The Day the World Discovered the Sun (5 page)

The Astronomer Royal's instructions for observing the Venus transit once they'd landed at Bencoolen called for both timing the duration of the transit and making angular separation measurements with their quadrant. “Observe the first and second contacts of Venus with the limb of the sun,” Mason's boss, James Bradley, instructed. “Then measure the distance of Venus from the limb of the sun to ascertain the nearest approach of Venus to the center of the sun's disk. Measure the diameter of Venus.”
⁵

More instructions followed about setting up and calibrating their pendulum clock with the varying day and night temperatures in Sumatra and the sun's slowly changing passage through the sky. More nights ahead would surely find Mason and Dixon getting to know each other's quirks and points of personal style in the telescope and quadrant measurements they'd need to keep.

The cry from high on the mainmast, at least as far as international agreements were concerned, represented no threat whatsoever: “Enemy sail bearing down hard to windward!” The
Seahorse
carried a scientific mission that both French and English courts heartily supported. Her captain, James Smith, had every military permission, domestic and foreign, to sail under a white flag—a universally accepted protocol for warships undertaking nonhostile expeditions.
⁶
Of course, white flags were also run up at times of surrender, and Smith captained a military vessel full of English seamen who knew from six years of fighting that the tide of war was now turning in their favor. As the leeward ship, the
Seahorse
had poor maneuverability and was thus the more vulnerable vessel as it rode toward the enemy.

The
Seahorse
was a “sixth rate” frigate, carrying a modest 24 nine-pound guns and 160 men—carpenters, sail makers, quarter gunners, and yeomen of the powder room—to make this small fortress function. Considered too weak for the battle line, sixth rates were typically, as a Royal Marines handbook of the time put it, “destined to lead the convoys of merchant ships, to protect the commerce in the colonies, to cruize in different stations, to accompany squadrons, or to be sent express with necessary intelligence and orders.”
⁷

As the French ship held its tack, it came into viewing range of the captain's nautical spyglass. A bigger and more intimidating warship came into focus. The thirty-four-gun frigate
L'Grand
was clearly not interested in discussing cosmographical matters with the astronomers onboard. “Monsieur,” the snide nickname English sailors gave to French ships, had its big guns ready. Captain Smith wouldn't deny the enemy its due.

Mason and Dixon, men of philosophy and “mathematicks,” had no place on deck once
L'Grand
came within firing range. Perhaps sequestered away in one of the officer's quarters or their own lodgings,
the two said their prayers. Thumps from afar and loud cracks from the gun deck made every moment of the eleven o'clock hour a God-fearing one. Marines boarded the
L'Grand
in punctuated waves of assaults, while their French counterparts shouted “Allez à l'abordage!” and crossed a plank onto the
Seahorse
for tense minutes of close-quarters musket shots and bayonetting. Heard from behind closed doors, the din of screaming, shouting, moaning, vomiting, exploding, and crashing only heightened these men's focus on their delicate telescopes. With the June transit date fast approaching, and no time or place on their itinerary that allowed for replacements or repairs, Mason and Dixon could be severely injured or maimed without necessarily jeopardizing the mission. Not so their precious instruments.

Mason and Dixon's shipmates worked feverishly to better the volleys of French cannonballs bashing
Seahorse
's timbers. However, for the instruments under Mason and Dixon's charge, this was exactly the problem. Unless an unlucky French cannonball actually pierced the boards protecting Mason and Dixon's cabin—in which case both instruments and instrument tenders were probably done for—enemy fire posed less of a threat to delicate casings of glass, wood, and metal than did the
Seahorse
's own cannon. With every English broadside came a fusillade of case-rattling tremors and quakes. With every English broadside, Mason and Dixon had the work of ten hands spread out among four.

The next hour and a quarter was wide-eyed with what doctors of the day called “excitement of the nerves.” Pulses pounding, with cold sweat dripping from their brows and chins, the ship's two scientists stayed their post and ensured no lens, gear, or eyepiece met with the same fate as bones and skulls of the fighting men above.

Then, just as suddenly as the engagement began, the French booms from beyond stopped. Groans and wails from the
Seahorse
's injured continued unabated. But from behind a closed cabin door, the sounds of the able-bodied had turned from those animating a warship in battle to those driving a frigate under sail.

Captain Smith had more than a score of maimed and wounded men, many beyond saving. “Monsieur” may have broken off the battle, but this was still war. The
Seahorse
gave chase as best she could. But French hulls, known to be sleeker than those of the lumbering English fleet, gave
L'Grand
a natural advantage that “monsieur” used to his benefit.

Soon a battered English frigate turned around and sailed back north whence she'd originated.

The post coach from London via Bath didn't run on Sundays.
⁸
So the letter that arrived at Mason's temporary lodgings in this dockyard city had one day longer to steep in its rich juices. It was dated Saturday, January 31.

“Resolved unanimously,” it began. “That the Council are extremely surprised at [Mason and Dixon's] declining to pursue their Voyage to Bencoolen and which they have solemnly undertaken; and have actually received several sums of money upon account of their expenses, and in earnest of performing their contract.”

Dogs—even cattle and poultry—openly foraged for food in Plymouth's filthy streets.
⁹
The farmyard chorus of moos and clucks provided all the sonic accompaniment that Mason, not lacking in a good sense of humor, could have wanted as he read through the Royal Society's haughty post.

The society's governing council, including a new member from the colonies named Benjamin Franklin, clearly had not appreciated Mason's argument that withdrawal, under the circumstances, was necessary. Three weeks had now passed since the
Seahorse
had limped back to port. Some of the nation's finest shipwrights were repairing the battle damage.

On January 12, Mason had posted notice to his paymasters at the Royal Society in London about the unfortunate turn of events in the
channel. “The stands for our instruments are tore very much,” he reported. “But the clock, quadrant, telescopes, etc. are not damaged that I can find.”
¹⁰
He asked what the society would have them do next. They soon learned the society's wish, as Mason paraphrased their new orders, to “do every thing in our power to answer the intention of our expedition.”
¹¹
Stay the course, in other words. Mason and Dixon were to wait in Plymouth and sail on the
Seahorse
once she was seaworthy again.

And so the Royal Society's representatives bided their time as each passing day made the mission to Bencoolen more likely to miss the transit altogether. The society should probably, considering the lengthy voyage, have initiated the expedition two or three months before it actually did. But now another precious month would pass before Mason and Dixon could log even their first bona fide nautical mile beyond English coastal waters.

The duo had been writing letters to both Royal Society officials and the Astronomer Royal begging to be reassigned to a closer destination, one they knew their ship could reach with time enough to construct an observatory worthy of their task. The eastern Mediterranean coastal city of Scanderoon (Iskenderun in present-day Turkey), they said, “will make a third point upon the Earth's disk of very great advantage to those of St. Helena [where a second Royal Society transit voyage had also been posted] and Greenwich.”
¹²
Moreover, Mason informed his boss in Greenwich that his calculations suggested Scanderoon or another location in the eastern Black Sea could give them a leg up against competition from across the English Channel. One of these alternate locations, Mason wrote, “will answer beyond those of the French in Siberia.”
¹³

The two men undoubtedly were aware of the additional fact that, especially in a time of open war in the Atlantic, sailing through the Mediterranean rather than around Cape Horn drastically reduced the risk of shipwreck by storm or of another rendezvous with the enemy.
¹⁴

And now, receiving the January 31 letter from the council, Mason had the final answer he'd been seeking. Not only did the council reproach Mason and Dixon for daring to suggest workable alternatives, the august body saw their action as something approaching mutiny. The Royal Society threatened legal action if the two continued with any more innovative thinking.

“That in case they shall persist in their refusal,” the letter concluded, “or voluntarily frustrate the end and disappoint the Intention of their Voyage, or take any steps to thwart it, they may assure themselves of being treated by the Council with the most inflexible Resentment, and prosecuted with the utmost Severity of Law.”

The next day, Mason and Dixon sent a short, apologetic post back to the council. “We shall to our best endeavours make good the trust they have pleas'd to confide in us,” they said—adding, in a postscript, “We hope to sail this evening.”
¹⁵

Two weeks on the open ocean for someone as prone to seasickness as Charles Mason might make a nonconfrontational man pine for the English Channel—even if it meant another gunboat fight. But more than two months at sea, steadily southward past the Azores and riding the trades west toward Brazil and back east again, provided daily affirmation of Samuel Johnson's quip, “Being in a ship is being in a jail—with the chance of being drowned.”

Poorly ventilated and pungent with every foul odor human bodies can unleash, a frigate at sea berthing 160 men in its close quarters gave Mason and Dixon ample excuse to take the fresh air on deck. They certainly exercised such opportunities when working with the ship's master to fix
Seahorse's
latitude (via measurement of stars and the sun against
the horizon) and its longitude (via lunars) along the way. Hours spent measuring stars and planets and calculating the ship's position probably constituted the best moments of the day that the two mathematicians spent on an otherwise wearisome passage.

As winter turned to spring—and, descending into the Southern Hemisphere, toward cooler weather again—the prospects looked progressively worse for anything approaching a further 6,000-mile voyage to Sumatra. The Dutch East India Company port of Kaapstad (Cape Town) represented the last hope for setting up their temporary observatory in anything resembling civilization.

An English ship dropping anchor in late April in Cape Town's Table Bay
¹⁶
already told company officials plenty. The stormy
quaade mousson
(Southern Hemisphere winter) was fast approaching. Either the visitors were stocking up for a hellish passage into the Indian Ocean, or they were somewhere they hadn't planned to be.

An exchange of salutatory cannon fire between fort and ship opened the dialogue. The last time Mason and Dixon's ears had rung with such thunder, of course, an enemy threatened to take away their phenomenal career-making opportunity. This gunfire, on the other hand, represented the opening salvo in a backup plan that might give the Venus transit back to them.

Dutch officers boarded
Seahorse
to learn of the circumstances that brought her to their shores. Captain Grant, prideful mariner that he was, couldn't tell the Dutch officials that
Seahorse
had been bested by a French warship. Instead, he explained that circumstances outside their control had forced
Seahorse
's hand.

As luck would have it, Cape Town's governor was no stranger to scientific expeditions. Ryk Tulbagh,
¹⁷
who'd overseen an era of reform during the ten years he'd reigned, had in 1751 welcomed the French astronomer Nicolas Louis de la Caille for a two-year sojourn that included compiling the world's most detailed sky map of the Southern Hemisphere. Tulbagh also counted famous natural philosophers among
his personal friends, including Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. The legendary Swede had once written to Tulbagh that, even if he could switch places with Alexander the Great, he'd still rather be governor of the Cape. “The Beneficent Creator,” Linnaeus wrote, “has enriched [Cape Town] with his choicest wonders.”
¹⁸

To his credit, Tulbagh welcomed the scientific expedition with open arms, unheralded and unannounced though it was. And so Tulbagh's star-shaped Castle of Good Hope, close by the city's main dock, became the first unnatural wonder to greet the visitors as they offloaded their gear.