The Day the World Discovered the Sun (15 page)

Chappe's seventy-seven-day transatlantic voyage was only remarkable for its predictable difficulties. His small brigantine craft, he wrote, encountered “every kind of weather, calms, storms, winds, sometimes fair, sometimes contrary; such is in few words the history of most voyages; and as to ours, we may add, a continual tossing of our little nutshell, which was so very light as to be the sport of the smallest wave.”

The tedium of constant motion set Chappe to thinking of a line from the Roman poet Horace: “That man must have had a heart cased in oak and three-fold brass who first committed himself in a frail bark on the raging sea.”

This quote from antiquity, he wrote, “is what I repeated a thousand times on our voyage, thinking of Christopher Colomb, [Juan de] Gryalva,
and all those first intrepid mariners, who in quest of a new world, upon a mere surmise of its existence, suggested by their own genius, dared to undertake near-three-hundred years ago those very voyages which at this day we still account dangerous, though assisted with a thousand helps that were wanting in the days of those great men.”
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For all his eloquence, Chappe was not a poet. He mostly busied himself during the passage in taking barometer and thermometer readings and in measuring seawater density throughout the trip.
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Chappe also tested the prototype telescope he'd been given that was designed to discover longitude at sea via timing of eclipses of the moons of Jupiter. And like Charles Green and Nevil Maskelyne's disastrous results five years before with the English “marine chair”—a telescope engineered with the same goal in mind—Chappe proved the utter folly of such an enterprise.

Last, Chappe tried taking lunar longitudes—aided by the “mégamètre” telescope that allegedly eased the measurement of angles between moon and reference star. But measurement wasn't the hard part of lunar longitudes. Calculations were. And without a
Nautical Almanac
to fall back on—an almanac that had already computed most of the difficult calculations in advance—Chappe convinced himself that only marine chronometers could ever practically yield longitudes at sea. “The tedious calculations which this method requires, with the accuracy and attention requisite in the observation itself, make it doubtful to me whether it will ever be fit for the use of trading vessels,” Chappe wrote.
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On March 6, Chappe and his men—having watched the choppy ocean swallow up most of their bobbly ship's store of food and drink—set anchor five miles outside the harbor at Vera Cruz. Access to this entrepôt of New Spain was famously difficult from the water. Rough winds from the north this time of year whipped up a fury of complications compounded with reefs and sandbars that challenged even experienced pilots.
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Typically a ship approaching Vera Cruz harbor would fire her guns twice, indicating she needed a pilot to guide her through the treacherous
waters. Chappe's captain, instead, ran up the French flag as his request for help. “This,” Chappe dryly observed, “was the ready way to get no assistance.”
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A day of thwarted attempts to negotiate jagged coral complexes like the Reef of Galleguilla and the Reef of Isla Verda only whittled down the fast-depleting provisions.

Then, on March 8, a cannon shot from Vera Cruz's fort plus spoken orders delivered by a harbor-cruising sloop suggested they'd better find a place to anchor immediately. The north winds were picking up. And the channel that Chappe's brigantine ultimately had to settle for was narrow enough to risk foundering the whole mission on nearby rocks.

A joint French-Spanish expedition sinking in Vera Cruz harbor might not have risked any actual lives. But the harbor incident was still a pivotal moment. Chappe helmed the Bourbon dynasty's most ambitious plan to secure the other crucial number—in addition to transit observations the Swedes and Danes were now being counted on to provide—that could cast humankind into a universe of known depth. England was staking its lot on a long-shot mission into largely uncharted South Seas waters. Who knew if the English vessel would ever be heard from again?

Landing at Vera Cruz and following familiar trade routes through New Spain, on the other hand, was nothing so outlandish. Attempting a surefire mission like Chappe's and failing would have proved both an embarrassment and a disgrace—an insurance policy that never insured.

Little surprise, then, that when Vera Cruz's governor learned that the nutshell bobbing out in the harbor carried the king of Spain's imprimatur, he ordered a safer berth for the boat. The mission's two Spanish co-observers, Salvador de Medina and Vicente de Doz, first offloaded onto a harbor vessel to port them to shore. Two hours later, another craft came for Chappe and his assistant Pauly.

The sky loomed. The waves slapping against the boat's sides and spraying its passengers were only increasing in size. As rain began pelting
the travelers, Chappe's craft landed and offloaded him into the dank little city founded by the legendary conquistador Hernán Cortés. Little more than a decaying way station for Mexican loot, Vera Cruz was hardly the most cosmopolitan of cities. “The town is not very considerable either in point of size or the magnificence of its buildings,” a contemporary visitor to Vera Cruz observed. “For on the one side being exposed to vast clouds of dry sand and on the other to the exhalations of very rank bogs and marshes, it is so very unwholesome that scarce any Spaniard of note resides there constantly.”
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Still, it was land. And considering the sky's outpourings, land of any kind was becoming more and more welcome by the minute. Chappe may not have been fluent in Spanish, but he didn't need proficiency to understand the import of the chatter in town: “Huracán!”

Now cut off from his assistants and some of the finest scientific instruments available anywhere in New Spain, Chappe watched helplessly as the storm tides and pounding winds battered his brigantine. A wise hand onboard the craft maneuvered it into the lee of the nearby island fortress, San Juan de Ulua. The tempestuous waters mercilessly tossed the little nutshell and would surely have crushed it had the pilot not sought shelter. But shadowed by the mighty stone castle, the passengers and precious cargo were spared to continue their journey, now venturing inland.

On his eight-day cross-country trek to the capital city of New Spain, Chappe had seen enough of Spanish rule to understand how it worked—and how its boot resembled the Russian model the Siberians lived under.

Despite the colossal plunder conquistadores were extracting from New Spain, Chappe attended a mountainside fair near the high-altitude
hamlet of Xalapa that conspicuously lacked shiny metals. “The Mexicans give in exchange cochineal [dye] and money, for as to gold or silver bullion, no body is allowed to have any,” Chappe recorded. “A breach of the regulations respecting the mines is the greatest crime that can be committed. A false coiner is hanged; a murderer is only imprisoned or banished.”
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The entourage consisted of two sedans—one containing Chappe and Pauly, the other containing their Spanish counterparts Doz and Medina—preceded by a mule train that the rest of the crew either rode on or rode herd over. As Easter weekend approached, the train reached the outskirts of Mexico City. The roads beyond Xalapa led toward a peak that provided, Chappe said, “a most singular prospect: We stood so high that the clouds were our horizon.” The aromatic spring air and lush scenery on the way down heightened the contrast to the scenes of human misery before their eyes. The Spanish colonial forces had put what remained of the original population to work extracting mineral resources. “The ill treatment these poor Indians receive from their masters contributes as much as sickness to destroy the race,” Chappe wrote. “And the mines where they make them work yearly prove fatal to an infinite number of these poor wretches. . . . The province of Mexico is now but a vast desert compared to what it was in the time of Montezuma.”
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At noon on Easter Sunday, March 26, Chappe and his mule train arrived at the capital of New Spain. The colony's viceroy had ordered his men to forgo the routine inspection of the visitors' baggage. The distinguished guests were led to a spacious converted cathedral that would be their lodgings—a cathedral that Chappe learned had been seized from the Jesuits when Spain expelled the order from its territories two years before.

The man who carried out the expulsion, Viceroy Carlos Francisco de Croix, was a former army general who made no pretenses about his preferences. For whatever unspecified reasons, de Croix took a liking to Chappe and company. “I am at a loss for words to express [his] friendship
and politeness,” Chappe wrote in his journal, adding that de Croix “left nothing undone to procure us whatever we wished for. . . . We had no table but his own for the four days we continued in the town, and he was so obliging as to send a cook to dress victuals for our attendants after the French fashion.”
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Just five hundred yards southwest of their accommodations, Chappe took a walking tour of the prime jewel of a city overflowing with rich mining families and their pillage. Mexico's Metropolitan Cathedral (Catedral Metropolitana) shone with the glint of an encrusted crown. Silver rails surrounded the main altar, which barely contained an oversize lamp of solid silver enriched with ornaments of pure gold. Gold-fringed velvet hangings streamed down from the inside pillars. But the ground beneath the cathedral, the silty bottom of a drained lake, was starting to give way. “The outside of the cathedral of Mexico is unfinished—and likely to continue so,” Chappe recorded. “They are afraid of increasing the weight of the building, which already begins to sink.”

While de Croix was known for his comparatively even-keeled administration, all was relative in New Spain. The Inquisition still burned penitents in the city's nearby site of religious torture, the notorious
quemadero
. Seventeen heretics had paid the ultimate price in 1768, another four the year previous. “This is the place where they burn the Jews and other unhappy victims of the awful tribunal of Inquisition,” Chappe wrote in disgust. “This quemadero is an enclosure between four walls and filled with ovens, into which are thrown over the walls the poor wretches who are condemned to be burned alive—condemned by judges professing a religion whose first precept is charity.”
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In a city that rewarded ostentatious cruelty, Chappe had found a few kindred spirits during his four days in town. Most productive scientifically was Chappe's meeting with a similarly omnivorous mind—the Mexican polymath priest, scientist, historian, cartographer, and journalist José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez. Although Chappe did not record his personal interactions with Alzate, the Mexican philosophe
drew up a detailed map of the New Spanish dominions Chappe's team would be exploring. Alzate also shipped a chest full of Mexican natural history specimens for further study to the Academy of Sciences in Paris—specimens of local trees, fruits, leaves, fishes, butterflies, shells, crystals, rocks, ores, seeds, and flowers that Alzate and his French counterpart probably spent some time discussing during the visit.
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Chappe had also discovered a native Frenchman living in the city who spoke both Spanish and indigenous Mexican languages. “I took him for my interpreter,” Chappe wrote, “as I thought he would be very serviceable to me for the remainder of our journey, and especially in California.”

Unlike the heavily traveled roads connecting the capital city to its principal Atlantic port, the roads ahead carried fewer travelers and more hazards. “The viceroy thought proper to give us a guard of three soldiers to defend us against the robbers who infest those parts,” Chappe noted. “Troops of fierce and unconquered Indians, called by the Spaniards, Indios bravos, attack travelers when they find themselves strongest, murder them—or at least, after stripping them and tying them to the neighboring trees, they carry off their mules and baggage.”

The Mexican soldiers now joining the expedition as it forged westward on March 30 said that any Indios bravos the group encountered would not be handled peaceably. “Our guides told us . . . these banditti are easily known by a handkerchief [that hides their face],” Chappe wrote. “When a traveler sees an Indian thus masked, the safest way is to be beforehand with him, and to kill him if possible.”
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Knowing the roads ahead would be rugged, Chappe chose horseback for his trek to San Blas—the Pacific port town that would be their launching point to the Baja peninsula. Doz and Medina opted instead
for the same “litter” carriage on which they rode into the capital city. Chappe knew his equestrian mount didn't make the journey any easier for him. But, he wrote, “I escaped a thousand mischances that befell our Spanish officers.”

Images of danger and abject poverty dogged the voyagers on their 650-mile passage west of New Spain's capital. “The farther you go from Mexico [City], the fewer habitations you meet with, and the road is often very rough, dangerous and full of precipices,” Chappe recorded. “In most places where we stopped, we hardly found bread, and every thing in that part of the country wears the face of the most pinching penury.”
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