The Day the World Discovered the Sun (26 page)

At 1:09
PM
and 46 or 56 seconds (Cook and Green, respectively) and then again at 1:27
PM
and 45 or 57 seconds (Cook and Green, respectively), the mission's two sweat-soaked astronomers recorded the two final points of contact as Venus exited the solar disk. They later drew pictures of the plastic membrane that briefly appears to connect the two astronomical bodies at the moment of their edges making contact.

Green recorded all the expedition's numbers but postponed conducting any big calculations or other data reduction projects until a later time.

Meanwhile, on Moorea, an island nine miles northwest of Tahiti, Banks had joined Lieutenant Gore, Spöring, surgeon Monkhouse, and the surgeon's brother, midshipman Monkhouse, for a backup observation voyage in case clouds ruined Fort Venus's day. Records of the observations, instruments, and even observers conflict with one another.
²⁵
Fortunately their data turned out to be unnecessary.

Banks, however, had spent the day chasing another Venus.

“At sunset I came off having purchas'd another hog from the king,” the island's visiting gentleman recorded in his journal. “Soon after my arrival at the tent 3 handsome girls came off in a canoe to see us. They had been at the tent in the morning with [King] Tarroa; they chatted with us very freely and with very little persuasion agreed to send away their carriage and sleep in [the] tent—a proof of confidence which I have not before met with upon so short an acquaintance.”
²⁶

The cool sunrise over the Gulf of California welcomed the French and Spanish voyagers to their new tropical home. The welcoming party, however, was slightly less impressive.

“We hurriedly began the same day the task of transporting our instruments and baggage to a small Indian town one mile from the beach,” the Spanish observers Doz and Medina wrote, “which took three days because of the rough surf on the beach and the fact that there were no more than six Indians available to carry our effects to the mission—all the rest being ill from an epidemic prevalent in that town since the beginning of November.”
¹

Their ultimate destination was an inland Franciscan mission, Misión Estero de las Palmas de San José del Cabo Añuití.
²
These missions operated under a simple system of exchange with the natives: we convert you to Christianity and then help to feed and clothe you—or God help you. God generally wasn't too helpful in these situations, especially with local immunities unaccustomed to old-world contagions—and not a few massacres of the native masses darkened the history of the period.

Once they'd arrived at Misión Estero, a new mood of urgency seized the travelers. Chappe wrote, “I made haste to establish myself at San José and to prepare for my preliminary observations. Myself and all my train took up our abode in a very large barn. I had half the roof taken off towards the south and put up an awning that could be spread out or contracted at will.”

Chappe enjoyed ready access to the mission's facilities—even to tear into buildings—because there was no one to stop him. The present location of the mission was just sixteen years old.
³
Moreover, San José's Franciscan owners had been running the establishment for only a year and a half. The mission's Jesuit founders had, like all other Jesuits in New Spain, been expelled the previous February with extreme prejudice. The king of Spain left severe orders that if just one Jesuit—even if ill or infirm—was found in his New World domains, the viceroy of New Spain would be put to death.

To fellow Spaniards in southern Baja the orders from Madrid must have seemed bizarre. The Jesuit fathers on the peninsula were, by all accounts, upstanding practitioners of their faith, seeing their role on this earth as rescuing as many souls as mortal time permitted.
⁴
Nevertheless, the indigenous Pericu nation of southern Baja was already dubious of the missionaries. Polygamists who ceded religious authority to a hierarchy of
guamas
—witch doctors—the Pericu, as a rule, gave no quarter to Christ and his legion of saints. Instead, most Pericu lived in the hills, dropping by Misión Estero occasionally to sample its dates and grapes and begrudgingly to take, as one resident put it, “intensive refresher courses in Christianity.” No wonder, then, that San José del Cabo boasted the smallest numbers of converts among the peninsula's eighteen missions. Still, ample ears remained to hear the sermons. For every human living at San José del Cabo, the stables counted as residents some three mules or horses—or, as the Pericu called the animals, “large deer.”
⁵

With syphilis running rampant among the Pericu for two generations, a second plague was hardly welcome. And yet, beginning in July
the year before, a “contagious fever” had descended on Misíon Estero, spiriting away the mission's founding father. This
grande enfermedad
, which had shuttered the Santiago mission to the northeast, was an epidemic strain of typhus—“jail fever.”
⁶

According to one account of the period, jail fever “begins with a sensation of coldness and shivering, somewhat resembling the fit of an ague. . . . Soon afterwards, the patient complains of a pain in his head and back and sometimes in other parts of his body. [He suffers] of nausea and sickness at stomach, but he seldom vomits; of great lassitude, weakness and weariness; of dejection of spirits; of heat frequently alternating with the cold shivering fits; of thirst; and of loss of appetite. His sleep is also confused and disturbed with frightful dreams.”
⁷

And this is only the first stage of jail fever.

The network of roads and mail routes between the eighteen missions on the peninsula was a feat of geography—if not scheduling. Even during a deadly epidemic, news and letters still ferried from hub to hub, infected or no. In Santa Anna, a mining town fifty miles north-east of Misión Estero, a royal officer of the Spanish crown, Joaquín Velázquez de Leon—an amateur mathematician and astronomer—had learned of the arrival of Chappe and his cohorts at San José del Cabo. Velázquez posted a letter asking to join the expedition and help conduct observations. Doz and Medina wrote back that Velázquez could indeed provide assurance and assistance. But such help consisted of Velázquez staying put. “Don Salvador de Medina and Don Vicente [de] Doz,” Velázquez recalled, “replied that although they would take great pleasure in our concurring for the day of the observation, it would be better if I made mine in Santa Anna in case theirs failed because of cloudiness.”
⁸

Medina and Doz were thinking about other contingencies too. The jail fever spreading through their local workforce was as serious as death. “The numbers that were daily carried off too plainly showed the danger [we were] in,” Chappe's assistant Pauly later wrote. Pauly recalled that once the expedition had made landfall and had begun to set up, Chappe became as focused as he'd ever been in his life. Although one-third of the local population had already died of the fever, he refused to consider relocating. “We might have escaped the contagion by going on to Cabo San Lucas [18 miles to the southwest], and this was what the Spanish officers proposed. But they were within a few days of the transit, and a second removal would have lost them very precious moments. Mr. Chappe, less apprehensive of endangering his life than of missing the observation—or making an imperfect one—declared he would not stir from San José, let the consequences be what they would.”
⁹

Another external force exerted its influence on the expedition, this time for the overall good. In the six months preceding their arrival, the inspector general of New Spain, José de Gálvez, had been ordering repairs to colonial properties in southern Baja and pressuring the Franciscans to improve the native population's lot. Gálvez knew that the French and Spanish visitors would be reporting back not only their astronomical data but also the local living conditions. Perhaps Chappe's emerging reputation as a noteworthy travel writer—his
Voyage en Sibérie
had recently been published in France—inspired Gálvez's cosmetic commandments all the more.

In late 1768, Gálvez wrote to a Franciscan official that he didn't want “a few learned strangers . . . [to] find in this province and its missions the wretched objects and horrid deserts which I encountered four months ago.” The inspector general feared that these astronomers would return to the Old World and “publish in their narratives that the greatest and most pious monarch of the world is, in California, the lord of deserts and that he has as subjects Indians who go about as vagrants and live like untamed brutes.” So Gálvez ordered extra food and clothing
from the mainland and a contingent of soldiers to distribute the provisions and assist in ensuring Baja “look[ed] more prosperous and the people more civilized when the scientific expedition . . . should arrive.”
¹⁰

Those same (increasingly sickly) Indians constituted the local workforce. But Gálvez also imported workers from missions to the north to assist Chappe, Doz, and Medina in their fortnight-long buildup to June 3.

Doz and Medina opted for their own facilities nearby rather than relying on Chappe's site, which could also be a single point of failure. Both Spanish and French observatories had to perform the same essential functions that challenged their counterparts in Tahiti and Vardø.

The essential transit measurement was, fundamentally, one of duration. Chappe and his Spanish counterparts knew that Venus's disk would begin touching the solar face sometime around noon on June 3 and would complete its passage at approximately 6:00
PM
. The timing of the actual event, however, needed to be accurate down to the second. For starters, this meant ensuring the pendulum inside the clock never felt even the slightest sway from Chappe or others coming and going from the observatory, accidentally bumping it, opening or closing doors, and so on.
¹¹
Chappe noted that his observatory's floor was plenty firm, but now the clock needed an unmovable vertical brace. This meant a big piece of lumber.

The southern Baja peninsula was verdant with luscious fruits like pomegranate and prickly pear and abundant staples like rice and millet. But it had no great forests. Even the local brazilwood trees, which elsewhere in New Spain grew stout and tall, scarcely reached beyond human dimensions in the sandy and salty earth.
¹²
Fortunately, Chappe had already anticipated this need as well as the peninsula's deficiency in fulfilling it. In San Blas, before crossing the Gulf of California, Chappe had secured a plank of dry cedar for just this purpose. With the help of his assistants and whatever local labor could be mustered, Chappe sank and cemented his cedar plank two and a half feet into the ground, bracing it and the clock against one of his makeshift observatory's inside
walls. He further buttressed the plank's two remaining sides and constructed a brick stand on the far side of the wall that braced the board and clock. Finally Chappe glued paper coverings atop a box that encased the pendulum clock's machinery, ensuring that neither wind nor dust could interfere with the clockwork apparatus.

While Chappe's clock was steadied to his converted barn's walls, Doz and Medina enjoyed no such luxury. They had to build their own makeshift observatory out of wood they'd brought with them from San Blas, plus local timber, cane, laths, clay, straw, and stones. The building measured an impressive forty-eight feet by sixteen feet, and had three holes in its roof. The holes, aligned along the path in the sky that the sun moves in early June, were each covered by a cloth. The flaps, Doz recorded, could be “raised and lowered with ropes, leaving open only space necessary for the telescopes in order to avoid the least movement the wind might cause.”
¹³

Windy southern Baja didn't affect just the design of the telescope housing. Securing their clock to unsteady walls would have subjected its delicate pendulum to extra jitters. And as Doz reported to his superiors, they found even the ground to be susceptible to vibration. So the Spaniards dug a hole in which they placed a pillar of rocks on which they then rested a five-inch-thick plank. The clock's cabinet rested on the plank and was vertically secured to another pillar of rocks behind it that was also sunk into the ground.

All clockwork seemed to be as independently suspended as circumstances would enable, and yet by May 28, Doz discovered his clock was drifting. The time between one solar noon and the next, according to the clock, was not twenty-four hours (as it should be on average) but closer to twenty-three hours and fifty-three minutes. It was ticking a little too slow; the pendulum rod was too long. Although the screw that allowed for fine-tuning the pendulum's length was worn down, Doz and Medina figured out a different way to shorten it. However, another couple days' observations revealed they'd shortened it too
much. The timepiece soon recorded twenty-four-hour periods as being twenty-four hours plus another four to six minutes.
¹⁴
Their clock still needed fiddling.

As for the quadrants, telescopes, and other specialty equipment for observing stars and planets at their zenith, “piers of masonry were constructed to support the fundamental instruments,” said a report about the two observatories. By May 31, both Chappe and Pauly's converted corn barn and Doz and Medina's hand-built observatory were as ready as they could be to observe a celestial phenomenon whose better acquaintance had led them into the heart of an epidemic-plagued territory on the far side of the New World.