes cut at their sides while their boots sank into muck. “Every step the leg must be lifted over [the bushes] and on being plac’d again on the ground was almost sure to sink above the ankles in bog,” Banks noted. A rocky outcropping seemed close at hand, though, so the party pressed on.
Then, during the unexpectedly strenuous walk to their new destination, Banks’s hired sketch artist Alexander Buchan had an epileptic seizure. “A fire was immediately lit for him and with him all those who were most tir’d remained behind, while Dr. Solander, Mr. Green, Mr. Monkhouse and myself advanced,” Banks wrote.
However, snow squalls—which were not uncommon on this island of minute-to-minute weather variability—descended on the group. Facing whiteout conditions and plummeting morale, Banks changed his tack. He realized that with one man in an uncertain state of health and others beginning to succumb to cold, someone had to take charge. Gratefully, Banks had untapped leadership skills in him—no doubt augmented by learning a few things from his extraordinary ship’s captain. The gentleman naturalist now began delegating people to start a real fire and prepare a shelter for the night. They were going to have to ride out the storm.
“The air was here very cold and we had frequent snow blasts,” Banks recorded. He sent Green and Monkhouse back to the group that was tending to Buchan. They’d all rendezvous at a nearby hill, Banks decided, and fashion a wigwam out of trees and branches for the night. But now the first signs of hypothermia began to appear. “We pass’d about half way very well when the cold seem’d to have once an effect infinitely beyond what I have ever experienced. Dr. Solander was the first who felt it. He said he could not go any farther but must lay down, tho the ground was covered with snow. And down he laid notwithstanding all I could say to the contrary.”
One of the servants, who carried a jug of rum, began drinking to keep warm. He started growing tired even faster than the rest of the group. “Richmond, a black servant, now began to lag and was much in the same way as the doctor,” Banks noted. “With much persuasion and entreaty we got through much the largest part of the birch [thicket] when they both gave out. Richmond said that he could not go any further, and, when told that if he did not he must be froze to death, only answer’d that there he would lay and die.”
A distant planet crawling across a fiery star’s face might have warmed the thoughts of Endeavour’s natural philosophers. However, in a few hours apart from the ship, the entire mission had shifted from cutting-edge science to simple survival. Banks roused Solander to the birch shelter and had sent two others to try to retrieve Richmond. Only one of Richmond’s rescue party, frostbitten and delirious, made it back to the lean-to. “The road was so bad and the night so dark that we could scarcely ourselves get on nor did we without many falls,” Banks wrote. “Peter Briscoe, another servant of mine, now began to complain and before we came to the fire became very ill but got there at last almost dead with cold.”
“Now might our situation truly be called terrible,” Banks continued. “Of twelve of our original number were 2 already past all hopes, one more was so ill that tho he was with us I had little hopes of his being able to walk in the morning. . . . Provision we had none but one vulture which had been shot while we were out. . . . And to compleat our misfortunes we were caught in a snow storm in a climate we were utterly unacquainted with but which we had reason to believe was as inhospitable as any in the world.”
Chapter 9
A SHINING BAND
VARDØ, NORWAY
January 10–May 9, 1769
In a world of endless night, there’s never enough time for sleep. Father Maximilian Hell and his scientific assistant, Joann
es Sajnovics, had discovered this counterintuitive fact of life in their arctic barracks as their “days” and “nights” bled into a hazy purgatory of perpetual sunlessness. “The winds are always raging,” Sajnovics later wrote to his Hungarian Father Superior. “You would think these people have plenty of time to sleep. But on the contrary, we have never slept so little as we do on these long nights.”
Without a solar cue to demarcate public and private social hours, Sajnovics found visitors streaming in to the voyagers’ makeshift house at increasingly impolite times. “People visit one another during the night here and offer their guests coffee and tea, just like during the day,” Sajnovics wrote. “We also have chocolate, but that is disappearing very fast.”1
On January 10, the voyagers and soldiers completed the island’s new observatory, a long, single-story wooden shed with sliding hatches in the roof and walls to enable observations of the skies when weather cooperated. The astronomers had much to do in the months before the transit. Observations of stars’ maximum altitudes could, when compared to the same measurements at a known latitude, yield the observatory’s latitude. That was the easier of the observatory’s two terrestrial coordinates. Hell and Sajnovics had hoped to discover their longitude by timing an eclipse of the moon two days before Christmas. But, as Sajnovics later wrote in a letter from Vardø, “The famous lunar eclipse from 23 December passed invisibly above us to our great sadness.” In his diary entry for the day, Hell’s assistant noted, “We could not see any trace of the moon because of the curtain of clouds. We responded to the untactful mockery of the [village’s] priest with a few stinging replies.”2
Instead, they tried to find their longitude via observations of Jupiter’s moons. But the planet was so close to the horizon that it was difficult to resolve in their scopes. Lacking marine chronometers, eclipses, or Jovian lunar data, they had to use the moon. But despite being editor of a leading lunar almanac, Hell didn’t put much stock in the lunar longitude method as anything more than an approximation.3 So Vardø remained, for the time being at least, effectively longitudeless.
Other careful measurements demanded the scientists’ attention. First, the pull of gravity was slightly stronger in Vardø than it was in central Europe. This meant a second as measured on their pendulum clock would be slightly shorter than the time interval the same pendulum clock would tick out in Vienna. Figuring out exactly how much shorter involved timing individual stars’ progress through the sky for a complete twenty-four-hour rotation of the earth. Hell and Sajnovics then used this data to fine-tune the length of their clock’s pendulum so that it ticked out something much closer to true seconds, minutes, and hours. Furthermore, Hell suspected the arctic atmosphere was thicker, which would increase the amount by which the sun’s light is deflected (or refracted). If so, another set of corrections would need to be applied to account for Vardø’s different levels of atmospheric refraction.4
Meanwhile, each day Sajnovics described the living conditions on the iced-over chunk of rock that was now their home. “To the west the island has a about a quarter mile of land; the rest is covered with a thick iced glacial sea covering about one mile,” he wrote in a letter from Vardø. “And even though it is flat, it is here and there pierced by coarse layers of rocks. This environment does not produce anything besides moss and always available cochelaria [scurvy grass]. . . . There are no seedlings or trees on the island, nor on the neighboring lands. They transport the firewood from many miles away, mainly from Russia.”5
The winter was, as the voyagers had expected, brutal. “We were waiting for better days with peace and patience and we were expecting the sunshine to disperse the darkness,” Sajnovics wrote in another letter. “We were sitting at home making proper use of our time, reading books, defining sea algae and examining snails, hoping that one day people might benefit from the fruit of our loneliness.”6 But even after the sun began to reintroduce itself in mid-January, the storms and long nights still took a toll. “Nothing special,” Sajnovics bleakly journaled on March 8, “unless the great coldness and the wind are worth mentioning.”
Hell had passed part of the time plying his spiritual trade, counseling some of the local residents in their no doubt seasonally affected malaise. According to Sajnovics, Hell helped to settle some family disputes and personal grudges among the populace—to the point that some formerly feuding parties now amicably visited with one another and even held gatherings together.
“These good people thought we were very much like them, and we would spend the whole night playing cards and going to dances with them,” Sajnovics wrote in a letter from Vardø. “So they immediately decided on a day when they would hold a night party at the commander’s place every week. . . . But soon they noticed from the way we talked and behaved that the Roman Catholic priest has a certain dignity—admiring us for our lonely lifestyle, moderation, soberness, and especially for the way we were looking away from the ladies.”
Hell and Sajnovics’s newfound affection for the locals was partly due to a surprise discovery Sajnovics had made: The regional Lapland dialect, Sami, was a linguistic cousin to Hungarian.7 Hell was overjoyed at the discovery of his newfound cousins. “They are Hungarians,” Hell wrote in a letter to a Hungarian Jesuit colleague, thanking the creator of the universe he hoped to unlock. “They speak our language; they wear our Hungarian clothing, they live according to the customs of our Hungarian forefathers. In a nutshell, they are our brothers!”8
VARDØ, NORWAY
May 27–June 6, 1769
One week before the century’s final Venus transit, on Saturday, May 27, nature put on a show for the visiting scientists in Vardø. The meteorological and northern lights spectacle was either a sign of good grace toward the Jesuit astronomers or a faith-testing demonstration of how badly things could go wrong in seven days. Weather along the north Norwegian Sea coast during June is often foggy, from nonstop sunlight evaporating arctic waters and offshore breezes blowing the moist air inland.9 Hell and Sajnovics knew they had a fair chance of never seeing the Venus transit. But something told them God was smiling on the voyage—although that didn’t stop the voyagers from bettering their odds by praying often and, as Sajnovics records in his journals and letters, taking Communion not infrequently too.
Whatever the source, the snow clouds flirting with sun and “polar lights” on May 27 did provide the visitors wonders to marvel at. Vardø’s mayor visited the observatory in the morning, as the thirteenth straight day without any night wore on. “We saw a remarkably beautiful northern light east to the sun,” Sajnovics wrote in his journal. “The sun was standing high above the horizon between north and west covered by a dense snow cloud. Thirty degrees to the northeast there was another dense snow cloud at the same altitude. The rest of the sky was clear. Very beautiful rays of light were stretching from the former cloud into the latter in great number; they were stretching long from the northwest and all the way to the zenith with bright particles rolling with an incredible speed towards the cloud that was in the northeast.”
At noon, the three astronomers—Hell, Sajnovics, and Borchgrevink—manned the Vardø observatory’s two quadrants. They used the devices to find the sun’s highest altitude, at noon. The chief instrument for the task, loaned to the expedition by German explorer Carsten Niebuhr, was a “portable” piece of bronze and iron optical machinery that had been carted around in three big boxes. According to Hell’s manuscript account of Niebuhr’s quadrant, a trained technician could set the instrument up or take it down in an hour. Its three heavy iron feet formed the base on which the brass optical finery rested. The quadrant looked a little like a quarter slice of pie made of trelliswork. A small telescope was hinged at the pie slice’s center with its eyepiece fixed along the circular edge by brass rollers attached to a brass plate. Tick marks and subdivisions (along a “Nonius” or Vernier scale) along the circular segment enabled angular measurements of the telescope’s orientation down to its finest scale, 30 arc seconds. The quadrant
had its own plumb line, which gave them their true vertical and horizontal directions.10 A trained user of these astronomical quadrants could in a few seconds’ time get a precise fix on a sun, star, or planet’s altitude measured in degrees, arc minutes, and tens of arc seconds.11
Niebuhr had famously used the same quadrant to become the first European to map the Arabian peninsula during a disastrous trip to the Middle East and India from which he was the only survivor. Hell sometimes complained about Niebuhr’s quadrant, but his team’s measurements using the instrument were nevertheless well beyond merely adequate.12
A storm then dumped snow on the island and enveloped the sun. Although it kept the region in daylight twenty-four hours a day, the sun remained hidden behind the clouds for the ensuing week. A quiet six days of tense preparations passed before Sajnovics even dared to offer up his mission’s fate to the powers above. “We did the necessary preparations for the observations tomorrow,” he wrote on June 2. “If it pleases God—Will’s Gott! [Let it be God’s will!]”
By 3:00 AM the next morning, the sun had shone briefly and just as quickly disappeared behind a curtain of clouds. At 9:00 AM, some twelve hours before the transit, the astronomers held mass. Tenuous and wispy streams of cirrocumulus—or perhaps northern lights—danced across a windy sky. Tension mounted throughout the afternoon, as the sun peeked through the sky’s cottony blanket and then hid beneath it again like a playful child. Sajnovics, a gourmand who often took pains to discuss food and drink throughout his travel diaries, didn’t bother to describe having even a drop of water throughout a very long June 3 Venus transit day. As the evening progressed toward the fated nine o’clock hour, the mood in the observatory began to darken.
The Day the World Discovered the Sun Page 16