The Day the World Discovered the Sun (19 page)

But that night, the seas calmed down enough to permit luminous plankton to cast an eerie green pall across the
Urania
's battered hull. “The marine phosphorescence gave us a surprising show,” Sajnovics recalled. “It was like our ship was cutting through fiery foams.”

On October 8, the
Urania
reached the tiny settlement of Hamningberg—less than fifteen miles from Vardø. But unforgiving winds and an unaccommodating shoreline left the boat with practically nothing to secure it to land. “We threw in three anchors waiting terrified for what fate would bring next,” Sajnovics wrote. “The wind was raging terribly throughout the night and we were expecting the ropes to be torn at any minute. But lo and behold, we saw the dawn! The two main anchors had fallen on cliffs, so they barely held anything. But one that was most worthless sunk in close to the shore, and it was the only one that resisted the attacks of the [waves] and the winds.”

Any European of the age who enjoyed adventures, hazards, and perils could scarcely go wrong buying a book about the arctic. Readers vicariously venturing into the far north could expect to discover “the bleak and chilling prospects in the Arctic seas” or that “les vents y sont en toute saison d'une impétuosité qui rend la navigation trèspérilleuse.”
⁴¹
(“The winds are so forceful in every season that they make travel by ship very dangerous.”)

Yet as Sajnovics discovered, the dangers now facing his expedition had drawn themselves out into something so continually mortally humbling that the experience couldn't quite be expressed in words.

One final storm front followed
Urania
into Vardø, and this gale too nearly sunk the boat. “Only he who knows the sea can know the dangers of the sea,” Sajnovics later wrote in a letter. “There was one enormous wave that was angrily chasing our ship, splashed above it, and . . . in its anger it hit the cabin, penetrating through the windows and the cracks, it filled up the whole room.” Fortunately, angry seas also meant swift waters, so
Urania
arrived in Vardø “in two short hours that seemed very long,” as Sajnovics noted. “No sooner did we get off the ship than the wind started screaming again, the sky darkened and a veritable tempest started that kept raging for a whole day; they all agreed that we would have perished, had the tempest caught us at sea. Beg the Lord to keep us safe the next year too.”

Little wonder, then, that the military officials manning the remote Norwegian garrison at Vardø were surprised when Hell and Sajnovics arrived. Sailing in mid-October through the Barents Sea was a calling that fell somewhere on the recklessness spectrum between crazy and suicidal. Nature's fury in the stormy season was, as Sajnovics had seen firsthand, something bordering on unnatural. And as nature's annual payment for being the summertime land of the midnight sun, daylight would be quitting the region in a month.

Hell and Sajnovics saw their safe deliverance as the kind of beneficence that called for deep reflection and prayer. “We set up the altar in the neighboring small room, and we expressed our gratitude to God,” Sajnovics wrote on October 12, the day after their arrival in Vardø. “We received visits from [Israel Olai Sigholt] the commander, [Peder Fischer] the lieutenant, [Raskvitz] the exile, and [Voigt] the barber—who did not actually know how to cut hair.”

A mostly torch-lit procession of trips back and forth to the ship followed. And out of the snow, in stakes and twine, emerged the beginnings of the observatory that the two astronomers had already sketched out. Their new building, near the village center, would be an annex to a house of one of the local officials, the
Fogdens hus
.
⁴²
The next day,
Sajnovics and Hell took lunch at the vicarage. “The sky was covered in snow clouds,” Sajnovics recorded. “Our hunger and thirst were amply settled with noodles, lamb stew, and Schneeballen red [ice] wine.” Table talk centered around the poor fishing season that had just ended and the outbreak of scurvy that Vardø had endured the last time such meager stocks supplied the long winter. So during the coming darkness, reindeer meat would be the new staple.
⁴³

Days of porting chests and timber through bracing winds gave way to insomniac nights kept restless by mice chewing on the visitors' lodgings. Hell and Sajnovics installed their Niebuhr quadrant—the one they'd already tested on the road to Trondheim—and measured the sun's altitude through intermittent breaks in the clouds. On October 13, Hell ordered a day's expedition to a nearby island to collect moss that would serve as the observatory's insulation. The next day, through a thick layer of snow, they laid the stone foundation.

On October 27 and 28, a raging arctic blizzard battered the island, blowing bitter winds through the cracks in the walls and keeping the shivering travelers up most of the night. Beer and water stores froze and burst their containers. “We took the wine to the pantry of the commander, lest it suffer the same fate,” Sajnovics wrote.

Some of the men were still quartered on the
Urania
, anchored near shore. Fierce, towering whitecaps crashed onto the ship and tossed it around like a toy boat. “Had it not been for the rope holding it down on the other shore, the wind would have definitely thrown our ship out into the open sea together with the two sailors sleeping on it,” Sajnovics wrote. “In the evening the waves became strong again, so the captain made the soldiers pull the ship closer to land.”

Those measures weren't enough. A fortnight later, on the night of November 8, Sajnovics noted that “the remarkably big waves had thrown our ship against the shore, having ripped apart the ropes that were used to secure it. It was filled with water. The captain was crying and whining.”
⁴⁴

The days grew progressively shorter and dimmer. On November 18, when the sun rose at 11:32
AM
and set at 2:06
PM
, three soldiers and a peasant from town set out in the captain's boat to fish.
⁴⁵
“Suddenly,” Sajnovics recorded, “an unexpectedly strong east wind started blowing and raved with fury throughout the day, to such an extent that we lost all hope of ever seeing those men again.”

Although the fishermen miraculously survived the night and made it back to shore the next morning, their return also marked a dark day on the local calendar. November 19 was to be the last day of sunlight for 1768.

“When we saw the sun rise in the south on 20 November and soon after go down in the same place, at that point it said good bye to us for a very long time,” Sajnovics later wrote to his Father Superior. “The light was replaced by darkness, indeed a fabulous and Egyptian darkness.”
⁴⁶

Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche (b. 1728) was a French polymath astronomer with a keen sense of wonder, a flair for drama, and an instinct for cutting-edge science. Chappe's observations of the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769 provided some of the best data to answer one of the age's greatest scientific problems: How far away is the sun?
Engraving from
Voyage en Californie, pour l'observation du passage de Vénus sur le disque du solei
by Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche (1772)

The Scottish astronomer and instrument-maker James Ferguson presented a series of lectures in early 1761 that projected the path of the planet Venus as it would be crossing the sun on June 6 of that year. Through nineteen pages of complex geometric calculations, Ferguson offered his readers, he wrote, a way “to trace this affair through all its intricacies [but] to render it as intelligible to the reader as I can.”
Diagram from
Astronomy Explained
by James Ferguson (1764)

On his Venus transit voyages to Siberia and present-day Mexico, Chappe took regular observations of everything from ocean currents to atmospheric pressure. Here he delights at lightning discharges during a thunderstorm while his less enraptured servants and Russian hosts take shelter.
Engraving from
Voyage en Siberie, fait par ordre du roi en 1761
by Jean-Baptiste Chappe d'Auteroche (1768)

In 1763, the British ship's master Archibald Hamilton wrote out a manuscript account of his ocean travels. On the cover page he drew this image of a master's duties—tracking positions of sun, moon, and stars with his “quadrant” and chronicling it and other data in the ship's log.
Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum

The Rev. Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811) was an astronomer and fierce advocate of navigation at sea via “lunars”—longitudes determined by the moon. Maskelyne was Astronomer Royal of England from 1765–1811.
Smithsonian Museum