The Day the World Discovered the Sun by Mark Anderson Page A

ports in the bay of San Barnabé. Chappe would have none of it. Time was running out, and no options looked better than the coastline that now lay before them. The ship’s master, familiar with San José del Cabo, said that although the landing might be rough, he also knew a Franciscan mission nearby that could serve the expedition’s purpose well.
    So on Friday, May 19—with just over a fortnight before the Venus transit —La Concepcíon dropped anchor less than two miles from the river that led inland toward their ultimate destination. As if on cue, the wind whipped up a new microstorm, one that set tempers blazing again. But it died down just as quickly, before any heated verbal exchanges could be logged.
    Pauly and the expedition’s young artist, Alexandre-Jean Noël, climbed aboard a longboat and hauled most of the equipment ashore. The sight of such a pathetic craft ferrying such essential gear must have raised the nerves to the kind of heights that a man like Chappe, under other circumstances, might have wanted to study. Chappe could only watch helplessly as the longboat capsized again and again in the rough surf.
    Pauly returned to La Concepcíon alone, informing his boss that through some brave twist of luck, “They came off with no other harm than their fright and being very wet, as were all the chests.” On Chappe’s boat ride toward land, he wrapped up his clock and kept it close. “I . . . sat down upon it myself, to keep it dry in case the waves should chance to wash us,” Chappe wrote.
    The ocean had already soaked the longboat’s passengers on approach to shore. And as breakers pushed the craft toward its uneasy meetingwith white sand, the saltwater spray ensured no clothes or unpacked provisions came ashore without a briny overscent coloring the sweat and stench of a long passage. The boom of a vivacious gulf now safely behind him was all the roaring crowd Chappe needed.
    â€œThen it was that casting my eyes upon my instruments that lay all around me, and not one of them damaged in the least,” Chappe reflected, “revolving in my mind the vast extent of land and sea that I had so happily compassed, and chiefly reflecting that I had still enough time before me, fully to prepare my intended observation, I felt such a torrent of joy and satisfaction, it is impossible to express, so as to convey an adequate idea of my sensation.”
    The sun hung low over the scrubby San Felipe foothills to the northwest. Nightfall was too close at hand to venture to San José del Cabo’s active mission seven miles inland. Instead, the abandoned former mission at the edge of the beach was their nearest shelter for the night. Freshwater from the nearby lagoon quenched the party, while fresh pitahaya fruit must have tasted like multicolored manna to stale mouths deadened by salt meats and hardtack.
    One part of the abandoned beachside property, however, was active. The nearby cemetery kept an informal history of the region told in tombstones—grave markers for local missionaries and converted indigenes of the peninsula, dating back to the mission’s founding in 1730. 26
    And judging from the number of fresh graves, in fact, history was still being made. Word had been spreading across the region that for nearly a year a brutal fever had been carrying off both Spanish and native populations like nothing since the spotted fever epidemics of the 1740s. 27 Some called this new plague measles, others a different kind of grande enfermedad . All who knew enough to say knew enough to advise the travelers to stay far away from anyone infected.
    The thundering surf feeding in from the bay sounded a steady and soothing drone to the travelers who at last lay down for the night, castingtheir thoughts northward to their final inland destination just a couple of leagues away.
    A welcome sleep washed over the voyagers. Even as fits of chills and shivers gripped stricken