Authors: Matthew Goodman
Grant reported the events of the previous January 10, when John Herschel directed his telescope at the moon. At exactly half past nine, Sir John removed the screen from the hydro-oxygen microscope (which was serving both to illuminate and further amplify the image produced by the telescope), and immediately the wall opposite displayed the distinct image of a steep shelf of basaltic rock, greenish brown but thickly covered with bright red flowers that precisely resembled the
Papaver rhoeas
that grows so abundantly in Europe and Asia. It was, noted Dr. Grant, “the first organic production of nature, in a foreign world, ever revealed to the eyes of men”: a field of poppies.
The reference to poppies was surely Richard Adams Locke’s little joke, akin to (though more subtle than) Edgar Allan Poe’s launching of his hero’s journey on April Fool’s Day; for as soon as Sir John had finished adjusting his telescope fantastic images of the lunar landscape began to pour forth, streaming through the telescope and then projected onto the walls of the room, as vivid and strange and beautiful as one of those
– 165 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 166
the sun and the moon
dreams lately described by Thomas de Quincey in his
Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater
. The poppies confirmed what Herschel and his three assistants had hoped for, though not dared to believe: that the moon did possess an atmosphere capable of sustaining life. Still, Herschel’s group was not prepared for what came next, as the telescope, in its slow transit of the moon’s surface, came upon a forest—a
lunar forest
— the trees standing as tall and dignified as the yews in an English church-yard. For long minutes the astronomers examined the forest, the telescope charting seemingly endless miles, until finally they decided to reduce the magnifying power of the microscope to enlarge the viewing area, at which point it became evident that the telescope’s course had been gradually descending a mountainous area just along the Mare Nubium, and had now come to the edge of a lake, or, as Grant pointedly called it, an “inland sea.”
By 1835 the world’s astronomers, while still divided over whether the moon was devoid of water, generally agreed that the so-called lunar
“seas” (Mare Nubium, Mare Angius, Mare Tranquillitatus, and so forth) were really nothing more than basaltic plains formed by ancient volcanic eruptions. A basaltic plain, however, can hardly inspire the romantic imagination, and so Richard Adams Locke had taken it upon himself to fill those plains with water, turning them back into actual seas. The water shone as blue as that of any of the earth’s oceans, and broke in gentle waves on the brilliant white sand of the shore that enclosed it, which was itself girded by high outcroppings of green marble (“wild castellated rocks,” as Locke described them, calling to mind images of turrets and battlements), in the distance mile after mile of white gypsum cliffs. Hundreds of thousands of miles away, in the telescope room of their Cape Town observatory, the astronomers gazed in silent wonder at the colorful images that revolved around them, each one slowly dissolving into the next, as though the room had been transformed into a magnificent kaleidoscope.
Before long the room began to glow red as the telescope swept across giant formations of quartz, which Herschel pronounced to be the wine-colored amethyst variety, as they were colored the ruby of claret. From there the observations passed through the Mare Fecunditatis, the “Sea of Fertility,” though, as Grant remarked, never had a name been so inappropriately bestowed: the region appeared to be a great desert of chalk and flint. But even the most unappealing lunar expanses had to be observed
– 166 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 167
“If This Account Is True, It Is Most Enormously Wonderful”
and recorded, and patiently the astronomers continued their trek, with three hundred miles passing under their lenses before the desert finally gave way to a great oval valley surrounded by hills “red as the purest ver-milion.” At the foot of the hills lay a wooded area thirty miles long and nearly twenty across, the picturesque copses including trees of every description. The region seemed to be bursting with life—and indeed it shortly proved to be the one that, as Grant reported, “blest our panting hopes with specimens of conscious existence.”
For there, in the shaded woods of that red-hilled valley, Sir John Herschel and his cohort first beheld lunar animals. They could clearly make out a herd of large brown quadrupeds; with their curved horns, humped shoulders, and shaggy fur, the animals closely resembled earthly bison, although they possessed a “fleshy appendage” over their eyes, like a hairy veil, which Sir John quickly identified as a “providential contrivance” to protect the eyes from the moon’s extremes of light and darkness.
The next animal they observed, reported Grant, “would be classified on earth as a monster.” It was a bluish gray and was about the size of a goat, with a goat’s head and beard—but it had, protruding from the center of its head, a single horn. The horned goats seemed to prefer the glades to the woods, racing fast over the gently sloped ground, pausing a while to nibble on the grass, then bounding and springing about as playfully as kit-tens. They provided the astronomers no end of amusement, and in their honor Sir John named the region the “Valley of the Unicorn.”
By now the astronomers had been at the telescope for many hours, they were as exhausted as they were exhilarated by what they had seen, and with the moon moving swiftly into its descent, they concluded their evening’s viewing, toasting their success with congratulatory bumpers of East India ale.
The following two nights were unfavorably cloudy, but Sir John Herschel’s lunar observations began again on the night of January 13, when, reported Grant, “further animal discoveries were made of the most exciting interest to every human being.” With that promise, the second installment of the
Sun’
s moon series came to an end.
It was a rainy day, that Wednesday, and a bit cooler, providing a welcome respite from the heat of the summer. The sky over New York was a gray slate, the streets a dingy brown, so far removed from the bright colors of Richard Adams Locke’s imagined lunar realm. He was living, in those
– 167 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 168
the sun and the moon
hectic weeks, in two worlds at once, one outside and one inside him, as he worked furiously to keep the moon series coming (it would not do to miss a day just because he hadn’t finished the next installment, not when the
Sun
claimed to have the entire
Edinburgh Journal of Science
account in its possession), writing whenever he could spare a few moments from the news of the city.
From his office in the
Sun
building on the corner of Spruce and Nassau, Locke could hear the murmur rising from the Park as final preparations were made for the mass meeting—“monster meetings,” they had been called back in his native England—that would be held the next day to place New York on record as supporting the South’s right of self-determination. He had witnessed some monster meetings in his youth, and heard about many others; in England, stories were still told of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, how the great orator Henry Hunt had bravely ex-horted the crowd, “Be firm!” as the cavalry charged, their sabers turning that Manchester field red with blood. Those meetings had declared universal suffrage a right fundamental to the expansion of human liberty; tomorrow’s mass meeting would give consent to precisely the opposite.
The resolutions that doubtlessly would be approved by acclamation had already been distributed and printed in the papers; he could scarcely imagine a drearier set of propositions than these, which condemned the cause of abolitionism and “recognized as lawful the condition of Slavery in the Southern States.” The mayor himself, Cornelius Lawrence, would chair the meeting, while the chief justice and all two dozen judges of the state’s Court of Errors had agreed to attend, standing together on the platform being assembled in the Park, less than two blocks from where Locke worked.
When he could, he dreamed a world of poppy fields and unicorns. He pored over his copy of Charles Blunt’s lunar map, charting where each new discovery would be made, read and reread his astronomy books, studying the moon’s librations, the refraction of rays, the correct working of lenses and reflectors. The words flowed so smoothly from his pen onto the page. His was the self-assured hand of a natural writer; that could be seen in the delicately curled serifs he placed at the feet of his capital letters, the slender loops of the
f’
s, the crosswise slashes of the
t’
s extending from one word into the next: the handwriting that Edgar Allan Poe would later call “clear, bold, and forcible” and “indicative of his fine intellect” (the science of autography, like phrenology, being very
– 168 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 169
“If This Account Is True, It Is Most Enormously Wonderful”
much in vogue). He only wished he had more time to write; as editor of the
Sun
there was always something to attend to. The office was a constant hubbub, what with people constantly coming in to purchase copies of the paper, deliver advertisements, or pass along the latest rumors. It was difficult enough to turn out his daily paragraphs, much less produce a series, thousands of words long, from his own imagination. The best time to work was late at night in the stillness of the apartment, away from the chatter of voices and the clank and whir of the printing press.
There was something soothing about the scratching of the pen, its metal nib, sharp as a needle, depositing threads of ink on the page like stitches on a sampler. Already the moon series gave every indication of surpass-ing the Matthias series in popularity, and New Yorkers had yet to discover the many astronomical wonders he still had in store. There, in the quiet of his room, he could almost hear the buzzing as it arose from all parts of the city, combining into one great reverberation, the sound large enough to drown out—if only temporarily—those awful noises coming from the Park.
“The night of the 13th was one of pearly purity and loveliness,” reported Dr. Andrew Grant from John Herschel’s Cape observatory. “The moon ascended the firmament in gorgeous splendor, and the stars, retiring around her, left her the unrivalled queen of the hemisphere.”
Sir John had decided to devote that evening to an investigation of the moon’s western regions. The telescope room was soon illuminated by the blue-white gas flame of the hydro-oxygen microscope, and within moments the viewing wall was presenting a mountain scene: three mountain chains that met at a common point, two of them rounded into loops, so that it all resembled an immense ribbon tied into a bow. Beyond the mountains, near the crater called Endymion, luxuriant green fields grew, their tall grasses undulating in an invisible breeze, an expanse that Herschel and his assistants thought must closely resemble the prairies of the American West. It seemed a likely spot in which to encounter more of the hairy bison that had been discovered in the Valley of the Unicorn, and many such herds did make their appearance, as well as reindeer, elk, moose, horned bears, and, most astonishingly, biped beavers—beavers that walked upright on their hind feet. (They walked, marveled Grant, “with an easy gliding motion.”) The beavers carried their young in their arms and made their habitats not in the crude mud-and-branch dams of
– 169 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 170
the sun and the moon
their earthly counterparts, but in actual huts, the roofs of which emitted trails of smoke; their occupants, like primitive man in his caves, had discovered the secret of fire.
From the Endymion, the astronomers next proceeded southward toward the Cleomedes crater, following the course of a broad river that wended its way for about twenty miles before flowing into the largest lake they had yet seen on the moon. The lake contained numerous small islands, most of them actively volcanic, hiding themselves from the astronomers’ attentions behind a veil of smoke and ash. Near its western edge lay a large oval-shaped island, ringed by velvety brown hills that were crowned with tall quartz crystals so richly yellow and orange that the astronomers at first thought them to be on fire. The crystals formed natural spires that rose above the low woods “like church steeples,”
noted Grant, adverting once more to his (and of course Locke’s) English origins, “in the vales of Westmoreland.” On this island the group observed for the first time lunar palm trees, bedecked with large crimson flowers. They also saw an elegantly striped quadruped, about three feet high, like a species of miniature zebra; blue and gold pheasants; and on the lakeshore, multitudes of shellfish of all shapes and sizes. The island’s bounty certainly merited further observation, but by now the hour was growing late and Sir John ordered the telescope to be redirected toward the Langrenus crater, a region for which he had especially high hopes.
(Here ended Thursday’s installment of
Great Astronomical Discoveries;
on its news page the
Sun
apologized for the brevity of that day’s portion—
the article ran just two columns, in comparison to Wednesday’s four—and promised its readers that the next issue would bring the account of the discoveries which had earlier been promised. The moon story picked up again on Friday, with a fourth extract, brief but highly spectacular, from the
Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science
.) After a short delay in redirecting the telescope and focusing its lenses again, the astronomers found themselves gazing upon a dark, narrow lake. At the lake’s edge a border of woodland opened onto a grassy plain bounded on three sides by red hills like those that surrounded the Valley of the Unicorn, the semicircle forming a kind of natural amphitheater, as steeply pitched as the Roman Colosseum but far larger, two thousand feet high and six miles wide. (In recognition of those hills, John Herschel denominated the region “the Ruby Colosseum.”) The high red wall of the
– 170 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 171