The Day the World Discovered the Sun

by Mark Anderson

  “Complaint was made the chief,” Banks added. “And to give it weight I started up from the ground and striking the butt of my gun made a rattling noise which I had before used in our walk to frighten the people and keep them at a distance.” After some delicate negotiations, the missing opera glasses and snuff box were returned—although the snuff itself had gone missing.

  The following day was worse, with a detachment going ashore and ultimately shooting dead a Tahitian who tried to pilfer a musket. Buchan, the painter who had suffered an epileptic fit at Tierra del Fuego, had a second seizure on April 16 and died the next day.

  “His loss to me is irretrievable,” Banks recorded. “My airy dreams of entertaining my friends in England with the scenes that I am to see here are vanish’d.” Out of fear of what the Tahitians might do with Buchan’s body, Cook ordered a small crew to pilot one of Endeavour’s boats out to open water, where the artist was given a sea burial.

  Ashore, the Tahitians had attempted a peace offering of some breadfruit and a few hogs. Cook gave the two chiefs who’d brought forward the offering a nail and a hatchet each. Cook had begun sizing up the shore for his ultimate purpose of visiting Tahiti—an astronomical event now forty-seven days away.

  “In the afternoon,” Banks recorded, “we all went ashore to measure out the ground for the tents, which done, Cap Cooke and Mr. Green slept ashore in a tent erected for that purpose, after having observ’d an eclipse of one of the satellites of Jupiter.”13

  TAHITI

  May 1–2, 1769

  Theft had become practically a form of communication between Cook’s men and the Tahitians. European explorers visiting the island—who claimed the whole landmass first for Spain, then for France, and then for England—usurped big. But Tahitians often picked pockets and pilfered whatever they could lay their hands on whenever the Europeans came into their presence.

  Green, Banks, Solander, and Cook had spent the remainder of April leading Endeavour’s carpenters and crew in building Fort Venus—an emerging walled complex of tents and makeshift structures that would become the British base camp and observatory. Cook had two weeks before he selected the sandy peninsula, dubbing it Point Venus. The promontory proved a strategic choice, being bounded on two sides by water and within cannon range of the Endeavour.14 (Trying to keep up peaceful relations with the Tahitians, Cook nevertheless planned for worst-case scenarios too.) The explorers put up with some thievery of their metal implements and garments. But the big wooden box that evaporated into nothingness on May 1 was a different story. Without the astronomical quadrant the box contained, Endeavour’s mission to Tahiti would be dangerously compromised. Fort Venus’s superintendents hoped that the quadrant’s thief wouldn’t open the secure box and find the delicate triangular instrument within. Or at least they hoped the crook would discard the instrument, seeking out something more relevant to the island’s daily life—or at least something sharper.15

  On a sunny and breezy Tuesday morning, May 2, Banks took the situation into hand.16 The crew and officers had already searched the whole of Fort Venus for the missing quadrant and turned up nothing. Banks started looking in the woods surrounding the fort. At a nearby river, the gentleman traveler ran into one of the local chiefs, Tubourai. “[He] immediately made with 3 straws in his hand the figure of a triangle,” Banks recorded. “The Indians had opened the cases. No time was now to be lost!”

  So Banks, Green, an unnamed midshipman, and Tubourai raced into the Tahitian jungle to pursue the thief who could singlehandedly scuttle Britain’s greatest scientific expedition. The 91-degree heat was stifling, but they ran whenever they could. “Sometimes we walk’d, sometimes we ran when we imagin’d (which we sometimes did) that the chase was just before us,” Banks wrote. Three miles into their seven-mile inland trek, Banks sent the midshipman back to Fort Venus to summon reinforcements. And so the sweaty, panting voyagers ran through black flies and mud, forest and clearing, till they reached the village where Tubourai had heard the quadrant had been taken.

  The day was wearing on, and no doubt all three overheated runners were hungry and thirsty. But once they’d arrived, Banks level-headedly sat down among the reported “hundreds” of villagers who soon surrounded him. He’d learned some local customs that he now wielded to his own favor. Banks drew a ring in the grass and sat in the middle of it, ready to hold court. (“Mr. Banks . . . is always very alert upon all occasions wherein the Natives are concerned,” Cook later observed.)17 Grabbing the villagers’ attention with his exposed but unbrandished pistols, Banks used his storytelling and explanatory skills to convey his words to Tubourai, his interpreter.

  Piece by piece, the quadrant and its components began to emerge from the huts. Once the main body of the quadrant had been returned, Green looked it over to see what could be salvaged after its rough transit inland. Green found small parts of the instrument missing, some of which were returned—some not. But ultimately Green satisfied himself that what they had would suffice.18 “We pack’d all up in grass as well as we could and proceeded homewards,” Banks recorded. “After walking about 2 miles, we met Captn Cook with a party of marines coming after us. All were, you may imagine, not a little pleas’d at the event of our excursion.”19

  TAHITI

  June 2–3, 1769

  To scout for backup sites in case of cloudy weather, Cook had sent men to two other nearby locations—one to the east and the other to Moorea, a nearby westerly island. But they wouldn’t be needed. The night of June 2 brought a tropical sunset unmarred by clouds—and calm to Fort Venus. “This day prov’d as favourable to our purpose as we could wish,” Cook wrote the following day. “Not a cloud was to be seen the whole day, and the air was perfectly clear, so that we had every advantage we could desire in observing the whole of the passage of the planet Venus over the Sun’s disk.”

  Cook posted sentinels around the observatory at Fort Venus, to ensure no thieving or other meddling by locals got in the way of job number one on that sunny Saturday morning. Earlier Green had set up a pendulum clock inside the officer’s tent, erected right next to a wooden-walled, canvas-roofed portable observatory. Per his instructions, Green had fastened the clock to a firm wooden stand and set the pendulum to the familiar length already established for Greenwich.

  The clock had been used before. It was on Nevil Maskelyne’s unsuccessful 1761 Venus transit voyage to St. Helena and then again, in 1766–1767, as one of the main timekeepers for Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon’s surveying trip to measure the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland—a line that immortalized the astronomers’ names.

  Outside the observatory building, Green and Cook each set up two-foot telescopes—as well as the repaired astronomical quadrant, with a wooden barrel serving as its makeshift stand.20 The Royal Society mathematician and optical instrument maker James Short had made these Gregorian telescopes—named after a Scots mathematician from the previous century who’d proposed the scope’s compact two-mirror design that had superseded Isaac Newton’s pioneering reflectors. The pair of two-foot brass instruments stood on sturdy brass stands that nevertheless belied their delicate optics. It was a stroke of good fortune that no idle Tahitian hands had absconded with these finely crafted devices. A broken quadrant, in the hands of a good watchmaker like Spöring, could be refitted. A broken telescope might have been beyond repair.

  Through the Gregorian reflectors’ 4 3/4–inch eyepieces, dimmed at the front end by smoked glass solar filters, Cook and Green trained their eyes on the star that makes day.21 At 7:21 AM and 20 seconds, Green was the first to see what planet astronomers all over the earth would be carefully viewing for the next six or so hours. Five seconds later, Cook shouted out that he spotted Venus too. Another twenty-one seconds after that, Solander recorded his first sighting of Venus’s ingress.22

  Here Cook, the preeminent tactician and military mind, was outflanked by nature. He might have bested the odds by crossing an entire unwelcoming planet to reach his remote destina
tion, but the same optical trick that had marred 1761 data fooled him too. “We differ’d from one another in observing the times of the contacts [of Venus with the edge of the sun] much more than could be expected,” Cook wrote in his journal.23 As the chief astronomer of the voyage, Green should have known what was coming. But Cook and Green collected their data as if the black drop effect was something unexpected and unknown.

  During the transit, Cook and Green used special adjustable eyepieces (so-called Dollond object glass micrometers) that enabled measurements of Venus’s apparent diameter. Both found the planet just under one arc minute in size—54.77 and 54.97 arc seconds, respectively. The same micrometer enabled Cook to measure a series of the angular distances between Venus and the sun’s edge as the planet inched its way across the blazing solar face.24

  And blaze the sun did on June 3. Cook noted in his journal that the mercury topped 119 degrees Fahrenheit by midday. “We have not before met with 119,” Cook recorded with characteristic terseness. Observers the world over felt the sweat of pressure as Venus inched toward departing the solar disk for the second and final time of the eighteenth century. But at Fort Venus, nervous perspiration could hardly compete with the body’s natural reaction to such oppressive heat.

  At 1:09 PM and 46 or 56 seconds (Cook and Green, respectively) and then again at 1:27 PM and 45 or 57 seconds (Cook and Green, respectively), the mission’s two sweat-soaked astronomers recorded the two final points of contact as Venus exited the solar disk. They later drew pictures of the plastic membrane that briefly appears to connect the two astronomical bodies at the moment of their edges making contact.

  Green recorded all the expedition’s numbers but postponed conducting any big calculations or other data reduction projects until a later time.

  Meanwhile, on Moorea, an island nine miles northwest of Tahiti, Banks had joined Lieutenant Gore, Spöring, surgeon Monkhouse, and the surgeon’s brother, midshipman Monkhouse, for a backup observation voyage in case clouds ruined Fort Venus’s day. Records of the observations, instruments, and even observers conflict with one another.25 Fortunately their data turned out to be unnecessary.

  Banks, however, had spent the day chasing another Venus.

  “At sunset I came off having purchas’d another hog from the king,” the island’s visiting gentleman recorded in his journal. “Soon after my arrival at the tent 3 handsome girls came off in a canoe to see us. They had been at the tent in the morning with [King] Tarroa; they chatted with us very freely and with very little persuasion agreed to send away their carriage and sleep in [the] tent—a proof of confidence which I have not before met with upon so short an acquaintance.”26

  Chapter 11

  BEHIND THE SKY

  SAN JOSÉ DEL CABO

  May 1769

  The cool sunrise over the Gulf of California welcomed the French and Spanish voyagers to their new tropical home. The welcoming party, however, was slightly less impressive.

  “We hurriedly began the same day the task of transporting our instruments and baggage to a small Indian town one mile from the beach,” the Spanish observers Doz and Medina wrote, “which took three days because of the rough surf on the beach and the fact that there were no more than six Indians available to carry our effects to the mission—all the rest being ill from an epidemic prevalent in that town since the beginning of November.”1

  Their ultimate destination was an inland Franciscan mission, Misión Estero de las Palmas de San José del Cabo Añuití.2 These missions operated under a simple system of exchange with the natives: we convert you to Christianity and then help to feed and clothe you—or God help you. God generally wasn’t too helpful in these situations, especially with local immunities unaccustomed to old-world contagions—and not a few massacres of the native masses darkened the history of the period.

  Once they’d arrived at Misión Estero, a new mood of urgency seized the travelers. Chappe wrote, “I made haste to establish myself at San José and to prepare for my preliminary observations. Myself and all my train took up our abode in a very large barn. I had half the roof taken off towards the south and put up an awning that could be spread out or contracted at will.”

  Chappe enjoyed ready access to the mission’s facilities—even to tear into buildings—because there was no one to stop him. The present location of the mission was just sixteen years old.3 Moreover, San José’s Franciscan owners had been running the establishment for only a year and a half. The mission’s Jesuit founders had, like all other Jesuits in New Spain, been expelled the previous February with extreme prejudice. The king of Spain left severe orders that if just one Jesuit—even if ill or infirm—was found in his New World domains, the viceroy of New Spain would be put to death.

  To fellow Spaniards in southern Baja the orders from Madrid must have seemed bizarre. The Jesuit fathers on the peninsula were, by all accounts, upstanding practitioners of their faith, seeing their role on this earth as rescuing as many souls as mortal time permitted.4 Nevertheless, the indigenous Pericu nation of southern Baja was already dubious of the missionaries. Polygamists who ceded religious authority to a hierarchy of guamas—witch doctors—the Pericu, as a rule, gave no quarter to Christ and his legion of saints. Instead, most Pericu lived in the hills, dropping by Misión Estero occasionally to sample its dates and grapes and begrudgingly to take, as one resident put it, “intensive refresher courses in Christianity.” No wonder, then, that San José del Cabo boasted the smallest numbers of converts among the peninsula’s eighteen missions. Still, ample ears remained to hear the sermons. For every human living at San José del Cabo, the stables counted as residents some three mules or horses—or, as the Pericu called the animals, “large deer.”5

  With syphilis running rampant among the Pericu for two generations, a second plague was hardly welcome. And yet, beginning in July the year before, a “contagious fever” had descended on Misíon Estero, spiriting away the mission’s founding father. This grande enfermedad, which had shuttered the Santiago mission to the northeast, was an epidemic strain of typhus—“jail fever.”6

  According to one account of the period, jail fever “begins with a sensation of coldness and shivering, somewhat resembling the fit of an ague. . . . Soon afterwards, the patient complains of a pain in his head and back and sometimes in other parts of his body. [He suffers] of nausea and sickness at stomach, but he seldom vomits; of great lassitude, weakness and weariness; of dejection of spirits; of heat frequently alternating with the cold shivering fits; of thirst; and of loss of appetite. His sleep is also confused and disturbed with frightful dreams.”7

  And this is only the first stage of jail fever.

  MISIÓN ESTERO, SAN JOSÉ DEL CABO

  May 19–28, 1769

  The network of roads and mail routes between the eighteen missions on the peninsula was a feat of geography—if not scheduling. Even during a deadly epidemic, news and letters still ferried from hub to hub, infected or no. In Santa Anna, a mining town fifty miles north-east of Misión Estero, a royal officer of the Spanish crown, Joaquín Velázquez de Leon—an amateur mathematician and astronomer—had learned of the arrival of Chappe and his cohorts at San José del Cabo. Velázquez posted a letter asking to join the expedition and help conduct observations. Doz and Medina wrote back that Velázquez could indeed provide assurance and assistance. But such help consisted of Velázquez staying put. “Don Salvador de Medina and Don Vicente [de] Doz,” Velázquez recalled, “replied that although they would take great pleasure in our concurring for the day of the observation, it would be better if I made mine in Santa Anna in case theirs failed because of cloudiness.”8

  Medina and Doz were thinking about other contingencies too. The jail fever spreading through their local workforce was as serious as death. “The numbers that were daily carried off too plainly showed the danger [we were] in,” Chappe’s assistant Pauly later wrote. Pauly recalled that once the expedition had made landfall and had begun to set up, Chappe became as focused as he’d ev
er been in his life. Although one-third of the local population had already died of the fever, he refused to consider relocating. “We might have escaped the contagion by going on to Cabo San Lucas [18 miles to the southwest], and this was what the Spanish officers proposed. But they were within a few days of the transit, and a second removal would have lost them very precious moments. Mr. Chappe, less apprehensive of endangering his life than of missing the observation—or making an imperfect one—declared he would not stir from San José, let the consequences be what they would.”9

  Another external force exerted its influence on the expedition, this time for the overall good. In the six months preceding their arrival, the inspector general of New Spain, José de Gálvez, had been ordering repairs to colonial properties in southern Baja and pressuring the Franciscans to improve the native population’s lot. Gálvez knew that the French and Spanish visitors would be reporting back not only their astronomical data but also the local living conditions. Perhaps Chappe’s emerging reputation as a noteworthy travel writer—his Voyage en Sibérie had recently been published in France—inspired Gálvez’s cosmetic commandments all the more.

  In late 1768, Gálvez wrote to a Franciscan official that he didn’t want “a few learned strangers . . . [to] find in this province and its missions the wretched objects and horrid deserts which I encountered four months ago.” The inspector general feared that these astronomers would return to the Old World and “publish in their narratives that the greatest and most pious monarch of the world is, in California, the lord of deserts and that he has as subjects Indians who go about as vagrants and live like untamed brutes.” So Gálvez ordered extra food and clothing from the mainland and a contingent of soldiers to distribute the provisions and assist in ensuring Baja “look[ed] more prosperous and the people more civilized when the scientific expedition . . . should arrive.”10