The Day the World Discovered the Sun (20 page)

Naval Lieutenant James Cook, later Captain Cook, headed up a Venus transit expedition to Tahiti that set sail from England in August 1768. Cook commanded a refitted collier called
Endeavour. National Library of Australia

Key figures in the
Endeavour
's 1769 Venus transit expedition to Tahiti: (l. to r.) supernumerary Joseph Banks; former Lord of the Admiralty, John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich; Lieutenant James Cook; botanist Daniel Solander; and chronicler John Hawkesworth.
National Library of Australia

The
Endeavour
in Australian waters in 1770. “A better ship for such a service,” her captain James Cook wrote, “I never could wish for.”
National Library of Australia

The Hungarian Jesuit father Maximilian Hell, who along with his assistant Joannes Sajnovics, traveled to an island in northernmost Denmark (today Vardø, Norway) to observe the 1769 Venus transit.
Engraving by Johann Gottfried Haid from a painting by Wenzel Pohl

Endeavour
's artist Sydney Parkinson made a thousand drawings during the ship's voyage, including sketches of the encampment that Cook had built at Tahiti for Venus transit observations. This engraving is based on Parkinson's “Fort Venus” sketches. (Parkinson himself died of dysentery on the journey home.)
National Library of Australia

A former Jesuit mission outside the town of San Jose del Cabo (in present-day Mexico) served as the site of Chappe's 1769 Venus transit observation. An epidemic of typhus was also decimating the region at the time of Chappe's journey here.
Courtesy of Musée du Louvre, Département des Arts graphiques

The harsh light of a cloudless morning brightened the palette of tan, purple, and greenish tones to the northwest. Britain's HM Bark
Endeavour
pulled round a hilly landmass to meet her maiden voyage's first port of call—the Portuguese-occupied Madeira, an island of cliffs and pinnacles that shoots up out of the ocean like a tiny Dover.

Chief astronomer Charles Green had manned his sextant on
Endeavour
's approach, measuring the angular altitude of the sun throughout the day and concluding their latitude was 32 degrees and 42 arc minutes.
¹
“When you first approach [Madeira] from seaward it has a very beautiful appearance,” the
Endeavour
's gentleman naturalist Joseph Banks recorded in his diary. “The sides of the hills being entirely covered with vineyards almost as high as the eye can distinguish, which make a constant appearance of verdure—tho at this time nothing but the vines remain'd green, the grass and herbs being entirely burnt up except near the sides of the rills of water by which the vines are water'd.”
²

As soon as
Endeavour
had been authorized to anchor in Funchal bay and conduct its business onshore, Lieutenant James Cook—supernumeraries onboard called him “captain”—authorized Banks and his assistant botanist Daniel Carl Solander to land and represent the ship to Madeira's English consul. The two were eager to explore the island, having discovered new species of both marine and bird life during the ship's approach.

Cook had his own business to attend to onboard. The night of their arrival, September 12, the rope attached to the stern anchor had slipped, unsteadying the ship's mooring. At 6:00
AM
the next morning
Endeavour
's quartermaster Alex Weir launched a boat to help raise the anchor, refasten it, and throw it back in the water. As the ship's gunner Stephen Forwood wrote in his diary, Weir's party had “hove [the anchor] up and carried it out again to the eastward, where Mr. Weir's mate, having charge of the boat, by heaving the anchor out of the boat, got fore of the buoy rope.”
³
As Sydney Parkinson, the ship's artist—hired by Banks to sketch the many specimens and natural settings on the journey—recorded, “The buoy rope happen[ed] to entangle one of [Weir's] legs, he was drawn overboard and drowned before we could lend him any assistance.”

A blanket of clouds and rain descended on the afternoon, darkening the mood appropriately for the first death of an
Endeavour
crewman. Typically a dead crew member's mess mates—the four- to six-man unit assigned to take their meals together—prepared the body for burial. The men wrapped their mess mate's corpse in a patch of canvas, drawn from the material used to mend sails, and threw in two cannonballs to send the cloth casket straight to the bottom. The sheet was sewn together, with the final stitch passing straight through the deceased's nose—both to ensure the man was truly dead and to keep the body fastened to its shroud. The next day, a pinnace lowered into the water, bearing a detachment that would drop the late quartermaster overboard. “[We] sent the boat into the offing,” Green recorded. “To bury the body
of Mr. Weir which we had found entangled in the buoy rope of the kedge anchor.”
⁴

Onshore, Banks and Solander had taken lodgings with one W. Cheap, British consul to Madeira. In spite of the late season, after which many flowers had already blossomed for the year, the two naturalists collected 246 plant specimens as well as 18 types of fish. They watched the locals prepare wine from the local vineyards—and were unimpressed. The method, Banks recorded, “is perfectly simple and unimprov'd.” Vineyard workers, after removing their stockings and jackets, jumped into vats with the grapes and stomped around. The pulp, Banks said, was then “put under a square piece of wood which is press'd down by a lever, to the other end of which is fastened a stone that may be rais'd up at pleasure by a screw. By this way and this only they make their wine, and by this way probably Noah made his when he had newly planted the first vineyard after the general destruction of mankind and their arts—tho it is not impossible that he might have used a better [way], if he remembered the ways he had seen us'd before the flood.”
⁵

Despite Banks's disapproval of Madeiran viticulture, Cook sent
Endeavour
's casks to shore to be filled with water and with 3,020 gallons of the island's famous wine.
⁶
Madeira wine was well suited for a long-haul voyage because brandy was added to the final product, upping both alcohol content and shelf life.

Cook also ordered his storeroom to be stocked with, as he wrote in his captain's journal, “fresh beef and greens for the ship's company.” During the Madeira stay, Cook even had a seaman and a marine whipped for “refusing to take their allowance of fresh beef.” Cook also loaded up with fresh fruits and onions. Every man on
Endeavour
was issued thirty pounds of Madeira onions—and expected to incorporate it into his daily rations.
⁷

Scurvy had long laid waste to ship's crews at sea. And while no one at the time knew exactly what caused the disease, Cook would be testing new foods throughout his three-year circumnavigation that were thought
to prevent scurvy. Such prophylaxes included sauerkraut, a lemon-orange concentrate, and water boiled with a sticky brown bouillon—“portable soup”—made from beef offal, salt, and vegetable stock. Before advancing to the newer curatives, though, Cook would first be fouling the stench of every
Endeavour
crew member's breath. As one treatise on scurvy at the time advised, “Every common sailor ought to lay in a stock of onions, for they are a great preservative at sea.”
⁸

Unburdened by officers' duties, Banks and Solander had free rein on the island for nearly five days. They ventured into the hills outside of Funchal to visit a doctor who gave them samples of the island's guava, pineapple, mango, banana, and cinnamon tree bark. Another day took them into a Franciscan convent, where Banks recorded his observations on the local climate, population, architecture, and religious culture. “The churches have an abundance of ornaments, chiefly bad pictures and figures of their favorite saints in lac'd clothes,” he wrote. The duo visited a nearby convent, where, Banks said, “the ladies did us the honor to express great pleasure in seeing us there. They had heard that we were great philosophers, and expected much from us.” The guests regaled the sisters, by their request, with scientific theories about thunder and ways to divine new sources of water. The exchange went both ways too. “While we stayed,” Banks wrote, “I am sure there was not the fraction of a second in which their tongues did not go at an uncommonly nimble rate.”
⁹