The Day the World Discovered the Sun (17 page)

Since geomagnetism was a new science, one that some contemporaries were exploring as possibly another means of determining longitude at sea, Hell saw his arctic voyage as an opportunity to explore the frontiers of human knowledge, whatever form it may take.

As Hell would later write in a letter, “Along with these astronomical tasks I shall not neglect work related to the realm of the physical, such as magnetic [measurements], observations with barometers and thermometers, northern lights, and the tides. That means everything I find useful for astronomy, navigation, geography, physics and understanding of nature; all of this will contribute to my work.”
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Reaching Prague on May 2, Hell and Sajnovics paid their homage to the astronomers at the local university the next day. Having enjoyed a quiet breakfast after morning mass, the travelers ascended the tower housing the college's observatory. (“It is very tiresome getting up to it on the wooden steps,” Sajnovics recorded.) The visitors introduced
themselves and admired the observatory's instruments. Sajnovics was impressed with the local handiwork behind the astronomical quadrants. “These two instruments were made here in Prague,” Sajnovics wrote (but presumably did not utter to his hosts). “So carefully, exquisitely and splendidly that one might consider it an English job.”
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Despite a day that threatened rain and thunderstorms, Hell and Sajnovics rode in the college rector's four-horse carriage across the Vltava River to visit St. Vitus's Cathedral. “The vicar thought we were Italian abbots,” Sajnovics recalled. “We were wearing completely black dresses with a collar—like abbots do—with two hanging white stoles and a small pallium made out of black silk.” The pair took mass at the cathedral and kissed the relics of “many famous saints,” including that of the medieval martyr who is also the national saint of the Czech people, St. John of Nepomuk. They took mass again the next day, Thursday, May 5, and continued their northward trek toward the land of the midnight sun. Sajnovics, a gourmand at heart, relished his pheasant dinner and trout lunch the next day. The expedition followed the river out of Prague, even as the Vltava becomes the Elbe approaching Germany. “We set out on a wicked road, on the left of which the river Elba was flowing, constantly fearing that rocks would fall off the steep cliffs,” Sajnovics recalled. “We spent the night in a lonely house. From here we could see a white chapel on the top of a mountain so high that from afar it seemed to be the biggest mountain of Bohemia, almost impossible to climb by man. That's it for today.”
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By the end of May, the party was approaching its first seaport, Lübeck. Its original intent was to sail from Lübeck to Copenhagen and meet the Danish king who had so graciously enabled the voyage. However,
along the way, the travelers learned that the nineteen-year-old recently crowned monarch, Christian VII, had just embarked for a grand tour of England and the Continent. Kings of Denmark at the time also carried the title Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, the region where the visitors now stood. The dukedom's seat lay eighteen miles west of Lübeck. Traventhal House—although the word “house” does meek justice to the pleasure palace it describes—was a beehive of activity as Sajnovics and Hell's carriages pulled into town.

“We arrived in the village of Traventhal in the evening,” Sajnovics recorded in his diary for May 30. “Everything was crammed with people. We had to make do with any old room in the inn. After a bit of soup and some beer, we spent the night on hay, as the other beds were taken by the owner and his staff. It was a miserable night. We found out that the king had arrived a few hours before at the palace.”
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Just the day before, the king had placed a capstone on a sly diplomatic victory for Denmark—a victory that also represented one of the greatest strategic blunders in the career of Russian empress Catherine the Great. Catherine's husband, Peter III, had six years earlier been advocating an ancestral claim to the very same Schleswig-Holstein dukedom where Hell and Sajnovics had arrived. The dukedom, crucially, would have given Russia the temperate seaports it needed to become a maritime power to rival at least the Dutch if not also the French and British. However, Catherine viewed her husband as a thwart to her own ambitions, so once Peter had been shuffled off to the great toy land beyond, Catherine papered over possible points of contention with any of her Teutonic countrymen. Emperor Peter's saber-rattling plans for the future of Russian sea power became, under Danish suasion and Catherine's envoys, a humbler request to endow less strategic German lands upon members of her extended family.
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On May 29, King Christian VII granted earldoms to key players in the Russian negotiations. One such entitled gentleman was Denmark's brilliant minister of foreign affairs, Johan Hartvig Ernst von Bernstorff.
Upon arriving at Traventhal on May 31, where the Hungarian visitors would be meeting their sponsoring king, Sajnovics met Count Bernstorff. Not only was the foreign minister well-known in Denmark, but courts across Europe also recognized Bernstorff's preeminence. Prussia's Frederick the Great—who called him “the oracle of Denmark”—reputedly quipped, “Denmark has her fleet and her Bernstorff.”
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Sajnovics was clearly impressed. “This prestigious minister is nearly 45 years old, of medium height, with a friendly disposition, a soothing voice, very gentle, an exceptionally intelligent and extremely cultured man,” Sajnovics wrote. “I could never praise highly enough the friendliness, kindness, respect and admiration with which he received Father Hell. He said he was happy to see such a meritorious man visit his entire country and that he would try to make his stay in Copenhagen and Vardø [the transit expedition's ultimate destination] as pleasant as it deserved on account of his extraordinary merits.”
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Taking a quiet lunch at a nearby inn, Sajnovics and Hell were surprised to see one of the king's counselors approach their table. His Majesty, the envoy said, requests your presence at lunch at the palace. The king, they learned, took lunch at four o'clock.

“The lunch was sumptuous,” Sajnovics wrote. After the afternoon repast, during which they had no opportunity actually to meet the king, Sajnovics and Hell took a walk among the famous sculpted greenery surrounding Traventhal House. “Walking about in the wonderful garden created by man and God, we had the marvelous idea to have a look at the maze at the end of the garden,” the visitor recorded.

A river flowed through the lush baroque landscaping, and Sajnovics began to wonder at a small boat that first approached them and then, once the travelers had passed, turned around as if to track them. “Wer sind Sie?” (“Who are they/you?”) asked the boat's sole occupant, wearing a hood over his face. “Since we did not know who was asking, we just ignored the question,” Sajnovics wrote, “but he repeated the question
louder still. Wer sind Sie? At the same time, he grabbed the paddle to push the boat that had been stuck on the shore back in the water. The silver cross on his chest, the collars of the Order of the Elephant and all of his appearance indicated that he was the king!”

Hell genuflected and immediately apologized for not recognizing His Majesty. But the king would have no such formalities once he'd learned who the two gentlemen were. “Pater Hell?” King Christian VII replied in German—the lingua franca of the Danish court. “Kommen Sie zu mir!” As commanded, Father Hell approached the king and a brief exchange of greetings passed their lips. However, without Bernstorff or other advisers at hand, the king could not accept an official visit. Instead, he requested his guests also attend dinner—which Sajnovics later learned began at 10:00
PM
or later. In no mean feat of cheek, Hell and Sajnovics declined the invitation and showed up at the palace the next morning instead.

Sajnovics and Hell arrived at Traventhal at 11:00
AM
. (Both days they'd left Apropos behind with the innkeeper, “growling and protesting,” Sajnovics said.)
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Talking both courtly and scientific matters with the royal advisers, the pair learned the nineteen-year-old monarch would greet them in person at 4:30
PM
.

The appointed hour came, as did the next hour, and the hour after that—without a hint of a royal audience. “Around seven o'clock the king left the meeting room,” Sajnovics recorded. “His purple dress was embellished with silver . . . a wide dark blue royal belt on his waist, a sword on his side, and his hat held under his arm. He is of medium height, proportionately built; he has an open and gentle look, only 22 years old [
sic
]; his royal dignity is doubled by his handsomeness, so anyone who gazes upon him cannot help but love him. We greeted him . . . and he expressed his gratitude in German that P. Hell had safely arrived and said that he was very happy to have received such a great astronomer to carry out the astronomical observations in his country.”

Christian queried Hell about their backup plans in case of inclement weather, as well as their expedition's other (nonastronomical) observations. All depends on the will of God Almighty, Hell replied. “Then the king turned to me and asked whether I was also a mathematician,” Sajnovics wrote. “I have studied the same sciences—I answered—and I am at His Majesty's humble service.”

The three-way conversation continued for another thirty minutes, including the king's observations on the voyage's destination. “[We talked] about the fact that he would send a biologist along with us from Copenhagen and other such things,” Sajnovics said. “We departed kissing his hand. He returned to his chambers.”

Hell found His Majesty still more impressive than did his assistant. “I myself was greatly amazed by the regal qualities of the [king's] soul and body during the three private conversations I had with him in Traventhal, two of which were exceptionally long,” Hell later wrote in a letter to Father Höller, empress Maria Theresa's confessor. “And I must admit: Because of these qualities I developed such an affection and respect for this young king that no matter where I was traveling I considered those royal subjects who have been blessed by God with such a great king most happy.”
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Sharing his observations about a foreign king with such a prominent figure in Maria Theresa's entourage—someone who might share Hell's remarks with others at court—Hell was not in any position to be candid. In fact, whether Hell noticed it or not, King Christian VII was a sick man. Suffering from a degenerative psychotic condition (which later ages would diagnose as dementia praecox), the king was coming through Traventhal as one of the first stops on his grand tour.
¹⁴
The king's advisers hoped the trip would be the curative that could rid His Majesty of the mental breakdowns that everyone at court had been keeping under wraps. Married to his cousin, the sister of England's King George III (himself no stranger to bugbears of the brain), the young Danish king already had a reputation for inciting scandal during his two years on the
throne. Chief among them were the sadomasochistic encounters he was reputed to have had with one or more confidantes at court, as well as a Copenhagen prostitute—Støvlet-Katrine (“Boots Catherine”)—who had become the king's official mistress.
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Earlier, on May 29, the Danish king had discharged his court-appointed doctor, leaving the unstable monarch without any medical or psychiatric supervision. The English ambassador to Denmark later quipped that “the politics of Denmark seem incapable of any other production than that of intrigue.”
¹⁶
As later events proved, the man hired to take the place of King Christian's dismissed physician would reduce the diplomat's observation to a feeble understatement.

Roughly tracing a centuries-old pilgrimage road for early Christians visiting the tomb of St. Olaf, the “Eternal King of Norway,” the transit pilgrims Hell and Sajnovics had continued their apprenticeship in the art of roadway improvisation. A troublesome axle on one of their carriages kept breaking, and vertiginous cliff roads and rushing rivers had forced the caravan to make snap decisions that kept these men of God praying. “The axle was grinding against the cliff wall on the right, which was about fifty feet high vertically and in fact so much bent towards us that we were in constant fear of the entire mountain collapsing on our heads,” Sajnovics wrote on July 22 on a narrow mountain road outside of Løsnes, thirty miles north of Lillehammer. “Two beam lines on the left are meant to ensure that the slightly wayward wheel does not cause the carriage to fall into the dreadful abyss.”
¹⁷

The contrast between the group's royal trappings and the decidedly rugged terrain was something to marvel at. Father Hell rode alone in a red-and-gold-trimmed single-seater sprung carriage; Sajnovics's ride
was similarly ornamented but painted in green. The baggage—and servants—tailed behind in five separate dual-horse-drawn carriages. “The mountains resemble big cones that are empty below and shaped like big ovens, among which the sound of the carriage wheels imitates the rumbling of the thundering sky,” Sajnovics later wrote to his Hungarian Father Superior. “Imagine a gigantic mountain which has vertical cliff walls on the side; over your head the threat of an imminent fall of rocks and under your feet flow the waves of mountain creeks among peaks of sharp cliffs of hair-raising depths, the sight of a dark and deep lake, or the bay of a waving sea gaping at you from down below. And you must go along this cliff wall on a road so narrow that if you turn a little to the left you cannot avoid the danger and would almost certainly lose your life. Yet the overhanging cliff sometimes does make you move to the left! Ah, if only the Viennese could have seen us . . . in these desperate moments, they would have forever given up the hope of ever seeing us again.”
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