15. Chappe, Voyage to California, 15; “Vera-Cruz,” in John Purdy, The Columbian Navigator, or Sailing Dictionary (London: R.H. Laurie, 1823), 128.
16. Campbell, Account of the Spanish Settlements, 141–142.
17. Ibid., 31–32.
18. Ibid., 36.
19. Fortunately the travelers found themselves on de Croix’s good side. Church authorities leeward to the viceroy’s favor had once demanded a meeting inside the cathedral. The former general arrived at the cathedral with an artillery detachment—informing his holy audience that the proceedings would need to be brief as his soldiers were under orders to reduce the building to rubble if de Croix didn’t emerge from the church within ten minutes. Campbell, Account of the Spanish Settlements, 39–40; Henry Charles Lea, The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 270 fn. 1.
20. Chappe, Voyage to California, 42–45; Lea, Inquisition, 272.
21. Chappe, Voyage to California, 77–105.
22. Ibid., 45–47.
23. Ibid., 47.
24. Steven Hales, “[On] the Late Earthquakes in London and Some Other Parts of England,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Abridged, April 5, 1750, 10:539; Martin Uman, “Positive Lightning,” in The Lightning Discharge (New York: Academic, 1987), 8–9, 188–204.
25. Chappe, Voyage to California, 49.
26. Ann Zwinger, A Desert Country Near the Sea: A Natural History of the Cape Region of Baja California (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 111–119.
27. S. F. Cook, “The Extent and Significance of Disease Among the Indians of Baja California, 1697–1773,” Ibero-Americana 12 (1937): 25–27.
CHAPTER 7: GREAT EXPEDITION
1. Joannes Sajnovics, travel diary entry for May 1, 1768, in Sajnovics Naplója: 1768–1769–1770, trans. Deák András, ed. Szíj Enikő (Budapest: ELTE Department of Finno-Ugric Linguistics, 1990). Translated into English for the author by Ilona Dénes. This volume will hereafter be referred to as Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
2. Helge Kragh, The Moon That Wasn’t: The Saga of Venus’ Spurious Satellite (Berlin: Springer, 2008), 80–84.
3. Per Pippin Aspaas, “Maximilian Hell’s Invitation to Norway,” Comm. in Asteroseismology 149 (2008): 15.
4. Sajnovics, letter to unnamed correspondent, Vienna, April 16, 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, 205.
5. Pinzger Ferenc, Hell Miksa Emékezete . . . II. Rész [To the Memory of Maximilian Hell, part II] (Budapest: Kiadja a Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1927): 31–32. Translated in Truls Lynne Hansen and Per Pippin Aspaas, “Maximilian Hell’s Geomagnetic Observations in Norway 1769,” Tromsø Geophysical Observatory Reports 2 (2005): 16.
6. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, May 3, 1768.
7. Ibid., May 4–6, 1768.
8. Ibid., May 30, 1768.
9. “The treaty by which Russia exchanged her claims on ducal Schleswig and Holstein for the counties of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst, which were intended to form an appanage for a junior branch of the Holstein family, was signed in 1768.” C. F. Lascelles Wraxall, Life and Times of Her Majesty Caroline Matilda (London: Wm. H Allen, 1864), 130; W. F. Reddaway, “Don Sebastian de Llano and the Danish Revolution,” English Historical Review 41, no. 161 (1926): 79.
10. The Cambridge Modern History, ed. A.W. Ward, G.W. Prothero, and Stanley Leathes (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 6:740–741.
11. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, May 31, 1768. Bernstorff had just turned fifty-six when Sajnovics and Hell met him.
12. On July 4, 1768, at Helsingor (Elsinore), the last Danish port of call before Hell and Sajnovics’s party had to cross through Sweden en route to Norway, Sajnovics wrote that they had to leave Apropos behind “because it was forbidden to take dogs out of Denmark on account of a dangerous disease going around.” However, the astronomers evidently spirited Apropos across the border anyway, as Hell’s correspondence from Vardø includes mention of the dog’s behavior. (Per Pippin Aspaas, personal communication with author, January 2, 2012.)
13. Maximilian Hell, letter to “Father Höller,” April 6, 1769, www.kfki.hu/~tudtor/tallozo1/hell/hell2.html. Translated by Ilona Dénes.
14. Viggo Christiansen, Christian den VII’s Sindssygdom (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1906), 62.
15. Wraxall, Life, 112–114; Karl Shaw, Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 52–55.
16. Robert Gunning, quoted in W. F. Reddaway, “Struensee and the Fall of Bernstorff,” English Historical Review 27, no. 106 (1912): 277.
17. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, July 22, 1768.
18. Sajnovics, letter from Nidrosa [Trondheim], August 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
19. Ibid., July 23, 1768.
20. Sajnovics, letter from Nidrosa, August 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
21. Ibid., July 25, 1768.
22. Ibid., July 28, 1768.
23. Ibid., July 26, 1768.
24. Sajnovics, letter, August 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
25. Sajnovics, letter from Haffnia [Copenhagen], June 21, 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary; Sajnovics, letter, August 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
26. In his diaries, Sajnovics variously spells Borchgrevink’s name Purgreving, Purkreving, Purkgrevin, and so on.
27. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, August 8, 1768.
28. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, July 30, 1768.
29. Other officials played too. Sajnovics later wrote of the “concerts organized in our honor with a lot of mastery and artistry according to many. [Franz Joseph] Haydn, [Georg Christoph] Wagenseil, Gazmann and the other composers from Vienna are not entirely unknown here, and their creations are appreciated.” Sajnovics, letter, August 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
30. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, August 22, 1768; Per Pippin Aspaas, personal communication to author, July 24, 2011.
31. Ibid.
32. “There were a few little ladies who also wanted to join us using all sorts of excuses,” Sajnovics later recalled. “But Hell severely refused them.” Sajnovics, letter from Vardø, November 14, 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
33. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, August 22, 1768.
34. Sajnovics, letter, November 14, 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
35. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, September 3, 18, 1768.
36. William Guthrie, A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World (London: Charles Dilly, 1794), 74.
37. Tobias George Smollett, The Present State of All Nations: Containing a Geographical, Natural, Commercial, and Political History of All the Countries in the Known World (London: R. Baldwin, 1768), 1:102–103.
38. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, September 25–26, 1768.
39. Sajnovics, letter, November 14, 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
40. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, October 7.
41. John Walker, Elements of Geography and of Natural and Civil History (Dublin: Thomas Morton Bates, 1797), 260; Jérôme (l’Abbé) Richard, Histoire naturelle de l’air et des meteores (Paris: Saillant & Nyon, 1770), 3:28.
42. Per Pippin Aspaas, personal communication to author, January 2, 2012.
43. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, October 13.
44. Sajnovics’s Travel Diary, November 12.
45. NOAA Improved Sunrise/Sunset Calculator, www.srrb.noaa.gov/highlights/sunrise/sunrise.html.
46. Sajnovics, letter from Vardø, April 5, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
CHAPTER 8: SOME UNFREQUENTED PART
1. Charles Green, manuscript, Endeavour journal for September 11, 1768, PRO Adm. 51/4545, f. 97.
2. The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (New South Wales: Angus & Robertson, 1962), 1:161.
3. Stephen Forwood, manuscript, Endeavour journal for September 14, 1768, PRO Adm. 51/4545, f. 231.
4. Charles Green, manuscript, September 14, 1768.
5. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Ba
nks, 1:161.
6. Charles Green, manuscript, September 17, 1769, reports “complet[ing] our holds, having rece’d on board 3032 gallons of wine.”
7. The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 1:7–8.
8. William McBride, “‘Normal’ Medical Science and British Treatment of the Sea Scurvy, 1753–75,” J. Hist. Med. and Allied Sciences 46 (1991): 167–169; R. Brookes, The General Practice of Physic (London: J. Newberry, 1765), 1:286.
9. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:163–164.
10. Anita McConnell, Jesse Ramsden (1735–1800): London’s Leading Scientific Instrument Maker (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 159–160.
11. Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (London: J. Dodsley, 1767), 416.
12. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:160, 2:276–278.
13. E. G. Forbes, “The Foundation and Early Development of the Nautical Almanac,” J. Navigation 18 (1965): 393–394; David Alan Grier, When Computers Were Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 30–33.
14. Maskelyne fired two of his “computers” when he discovered they were copying each other’s results.
15. Forbes, “Foundation.”
16. Derek Howse, “The Principal Scientific Instruments Taken on Captain Cook’s Voyages of Exploration, 1768–80,” Mariner’s Mirror 65 (1979): 120–123; A. N. Stimson, “Some Board of Longitude Instruments in the Nineteenth Century,” in Nineteenth-Century Scientific Instruments and Their Makers (Amsterdam: Rodpi, 1985), 109 fn. 20.
17. Green, manuscript, f. 105.
18. On his second and third voyages, Cook would also test some of Harrison’s chronometers. Astronomical Observations Made in the Voyages Which Were Undertaken by Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, ed. William Wales (London: C. Buckton, 1788), viii.
19. Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1898), 65.
20. Green, manuscript, ff. 107–111; Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:170.
21. Fernando de Noronha’s cornucopia of flora and fauna would have to wait to inspire Charles Darwin, who made it to the archipelago on his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle.
22. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:16 fn. 2.
23. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:177.
24. Dauril Alden, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 110–111.
25. Cook, letter to the Royal Society, November 30, 1768, in Dan O’Sullivan, In Search of Captain Cook: Exploring the Man Through His Own Words (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), 19.
26. Lieutenant Gore diary, cited in Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York: Walker, 2003), 44.
27. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:23.
28. Green, manuscript, f. 125.
29. Banks, letter to Lord Morton, in Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (Boston: David R. Godine, 1993), 78.
30. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:190–191.
31. Richard Hough, Captain James Cook (New York: Norton, 1994), 68.
32. Endeavour journal by (prob.) James Magra in Thomas, Cook, 44.
33. Leslie Bethell, Colonial Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 257, 286.
34. Hough, Captain James Cook.
35. Alden, Royal Government, 109.
36. Thomas, Cook, 45; Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:31.
37. Banks had his own cabin but preferred to sleep on a hammock in the ship’s great cabin.
38. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:212.
39. Wales, ed., Astronomical Observations, vii.
40. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:214.
41. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:217–218.
42. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:45.
43. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:218–222.
CHAPTER 9: A SHINING BAND
1. Joannes Sajnovics, letter from Vardø, April 5, 1769, in Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
2. Sajnovics, letter from Vardø, April 5, 1769;Sajnovics, entry for December 23, 1768, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
3. Barthold Georg Niebuhr, The Life of Carsten Niebuhr: The Oriental Traveler, trans. “Prof. Robinson” (Edinburgh: Thomas Clar, 1836), 39, http://tinyurl.com/hell-niebuhr.
4. The hard work had already been done. Hell discovered that the atmosphere at Vardø wasn’t much thicker, so he could get away with using refraction tables already tabulated for the Royal Observatory in Paris. Truls Lynne Hansen and Per Pippin Aspaas, “Maximilian Hell’s Geomagnetic Observations in Norway 1769,” Tromsø Geophysical Observatory Reports 2 (2005): 15, http://geo.phys.uit.no/tgor/Hell-text.pdf.
5. Sajnovics, letter from Vardø, November 14, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
6. Sajnovics, letter, April 5, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
7. In 1770 Sajnovics wrote a book on the subject, Demonstratio Idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum Idem Esse, discussed below.
8. Maximilian Hell, letter to “Father Höller,” April 6, 1769, Hungarian Electronic Library, www.kfki.hu/~tudtor/tallozo1/hell/hell2.html. Translated by Ilona Dénes.
9. Per Pippin Aspaas, “Maximilian Hell’s Invitation to Norway,” Comm. in Asteroseismology 149 (2008): 16.
10. Hell already knew gravity didn’t pull precisely toward the earth’s center, because of local variations in terrain and the earth’s nonspherical imperfections. But he and Sajnovics spent nights during the dark months measuring stars’ peak altitudes, which they could compare with star charts to better discover true vertical and thus their observatory’s true horizon.
11. Vienna University Observatory, Manuscripte von Hell, Observationes Astronomicae et caeterae Jn Jtinere litterario Vienna Wardoehusium usqve factae. 1768. A.M. Hell, trans. Per Pippin Aspaas (personal communication to author, August 15, 2011); J. A. Bennett, The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation, and Surveying (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987), 114–117.
12. Hell also had a feud with Niebuhr’s mentor, Tobias Mayer, who championed the lunar method of determining longitude at sea. In England, Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne based his Nautical Almanac on Mayer’s work. But Hell remained skeptical of Mayer’s methods. Niebuhr, Life of Carsten Niebuhr, 3:39; I. W. J. Hopkins, “The Maps of Carsten Niebuhr: 200 Years After,” Cartographic Journal 4, no. 2 (1967): 115–118.
13. Sajnovics, letter from Vardø, June 6, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
14. Smoked glass covered the opening to the telescopes, which enabled the observers to point their optics at such a luminous body as the sun and not completely burn their retinas.
15. For a detailed discussion of the Vardø transit, including assessment of reliability of each observer’s data, see Simon Newcomb, “Wardhus,” in Astronomical Papers Prepared for the Use of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, vol. 2, pt. 5 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Equipment and Recruiting, Navy Department, 1890), 301–305.
16. Maximilian Hell, Observatio Transitus Veneris Ante Discum Solis Die 3 Junii Anno 1769 (Vienna: Joannis Thomae, 1770), 92. Translated by Bob Pigeon.
17. Ibid., 93.
18. “Te Deum,” in Encyclopedia Britannica, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh: A. Bell & C. MacFarquhar, 1797), 18:332.
19. Sajnovics, letter, June 6, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
CHAPTER 10: FORT VENUS
1. The Endeavor Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (New South Wales: Angus & Robertson, 1962), 1:222.
2. Charles Green, manuscript, PRO Adm. 51/4545, ff. 143–145.
3. The Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 1:55.
4. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:233.
5. John Clark, Cook’s Endeavour Journal: The Inside Story (
Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008), 47–51.
6. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:242–243; Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (Boston: David R. Godine, 1993), 86–87.
7. Today it’s called Vahitahi.
8. Green, manuscript, f. 169.
9. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:74. The role of sauerkraut in keeping scurvy at bay may be overplayed today, however, with Cook’s fresh greens at each port of call playing at least an equal role in his mission’s tremendous success at scurvy prophylaxis. Egon H. Kodicek and Frank G. Young, “Captain Cook and Scurvy,” Notes & Records of the Royal Society 24, no. 1 (1969): 43–63.
10. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:75–76.
11. David Howarth, Tahiti: A Paradise Lost (New York: Viking, 1983), 33–34.
12. Later Cook privately observed that the island’s free and open sexual mores “can hardly be call’d a vice, since neither the state or individuals are the least injured by it.” J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain Cook (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 348.
13. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:252–258.
14. Cliff Thornton, personal communication with author, December 28, 2011.
15. Stolen metal goods often got incorporated into weapons, putting iron-armed Tahitian warriors at a distinct advantage against the usual blunt instruments rival factions on the island made from stones, shells, and shark teeth. O’Brian, Joseph Banks, 92.
16. Green, Manuscript, f. 278.
17. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:87.
18. To the expedition’s great fortune, Banks’s assistant Herman Spöring was a former watchmaker and was able to perform whatever surgery the mauled quadrant demanded.
19. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:268–270; Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 5–7.
20. Derek Howse, “The Principal Scientific Instruments Taken on Captain Cook’s Voyages of Exploration, 1768–80,” Mariner’s Mirror 65 (1979): 119–135.
21. Banks’s assistant Solander had also set up his own three-foot reflecting telescope at Fort Venus for a redundant set of observations.
22. Wayne Orchiston, “James Cook’s 1769 Transit of Venus Expedition to Tahiti,” in Transits of Venus: New Views of the Solar System and Galaxy, ed. D. W. Kurtz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 61.
The Day the World Discovered the Sun Page 26