The Day the World Discovered the Sun Read online

  The Day the World

  Discovered the Sun

  THE

  DAY THE

  WORLD

  DISCOVERED

  THE SUN

  An Extraordinary Story of Scientific Adventure and the Race to Track the Transit of Venus

  Mark

  Anderson

  DA CAPO PRESS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  Copyright © 2012 by Mark Kendall Anderson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 44 Farnsworth Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02110.

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  Set in 11.5 point Adobe Jenson Pro by The Perseus Books Group

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  First Da Capo Press edition 2012

  ISBN 978-0-306-82106-6 (e-book)

  Published by Da Capo Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.dacapopress.com

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  For Penny

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  One A Star in the Sun

  Two The Choicest Wonders

  Three Flying Bridges

  Four The Mighty Dimensions

  Five The Book and the Ship

  Six Voyage en Californie

  Seven Great Expedition

  Eight Some Unfrequented Part

  Nine A Shining Band

  Ten Fort Venus

  Eleven Behind the Sky

  Twelve Subjects and Discoveries

  Thirteen Sail to the Southward

  Fourteen Eclipse

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Technical Appendix

  Notes

  Index

  Illustrations

  PROLOGUE

  I closed my lids, and kept them close,

  And the balls like pulses beat;

  For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky

  Lay like a load on my weary eye,

  And the dead were at my feet.

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

  SAN JOSÉ DEL CABO, BAJA PENINSULA

  May 20, 1769

  Oranges, bananas, pomegranates: how could such sweet fruit go so sour? Steady winds gusting off the Sea of Cortez did a fair job of keeping the flies from hovering over the dwindling piles of rotting food scattered around the huts and makeshift homes near the beach. But the flies had better places to lay their eggs. With every new day came a new crop of corpses.

  Spanish frigate captain Salvador de Medina had spent nearly seven months escorting twenty-eight men across the Atlantic Ocean and the whole of Mexico to arrive at a former Jesuit sanctuary near the southern tip of the Baja peninsula. Medina had technically discharged his duty. But his orders included nothing about a deadly epidemic, a brutal and unforgiving fever sweeping through the local population and filling graves by the hour. Medina knew the epidemic posed too great a threat to risk staying.

  Yet, the man at the center of the expedition, the French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, held his ground. Chappe, as he was known, had already begun to size up an abandoned corn barn at the former Jesuit mission inland. The barn would make a fine observatory, Chappe surmised. As if consumed by a fever of its own peculiar nature, Chappe refused to hear anything more about a port eighteen miles to the southwest. Word on the ground may have been that Cabo San Lucas was free of the contagion. But Chappe told Medina that he would not risk the expedition’s founding purpose simply because of some rumor.

  The group’s late arrival on the white sandy shores of San José del Cabo the night before had left precious little time to spare before the afternoon sky would host a sensational spectacle.

  The universe, Chappe liked to explain to anyone who would listen, would soon be opening itself up for a rare inspection. Although anyone without a telescope would never notice it, for five and a half hours on June 3, 1769, a little dot would appear to cross the disk of the sun. That little dot was the planet Venus. Its shadow crawled across the sun’s face, at most, only twice per century. Timing the planet’s entire transit down to the second and comparing other observations of the same event from elsewhere on the globe, Chappe said, would by year’s end enable humankind to discover something that had evaded it since the dawn of time—the exact physical dimensions of the sun and its planets and the distances that separated them. Venus’s transit opened a brief window into the very architecture of God’s creation.

  This, Chappe explained, is why no mere disease could be allowed to interrupt his careful observations of the practically theological phenomenon that a fortnight later would be taking place overhead.

  Having spent his first night ashore sleeping on the beach, Chappe mustered what remained of the able-bodied natives. Two leagues inland stood the mission that would serve as Chappe’s observatory. Much work remained to be done, and with very little time to spare. The first job entailed hauling Chappe’s delicate telescope and other scientific equipment inland—precision instruments whose every fragile inch had endured muttered curses of Spanish soldiers porting them nearly halfway across the world from ship to jungle and back to ship again.

  The observatory’s one widely recognizable instrument looked like the guts of a clock quartered and served up like a piece of pie. A kind of maritime priesthood wielded the quadrant with incantations and scriptures that were as mysterious as Holy Writ to most of the sailors.

  A ship’s navigator typically used this machine and a table of nautical charts to measure the moon and sun and sometimes stars. Through a mathematical ritual that occupied the navigator for hours on end, these measurements would then produce a crucial number that everyone at sea could appreciate: longitude.

  Longitude was the most costly puzzle of its time. And astronomy was poised to solve it. Esteemed astronomers like Chappe commanded authority with royal audiences and military commanders. Commanders like Medina.

  The groans of wretched men and glimpses of the cadavers they became underscored how dire the situation had become. Still, as the morning’s sweat turned clammy from cooler breezes that nudged the mule train inland, Medina and Chappe remained tense allies bound by death’s encroaching shadow.

  Theirs was a world inching closer to discovering great secrets behind the sky. But the sun shone down relentlessly, and it forgave no one unprepared. The sun would have its day.

  Chapter 1

  A STAR IN THE SUN

  VIENNA, AUSTRIA

  December 31, 1760

  Reddened hands fastened the barge to its mooring. For the past month the Danube’s breezes had chilled its travelers. No more. A brisk walk from the canal bank, and Vienna—with its famously narrow streets, tall buildings, and fragrant coffeehouses—welcomed its visitors in from the cold.

  Just eight years before he would travel to San José del Cabo, French astronomer Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche and his party made a wintry landing in the capital city of the Habsburg monarchy and, with it, much of the Holy Roman Empire. His was a journey altogethe
r of its time. The turbulent 1760s—when the Enlightenment was in full bloom but before bloody revolutions had brought the age’s heady ideals down to earth—would effectively frame the world’s most concerted effort to find the sun.

  In transit from Paris, Chappe and his servants—as well as “M. Durieul,” a Polish military man traveling to Warsaw—offloaded their Danube barge and walked through the city gates of Vienna. The crunching snow underfoot and clouds of condensed breath had become familiar companions as Chappe’s party daily pressed eastward. Still, the Viennese chill could not compare to the core-consuming freeze Chappe and his servants were about to undergo. Their ultimate destination was Tobolsk, a remote town in Siberia.

  In April, Chappe’s colleague, the seventy-two-year-old astronomer Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, had presented a paper to the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris arguing that Tobolsk was one of the best locations on earth to observe the coming transit of Venus on June 6, 1761. The Mappemonde that Delisle presented the French academy served as a sort of global menu of the most coveted destinations that teams of explorers and scientists across Europe would be risking their lives to venture to.

  June 6 was the first time in living memory that the skies provided such a rare opportunity to plumb the solar system’s size. Venus had last transited the sun 122 years previously in 1639, more than a generation before mathematicians had figured out the trick that enabled the sun’s distance to be triangulated. Venus would provide one more chance on June 3, 1769. After that, another 105 years would elapse before Venus again passed in front of the sun.

  The 1761 transit, as these scientists (known then as natural philosophers—philosophes) told their country’s paymasters, presented the best opportunity in more than a century to get a precise fix on the sun’s distance. And thanks to the planetary laws discovered by Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century, knowing the distance to the sun allowed scientists to locate the orbital path of every planet. One measurement unrolled the blueprint to “the heavens and the earth”—what the biblical book of Genesis said God created at the universe’s very beginning. It was arguably as close to knowing the mind of the Creator as anyone had yet conceived. “If we make the best use of [the Venus transits],” the instrument maker and popular science author Benjamin Martin wrote in 1761, “there is no doubt but that astronomy will, in ten years time, attain to its ultimate perfection.”1

  For a seafaring nation, discovering the distance to the sun meant advancing the frontiers of knowledge intimately connected to national security. As officials from the rival British Royal Society reminded their nation’s Admiralty in a 1760 letter, Venus transit voyages required top priority attention because they constituted “the promotion of a science so intimately connected with the art of navigation as well as for the honour of the nation.”2

  For reasons that were scientific and geopolitical—if not also theological—Venus transit expeditions had become paramount. Even if they meant traveling to a remote and frigid location like Siberia. Although Russian scientists were already preparing their own expeditions to observe the Venus transit, the French Academy of Sciences had secured Chappe an invitation to make his own competing measurements of the celestial event at Tobolsk. Entrée to the Russian empire, with the empress’s blessing no less, spurred Chappe and his party into the Siberian beyond.

  For the next eight nights, however, Chappe would enjoy a warm bed in the comfort of one of the great cosmopolitan centers of Europe. His timing was propitious. New Year’s Day in imperial Vienna was like a red-carpeted runway, providing the excuse every monied house in the city needed to strut like a peacock in full fan.

  On New Year’s morning, the entire society—peasants, landed gentry, middle-class burghers, the indigent—all gathered outside the imperial Hofburg palace, where the Royal Bodyguards, ministers of state, and the city’s leading aristocratic families paraded through the square in flamboyant dress uniforms and courtly regalia. National identities in this crossroads city jockeyed for placement, with German soldiers marching first in line, followed by Polish soldiers and Hungarian troops in silvery uniforms and holstered sabers that glinted in the late morning sun.3

  As a visiting French dignitary, Chappe would have stayed with the French ambassador to Vienna, the Duke de Praslin—or at least enjoyed lodgings arranged by the ambassador.

  When Chappe arrived, de Praslin was caught up in a particularly busy time for a diplomat. On New Year’s afternoon, families of wealth, power, and prestige gathered throughout Vienna for lavish parties that carried on well into the night. It was prime time, in other words, for a minister of state to ply and expand his network of connections.

  As the afternoon shadows lengthened across the snowy streets, opulent carriages approached the city’s stately homes and paused as dandified gentlemen and bejeweled ladies alighted. For a well-educated Frenchman staying in a posh part of town, Chappe didn’t need a translator to understand the partygoers’ chatter. Public conversations in upper-class Vienna were in French, still the language of the refined and courtly set.

  Inviting aromas emanating from the kitchens of the well-heeled provided an olfactory tour of Europe: chocolate from Milan, pheasant from Bohemia, fresh oysters from Istria. Enticing music also warmed the air, as Viennese nobles prided themselves in their musical sophistication—hiring some of the finest concert maestros in the world to provide entertainment. At the time, for instance, a twenty-eight-year-old composer named Franz Joseph Haydn (four years younger than Chappe) was practically reinventing the symphony as musical director for Vienna’s wealthy Morzin family.4

  Once the New Year revels had ended, though, life at court returned to its normal state of angst. Austria was caught up in a brutal war with Prussia—putting her conscripted soldiers through battlefield abattoirs like the battle of Torgau, in which 7,000 Austrians gave their lives in one day. France, Austria’s reluctant ally, wanted out of the coffer-draining conflagration, and Chappe’s host was already working on his new job for 1761: convince Her Majesty to consider a peace treaty with her hated rival, Prussia’s Frederick the Great.

  Chappe, on the other hand, carried no such worldly baggage when he paid an invited visit to the empress and her husband, Franz I—that rare emperor who preferred to leave politics and governance to his wife. Chappe climbed the Hofburg palace stairs to the library, where the royal couple waited to receive their learned guest.

  Although Maria Theresa herself had no interest in science, the emperor did. A statesman with his own intellectual passions, Franz I showed his French visitor the biggest and most comprehensive collection of rare minerals, fossils, corals, and shells in all of Europe. The emperor’s natural history cabinet—boasting 30,000 specimens collected from across the globe—even included “thunderstones” from Croatia and Bohemia. Today called meteorites, these melted miniature chunks of asteroid were at the time thought to be small pieces of earth superheated by lightning strikes.5

  Chappe spent his week in Vienna mingling with the great scientific researchers working there. Gerard van Swieten, personal physician to the empress, for instance, shared the latest Viennese discoveries on the use of “electricity with great success in the [treatment of] rheumatism and other disorders of the like nature,” as Chappe later recorded.6

  The prince of Liechtenstein entertained Chappe at Vienna’s imperial arsenal. The sixty-four-year-old Austrian military director general—who had overhauled the entire artillery, a redesign that Napoleon’s generals later copied—welcomed his French guest at a suite in the military compound. Filled with state-of-the-art cannon but missing the pungent battlefield smells of death and burnt gunpowder, the prince’s receiving room also had the air of a mini-mausoleum. Marble statues of Maria Theresa, Franz I, and Liechtenstein himself greeted the French visitor. Liechtenstein’s school of artillery science had become one of the best in the world, so Chappe perhaps made polite conversation with his host about matters relevant to the school—explosive propulsion or trajectory calculation, for ins
tance. Chappe also recorded accepting the prince’s gift of regional fossils and local geological samples for study at his leisure.7

  Chappe faced the bracing January winds on a visit to the rooftop observatory at the University of Vienna. The observatory’s director was Hungarian Jesuit Maximilian Höll, who had Latinized his name as “Hell.” Father Hell showed his guest the telescope that would point at the sun on June 6—the Holy Roman Empire’s chief witness of Venus crossing the solar disk.

  Hell, a lean and intent man with a piercing gaze, discussed sky and earth with his French visitor, whose pudgier frame and baby-faced visage concealed an overriding pride at least Hell’s equal. Both men of God and men of science, Hell and Chappe had as much in common as anyone Chappe would meet in Vienna. And they shared the animating passion of knowing the Creator better by better studying his creation.

  Bookshelves around the observatory showcased Hell’s greatest accomplishment to date. Under his direction five years before, the observatory had begun turning out its own celestial almanacs—forecasting daily sunrise and sunset times as well as regular positions of the moon, the planets, and the moons of Jupiter. These tools enabled precision navigation anywhere on the planet and inspired great pride, even in an empire that lacked a great navy.

  Chappe, whose plain dress may have lost the battle of sartorial rank, retained the upper hand throughout his meeting with Hell. As a lifelong observer of the skies, Hell knew he would find no greater career-advancing opportunity than the two upcoming Venus transits. But all Hell could do this time was go to the roof and log another day. His Viennese data would be all but irrelevant beyond the walls of his own observatory. By contrast, learned men across Europe would be eagerly awaiting posts from Chappe.

  The transit’s extremes—the places on earth where Venus takes the longest and shortest length of time to cross the disk of the sun—produced some of the most valuable data for calculating the sun’s distance. According to his colleague Delisle’s all-important Mappemonde, Chappe was headed to one of the key stations on earth to observe the 1761 transit: the “Halleyan pole” where Venus would be taking the shortest time to cross the sun. “As the transit of Venus over the sun would not be performed in less time in this capital of Siberia than in any other part of the globe,” Chappe later recalled, “it could not have been viewed to so much advantage anywhere else.”8 Chappe’s observation promised to be one of the most important early measurements of the physical size of the solar system. The prospects of such groundbreaking science tantalized Hell: a single scientific adventure that could secure one’s own historical legacy.