The Day the World Discovered the Sun (21 page)

On one day the island's governor waylaid Banks and Solander at their quarters, while he talked their ears off. Like many gentlemen of his age, the governor enjoyed keeping current with the latest scientific technology—no small sample of which Banks and Solander had in their possession. The governor's fascination centered around an “electrical machine” built by the London instrument maker Jesse Ramsden. It was an eight-inch-diameter glass disc that was spun as it pressed against a leather pad, generating little lightning discharges from an attached metal rod. With learned organizations around the world, like London's Royal
Society, providing public demonstrations of spark-producing whirligigs like Ramsden's device, polite society produced its own quiet hum about the zaps and jolts such machines produced.
¹⁰
Researchers such as Benjamin Franklin, William Watson, and Henry Cavendish had each recently advanced the field with discoveries about lightning, circuits, and conductors. Journals and books enthused over possible medical uses of “the electric fluid.” One prominent London book published the year before
Endeavour
's launch, for instance, detailed numerous cases in which “medical electricity” had allegedly helped patients with their ailments. “It has seldom failed,” one account read, “to cure rigidities or a wasting of the muscles—and hysterical disorders, particularly if they be attended with coldness of the feet.”
¹¹

Because of the governor's visit, Banks noted, “we were obliged to stay at home, so that unsought honor lost us very near the whole day. . . . We however contriv'd to revenge ourselves upon his excellency by an Electrical Machine which we had on board. Upon his expressing a desire to see it, we sent for it ashore—and shock'd him full as much as he chose.”
¹²

Captain Cook and his crew and supernumeraries were not voyaging across the globe just to discover the solar system's dimensions. They'd also been commissioned to test Britain's most celebrated navigational breakthrough: Nevil Maskelyne's
Nautical Almanac
. Together with four human computers (including Charles Green's new brother-in-law William Wales) and the
Almanac's
“corrector” Richard Dunthorne, Maskelyne had completed a Herculean task.

The debut
Almanac
of 1767—tabulating a stunning 15,500 solar, lunar, planetary, and stellar positional predictions—had been a midnight oil burner, falling far behind its publishing schedule and coming into print six days into the year it was forecasting. A thousand copies
had been printed, which promptly found their way onto ships traversing the planet and into navigational schools in the United Kingdom, North America, and Europe.
¹³

His book was stunning, but now Maskelyne faced the difficult task of bottling his lightning. How to repeat the same impossible labor year in and year out?

Having been satisfied that the team was indeed up to the job, the Board of Longitude authorized Maskelyne to spend whatever he felt he needed to produce almanacs for 1768 and 1769 and, in due course, into the 1770s as well. So Maskelyne hired more computers.
¹⁴
The Astronomer Royal furthermore rewarded innovation among his team members, giving £50 bonuses to computer Israel Lyons and corrector Dunthorne for finding shortcuts in calculating tables concerning atmospheric phenomena like refraction.
¹⁵

The board wanted the
Endeavour
to sail with almanacs for the whole of its projected voyage. Good as they were, Maskelyne's computers hadn't yet refined their methods well enough to forecast so far into the future. They did, however, provide Cook and Green with almanacs for 1768 and 1769. Green was becoming very familiar with them as the
Endeavour
followed the northeast trade winds down to the equator.

On Saturday, October 1, with a “fresh trade” at their back and a hazy cloud cover veiling the morning sun, Green and Cook met on
Endeavour
's quarterdeck—the far back region behind the ship's wheel and mizzenmast. With the swivel gun on its perch nearby, Green and Cook set up their sextants. Green's, built by the same Jesse Ramsden who'd created Banks's “electrical machine,” was a fifteen-inch brass device on loan from the Royal Society. Cook owned his own—a twenty-inch, wooden-framed brass instrument with a pole that steadied it to the deck.
¹⁶

Between 7:19 and 9:02
AM
, the pair of explorer-astronomers made thirty-two angular measurements of the moon and sun's position. Green did most of the work. He found, for instance, the rising sun climbed
from 21 degrees and 31 arc minutes to 45 degrees and 40 arc minutes over the 103-minute interval. The duo carried out multiple iterations of three repeated measurements of three values: the altitude of the moon's upper limb above the horizon, the altitude of the sun's lower limb and the angular separation between the nearest edges of the two bodies.
¹⁷
At the level of precision their calculations demanded, they even needed to keep track of whether their altitude measurements came from the
Endeavour
's quarterdeck (19–20 feet above the sea's surface) or the main deck or forecastle (18 feet). The
Nautical Almanac
then provided instructions and charts necessary to transform these sundry quantities into mariner's gold—longitude.

As Green found within thirty minutes of calculation, using inexpensive tools and methods that were coming into reach of practically any navigator on the planet,
Endeavour
lay at 14 degrees, 26 arc minutes north of the equator and 22 degrees, 47 arc minutes west of Greenwich. The world was becoming a smaller and more navigable place.

“In justice to Mr. Green,” Cook later wrote, “I must say that he was indefatigable in making and calculating these observations.” Cook also extolled Green's teaching skills. “Several of the petty officers can make and calculate [lunar longitudes] almost as well as himself,” Cook continued. “It is only by this means that this method of finding the longitude at sea can be brought into universal practice—a method which we have found may be depended on to within a half a degree! Which is a degree of accuracy more than sufficient for all nautical purposes.” The
Nautical Almanac
clearly had a convert.
¹⁸

Two more days of northeasterly winds pushed the
Endeavour
steadily southward on its journey into a known dead zone in the Atlantic. Near the equator, the northeast trades die out, and ships enter a region called the doldrums—which for this mission started at about 12 degrees north latitude. Ships could spend weeks lolling around with the capricious currents and breezes. As Mark Twain would write more than a century later, the zone's prevailing characteristics are “variable winds, bursts of
rain, intervals of calm, with chopping seas and a wobbly and drunken motion of the ship—a condition of things findable in other regions sometimes, but present in the doldrums always.”
¹⁹

Without any real progress to track on his sextant and
Nautical Almanac
, Green became a weather station for nine days, chronicling the passing clouds and “squally” storm fronts that knocked the boat about but rarely moved it much forward. Banks and Solander, by contrast, were overjoyed. Windless days for them meant the
Endeavour
became a kind of dedicated field biology lab. On October 4, Banks commanded a pinnace expedition into the calm seas to haul in and study various jellyfish and other many-tentacled creatures (like the “blue button” porpita) as well as water bugs and an exotic swimming mollusk called the blue sea slug (
Glaucus atlanticus
).
²⁰

Other days, like October 11, ended without taking a thing from the ocean but just observing its inhabitants from afar. “Saw a dolphin,” Banks recorded. “And admired the infinite beauty of his colour as he swam in the water. But in vain. He would not give us even a chance of taking him.”

On October 21, just north of the equator, the next trade wind picked up. The southeasterly trades that carry ships toward South America—the continent whose shoreline
Endeavour
would trace till it met the Pacific—required a different tack but constituted a reliable mode of transit nonetheless. The mission was back on course. Banks pleaded with Cook to detour to Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago of 21 islands 220 miles off the Brazilian coast. The captain agreed if the winds and current cooperated. They did not.
²¹

Four days later, as a stiff morning wind fluttered flags and carried aloft all unmoored scraps of paper and cloth, Green stood on the same quarterdeck and used his same brass sextant to find the sun 77 degrees and 39 arc minutes above the horizon. According to his calculations, this put
Endeavour
at 0 degrees, 15 arc minutes south latitude. She had just crossed the equator.

“After we had got an observation and it was no longer doubted that we were to the southward of the Line, the ceremony on this occasion practiced by all nations was not omitted,” Cook recorded in his captain's journal for the day. Anyone who couldn't prove he'd crossed the equator before, Cook added, had to make a choice: give up a bottle's worth of his rum ration or be ducked into the sea. Some twenty to thirty of Cook's men picked the latter option, Cook wrote, “to the no small diversion of the rest.”
²²

Banks chose to pay out liquor rations for himself, his servants, and even his two greyhounds. Green does not record whether he chose dousing or not. His sober and matter-of-fact diary, however, suggests he doesn't seem the sort to have sorely missed four days' allotment of liquor. The cost, in Green's eyes, of a little rum seems slight, especially considering the ritual hazing of equator crossing he would have endured had he not paid it out.

Banks described the brutal hazing, a triple-ducking from the yardarm, which involved binding a sailor to a block of wood and hoisting him “as high as the cross piece [on the yardarm] over his head would allow.” The dangling man would then be dropped into the ocean from the yardarm, the outermost tip of the horizontal spar that held the sails in place. “His own weight carried him down, [and] he was then immediately hoisted up again and three times served in this manner,” Banks wrote in his journal. “Sufficiently diverting it certainly was to see the different faces that were made on this occasion, some grinning and exulting in their hardiness whilst others were almost suffocated and came up readily enough to have compounded after the first or second duck.”
²³

To a veteran military leader like Antonio Rolim de Moura—viceroy of Brazil—the British cargo ship lumbering into Rio de Janeiro's harbor
sent a message that anyone who knew espionage and privateering could understand. Count Rolim, as Cook would call the colonial governor, had seen too many dubious maneuvers by enemy Spanish forces to trust the English officers at their word.

According to representatives from the
Endeavour
, this English military mission (or was it a secret reconnaissance ship?) was stopping in Rio to restock so it could sail to some Pacific island and observe the planet Venus passing in front of the sun. And this so-called British Navy ship—one that stood apart from other British Navy ships on the oceans—carried onboard a retinue of “philosophers,” equipped with advanced mapping and surveying technology, no less. Rolim no doubt thought his visitors were taking him for a fool. During the Seven Years' War and subsequent Portuguese-Spanish flare-ups in the New World, England had proved herself a conniving and untrustworthy ally. The prime minister of Portugal had sent instructions for Rolim's predecessor to remain vigilant against any British maneuvers in southern South America. The prime minister feared that England was working behind the scenes to take Brazil from Portugal just as it had taken France's colonial possessions in India.
²⁴
Endeavour
's “philosophers” could just as easily have been undercover engineers on a mission to size up the Brazilian capital's defenses. Moreover, even if England had no designs on Brazil, King George III's ministers had financed smuggling missions that undermined the South American colony's economy.
Endeavour
, built to haul hundreds of tons of coal—or other booty such as Brazilian gold—was, after all, a smuggler's dream ship.

“The account we gave of ourselves,” Cook later wrote in a letter to the Royal Society, “of being bound to the southward to observe the Transit of Venus (a phenomen[on] they had not the least idea of) appeared so very strange to these narrow minded Portuguese that they thought it only an invented story to cover some other design we must be upon.”
²⁵

Lieutenant John Gore recorded in his diary that the viceroy viewed Banks and Solander as “supercargoes and engineers and not naturalists—for
the business of such being so very abstruse and unprofitable that they cannot believe gentlemen would come so far as Brazil on that account only.”
²⁶

So the viceroy ordered
Endeavour
indefinitely detained, with only Cook and approved supply missions enjoying any access to the shore—and the captain was to be accompanied by a guard at all times.

“A boat fill'd with soldiers kept rowing about the ship,” Cook wrote on the first full day in Rio, November 14. “Which had orders, as I afterwards understood, not to suffer any one of the officers or gentlemen except my self, to go out of the ship.”