The Day the World Discovered the Sun: An Extraordinary Story of Scientific Adventure and the Race to Track the Transit of Venus

251 Pages·2012·2.36 MB·English

by  Mark Anderson

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
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First Da Capo Press edition 2012
ISBN 978-0-306-82106-6 (e-book) Published by Da Capo Press
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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