23. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:97–98.
24. Orchiston, “James Cook,” 58.
25. Ibid., 57.
26. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:285.
CHAPTER 11: BEHIND THE SKY
1. Salvador de Medina and Vicente de Doz, “Observations of the Transit of Venus,” in The 1769 Transit of Venus, ed. Doyce B. Nunis, trans. Maynard J. Geiger (Los Angeles: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, 1982), 121. In contrast, Chappe says (Voyage to California, 62) he spent the first night “determined not to go to [San José] till morning, [so] I laid me down by the water side.”
2. Between 1730 and the mission’s shuttering in 1840, there were actually multiple locations for Misíon Estero, two incarnations that were close to the water, one inland, one farther inland by up to eight kilometers. Circa 1769, the active mission was inland. There is no a priori reason to doubt the claim of “one mile from the beach” in Doz’s account—although its exact whereabouts are unclear. Edward Vernon, Las Misiones Antiguas: The Spanish Missions of Baja California, 1683–1855 (Santa Barbara, CA: Viejo, 2002).
3. The previous location on the shores of the gulf was abandoned in 1753 because of the terrible weather and swarms of mosquitoes that bred in the freshwater lagoon nearby.
4. On the Mexican mainland, by contrast, Jesuits had been running a corrupt network of missions, allegedly siphoning off the present-day equivalent of millions of dollars from their tills. 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.
5. Survey of Franciscan missions in Baja California, May 1773, in Charles Edward Chapman, The Founding of Spanish California (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 308–309.
6. S. F. Cook, “The Extent and Significance of Disease Among the Indians of Baja California, 1697–1773,” Ibero-Americana 12 (1937): 25–27.
7. John Heysham, An Account of the Jail Fever, or Typhus Carcerum, As It Appeared at Carlisle in the Year 1781 (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 8.
8. Joaquín Velázquez de Leon to Marqués de Croix, December 25, 1770, in The 1769 Transit of Venus, 133. Translated by Iris Wilson Engstrand.
9. Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, A Voyage to California to Observe the Transit of Venus (London: Edward & Charles Dilly, 1778), 63–65.
10. José de Gálvez to Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, November 23, 1768, in The 1769 Transit of Venus, 63.
11. The clockmaker Ferdinand Berthoud later wrote that he outfitted Chappe’s expedition with one of his experimental spring-wound marine chronometers too. But finely crafted pendulum clocks still remained the most reliable timepieces on land. Ferdinand Berthoud, Éclaircissemens sur l’invention, la théorie, la construction et les épreuves des nouvelles machines proposées en France pour la détermination des longitudes en mer (Paris: J.B.G. Musier Fils, 1773), 25 fn. and especially 149.
12. Joaquín Velázquez to unknown colonial official, September 13, 1768, in Iris Wilson Engstrand, Royal Officer in Baja California, 1768–1770: Joaquín Velázquez de León (Los Angeles: Dawson’s Book Shop, 1976), 45–46 fn.
13. “The Observations of Vincente de Doz,” in The 1769 Transit of Venus, 122. Translated by Maynard J. Geiger.
14. The 1769 Transit of Venus, 123–124.
15. Heysham, Account, 9–10.
16. The 1769 Transit of Venus, 98–99.
17. See Chapter 9, note 15 about Hell’s purported tenths of a second accuracy. Jean-Baptiste Chappe D’Auteroche, Voyage en Californie pour l’observation du passage de Vénus sur le disque du soleil (Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1772), 94. Translation by Mark Anderson.
18. “Observations of Vincente de Doz,” 124.
19. Ibid., 125.
20. Ibid., 126.
21. Voyage to California, 65.
CHAPTER 12: SUBJECTS AND DISCOVERIES
1. Joannes Sajnovics, letter from Trondheim, September 2, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
2. The Hungarian astronomer also recorded in his travel journal a similarly disappointing null result from Russian expeditions to observe the transit from the nearby Kola peninsula—one group coming up with nothing because of weather, the other because of what Sajnovics said was the sudden death of its lead observer. (However, reports of this Russian’s death were indeed greatly exaggerated.) Entry for May 15 and June 14, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary. Per Pippin Aspaas, personal communication with author, January 2, 2012.
3. Entry for October 19, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
4. Per Pippin Aspaas, “Le Père Jésuite Maximilien Hell et ses relations avec Lalande,” in Jérôme Lalande (1732–1807): Une trajectoire scientifique (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010). The author would like to thank Dr. Aspaas for sharing a prepublication version of the present article.
5. Entry for October 17, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
6. Entry for December 8, 1769, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
7. Letter to Count Bernstorff, October 1771, in W. F. Reddaway, “Christian den VII’s Sindssygdom af Viggo Christiansen,” English Historical Review 25, no. 97 (1910): 188–189.
8. Aspaas, “Lalande.” De Luynes letter translated by Mark Anderson.
9. Sajnovics, letter from Copenhagen, February 10, 1770, Sajnovics’s Travel Diary.
CHAPTER 13: SAIL TO THE SOUTHWARD
1. “Secret Instructions for Lieutenant James Cook Appointed to Command His Majesty’s Bark the Endeavour,” July 30, 1768 (NLA: MS 2), http://foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-34.html.
2. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:312–313.
3. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:155.
4. Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1:332–333.
5. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:161.
6. A blind date with the Great Barrier Reef, for instance, would probably have ended in disaster but for Endeavour’s wonderfully unsexy flat keel. Karl Heinz Marquardt, Captain Cook’s Endeavour: Anatomy of the Ship, rev. ed. (London: Conway Maritime Press, 2001), 11–14.
7. Brian W. Richardson, Longitude and Empire: How Captain Cook’s Voyages Changed the World (Vancouver, B.C.: UBC Press, 2005), 73.
8. Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (Boston: David R. Godine, 1993), 129.
9. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:352.
10. Averil Lysaght, “Captain Cook’s Kangaroo,” New Scientist, March 14, 1957, 17–19.
11. James Cook, Captain Cook’s Voyages Round the World, ed. M. B. Synge (London: Thomas Nelson, 1897), 148.
12. Cook’s Endeavour Journal: The Inside Story (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2008), 165–167.
13. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:444.
14. Cliff Thornton, personal communication with author, December 28, 2011.
15. Journals of Captain James Cook, 1:448.
CHAPTER 14: ECLIPSE
1. John Heysham, An Account of the Jail Fever, or Typhus Carcerum, As It Appeared at Carlisle in the Year 1781 (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 10.
2. Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, A Voyage to California to Observe the Transit of Venus (London: Edward & Charles Dilly, 1778), 67.
3. Chappe took thirteen such measurements during his stay at the mission, each of which helped fix the observatory’s exact longitude—something the precision of his transit measurements now demanded.
4. Chappe, Voyage to California, 85.
5. The reason they’re not exactly identical is that the earth is also moving approximately 1/365 (≈ 1°) of its way around the sun on any given day, slightly shifting the field of view from star rise to star set. This offset, however, is predictable and can be subtracted out of any use of culminations to test a quadrant’s accuracy—as the calculations show was done for Chappe’s quadrant.
6. Chappe, Voyage to California, 75, 80–81, 85.
7. The 1769 Transit of Venus, ed. Doyce B. Nunis, trans. Maynard J. Geiger (Los Angeles: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, 1982), 101; Chappe, Voyage to California
, 67.
8. Chappe, Voyage to California, 68–69.
9. Chappe, Voyage to California, 89. Translation by Mark Anderson.
10. Ibid., 92.
11. Ibid., 88.
12. Nunis, 1769 Transit, 93.
13. Heysham, Jail Fever, 11–12.
14. “Éloge de M. l’Abbé Chappe,” in Histoire de L’Académie Royale des Sciences (Paris: 1772), 171. Translation by Mark Anderson.
15. Nunis, 1769 Transit, 82.
16. Ibid., 87.
17. Chappe, Voyage to California, 150. Translation by Mark Anderson.
18. Ibid., 151–156.
19. Rumors still swirled around Hell’s initial refusal to send the academy in Paris his Vardø transit data—and aroused anti-Jesuit tinged suspicions about the validity of Hell’s findings.
20. Chappe, Voyage to California, 168. Translation by Mark Anderson.
21. The translation of parallax into physical distance from the sun also depends on an accurate value for the size of the earth, which was not precisely known in the eighteenth century. As a result, Hornsby’s solar distance calculation loses a hair of precision—but still registers at an impressive 99.2 percent of the correct value.
EPILOGUE
1. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 61 (December 1771):574.
2. Phil. Trans. R.S. 61 (December 1771): 578; Harry Woolf, The Transits of Venus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 190.
3. W. Orchiston, “James Cook’s 1769 transit of Venus expedition to Tahiti” in Transits of Venus: New Views of the Solar System and Galaxy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58–61.
4. Woolf, Transits of Venus, 182–191.
5. Ibid., 190–191.
6. Per Pippin Aspaas, “Le Père Jésuite Maximilien Hell et ses relations avec Lalande,” in Jerôme Lalande (1732–1807) Une trajectoire scientifique (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010).
7. Journal des Sçavans, September 1770, 619–622, in Aspaas, “Le Père.”
8. Because Hell was a Jesuit, and therefore already suspect in the eyes of some, Hell and Sajnovics’s entire mission was cast into eclipse. Until the late nineteenth century, many even suspected Hell of fabricating his expedition’s Venus transit data. It was only with a careful study of Hell’s manuscript archives in 1890 (Simon Newcomb, “Discussion of Transits of Venus, 1761–1769,” in Astronomical Papers Prepared for the Use of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac [Washington, D.C.: Dept. of Navy, 1890], 301–305) that Hell was vindicated and the allegations against his mission proved definitively wrong.
9. Hell, Eph. Astr. anni 1773 (1772), in Aspaas, “Le Père.”
10. Woolf, Transits of Venus, 192. As just one example, in 1779 A.I. Lexell used a solar parallax value of 8.63 arc seconds to calculate the mass ratio of the earth to the sun. C.A. Wilson, “Perturbations & Solar Tables,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 22 (1980) 195.
11. John Lathorp, “Lectures on Natural Philosophy (Lecture X),” Polyanthos, n.s., June 1814, 133–134.
12. Hamish Lindsay, Tracking Apollo to the Moon (London: Springer-Verlag, 2001), 316.
13. Sharon Gaudin, “NASA’s Apollo Technology Has Changed History: Apollo Lunar Program Made a Staggering Contribution to High Tech Development,” Computerworld, July 20, 2009.
14. Thomas Arnold, The American Practical Lunarian and Seaman’s Guide (Philadelphia: Robert Desilver, 1822), 4:437.
15. Egon Kodicek and Frank Young, “Captain Cook and Scurvy,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, June 1969, 43–63.
16. “Reading this book greatly inspired him, and gave him a taste for the physical sciences. From this point on, all his studies, and even his pastimes, were focused on that subject.” Abraham Chappe, quoted in Journal de Paris, February 1, 1805, in Gerard Holzman and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (New York: Wiley-IEEE Computer Society, 1994), 50.
17. Diana Hook and Jeremy Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (Norvato, CA: HistoryofScience.com, 2001), 179–180.
18. Rita Griffin-Short, “The Ancient Mariner and the Transit of Venus,” Endeavour, December 2003, 175–179.
19. The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments, ed. Adam Clarke (New York: Ezra Sargeant, 1811).
20. Hervey Wilbur, Elements of Astronomy, Descriptive and Physical (New Haven, CT: Durrie & Peck, 1830), 83.
21. P. Hedelt, et. al. “Venus transit 2004: Illustrating the capability of exoplanet transmission spectroscopy.” Astronomy & Astrophysics, vol. 533 (Sept. 2011) id. A136, http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3700.
22. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html
23. David Ehrenreich et. al., “Transmission spectrum of Venus as a transiting exoplanet,” Astronomy & Astrophysics, vol. 537 (Dec. 2011) id. L2, http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.0572.
TECHNICAL APPENDIX
1. Technically, planetary orbits describe an ellipse, a geometric figure that may be described nontechnically as a “squished circle.” The distance a represents the so-called semi-major axis of the ellipse. However, for present purposes, the orbits of both earth and Venus are close to circular, so a closely approximates the average distance between planet and sun.
2. Albert van Helden, Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to Halley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 154–155.
3. William Sheehan and John Westfall, The Transits of Venus, (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2004), 125–138. Raymond Haynes, Explorers of the Southern Sky A History of Australian Astronomy (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22–26.
4. Rezso Nagy and Attila Jozsef Kiss, “Observation of the Venus Transit,” in Jubilee Conference, 1879–2004 (Budapest: Budapest Tech Polytechnical Institution, 2004).
5. What follows is an adaptation of F. Mignard, “The Solar Parallax with the Transit of Venus,” Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, 2004.
6. “Right ascension” is an astronomical coordinate that represents the projection of terrestrial longitude on the sky.
7. “Declination” is the similar projection of terrestrial latitude on the sky. Ninety degrees declination is the north celestial pole, close to the location in the sky of Polaris, the North Star.
8. Ibid.
9. Thomas Hornsby, “The Quantity of the Sun’s Parallax,” Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc., December 1771, 575.
10. The calculation requires that the parallax be measured in radians, not arc seconds. An extra factor of 206,265 arc seconds/radian was also applied to equation 13.
INDEX
An Account of the Discoveries Made in the South Pacifick (Dalrymple), 85–86
Alzate y Ramírez, José Antonio de, 108–109, 210
The American Practical Lunarian and Seaman’s Guide (Arnold), 222
Apollo program, NASA, 221
Arctic Venus transit observations
atmospheric density, 219
by Horrebow, 188, 193
importance, 190–191
with longest transit times, 81
See also Vardø, Norway, expedition
Astronomers Royal
Bradley, 28, 32, 68
Cassini de Thury (French), 211
Danish, 193
Halley, 80
Maskelyne, 77, 83–84, 89
Astronomical unit (AU), 118
Astronomy
exoplanet research, 225–226
and navigation/longitude puzzle, 3, 41, 84, 118
Venus transits impact, 6, 51, 80, 225
See also under specific astronomical subjects
Astronomy & Astrophyisics journal, 227
Australia (New Holland), 199–201
Banks, Joseph
embarks on Tahiti expedition (1769), 93–94, 137
aquatic specimens collected in doldrums, 144
as expedition’s naturalist, 139–140, 147–148
on Madeira Island, 138
ornithological specimens collected, 164
in Tahiti, 169–172
Tahiti transit observed, 175
Tierra del Fuego experiences, 150–154, 163
after-mission experiences, 196, 198, 201
Barbados longitude testing, 68–72
Batavia, 202–203
Bernstorff, Johan Hartvig Ernst von, 121–122, 191
Berthoud, Ferdinand
introduced, 66
attempts to copy Harrison’s chronometer, 67–68
chronometers tested, 73–74, 102
Bevis, John, 81, 83–84
Bible, literal truth of, 98–99, 224
Black drop effect, 48, 56, 161–162, 174, 186
Borchgrevink, Jens Finne, 128–129, 159–160, 162
Boscovich, Roger Joseph, 82
Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 200
Bradley, James, 27, 28, 68
Brahe, Tycho, 193
Brest, France, chronometer test, 73–74
Bridgetown, Barbados. See Barbados longitude testing
British Mariner’s Guide . . . of . . . Longitude at Sea (Maskelyne), 61–64, 70, 71
Bruce, James, 92
Buchan, Alexander, 153, 170
Cadiz, Spain, 101–103, 211
California/Baja peninsula expedition (1769). See San José del Cabo, Baja, expedition (1769)
Camus, Charles Étienne Louis, 66, 67–68
Cape Town observations by Mason and Dixon (1761), 34–38, 40
Carlos III, king of Spain, 101
Cassini, Jean Dominique de, 101
Cassini de Thury, César-François
analyzes, reports on, 1769 transit data, 212–214
publishes Chappe’s papers, 211
Catherine the Great (Catherine II), empress of Russia, 53, 121
Cavendish, Henry, 84, 141
Chappe, Claude, 223
Chappe d’Auteroche, Jean-Baptiste
eclipse observations, 45–46, 205–208
Siberia expedition (1761), 5–24
Siberia transit observation (1761), 45–49
Siberia expedition lectures given to Russian scientists, 49–53
Siberia expedition memoirs, 97–99
tests Berthoud’s chronometer, 73–74, 102, 104
San José expedition and transit preparation (1769), 1–3, 100–115, 177–183
The Day the World Discovered the Sun Page 27