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

locals in the epidemic’s deadly embrace, a warm offshore breeze kissed the nearby jacaranda trees, cradling their purple blossoms softly to the ground.

Chapter 12
SUBJECTS AND DISCOVERIES
T RONDHEIM , N ORWAY
September 2–13, 1769
    The altar bread had grown moldy since Sajnovics and Hell were last in town. And with Communion supplies imported from the Netherlands, the priests in this Norwegian port city had no holy host to spare. The Jesuit astronomers had spent all of July and August surviving various hair-raising sea adventures on the 850-mile journey from Vardø. They relished a rare moment when their greatest worry concerned spoiled wafers.
    On the morning of Saturday, September 2, Sajnovics sat in his unheated guest quarters and scratched out a letter recounting the sea journey to his Hungarian Father Superior. The soldiers and townsfolk in Vardø, Sajnovics said, “were not too thrilled to see us go. . . . They were forced to stay in this place nobody liked and everybody wanted to leave, wishing to be freed so much that they utter hundreds of sighs.” 1 But the captain said the wind was finally favorable, and the astronomers had done all the astronomy they needed to do. So with a new pet (“the little fox we had purchased from a Finn in Vardø kept scaring people with its cute barking”) and a new ship (“its cabin was sumptuously furnished,but it was small, and it had no stove”), Hell and Sajnovics and their crew were soon on their way.
    â€œOnly he who has experienced the unspeakable wrath of the Arctic Ocean and its many rocks and cliffs reputed for sinking countless ships can have an idea about the many dangers we had to face,” Sajnovics wrote. Within a week, they’d already begun to hear about competing arctic transit expeditions. The Danish king had also sent, as a backup mission, astronomer Peder Horrebow to a Norwegian coastal town two hundred miles north of Trondheim. But Horrebow, Sajnovics reported, “was unable to see the transit because of the unfavorable weather conditions.” The following week, Sajnovics had come within hailing distance of an English ship bearing two sets of astronomers who had tried to observe the Venus transit from another northern Norwegian location. “As we learned later on, neither of them saw Venus because of that impenetrable fog that was blocking the view on the 3rd and the 4th of June,” Sajnovics wrote. 2
    â€œOh amazing divine providence,” Sajnovics wrote, “that from all these people who had prepared and worked hard, [God] only granted Father Hell the privilege to reach the goal for which so many have strived and hoped for.”
    During their Trondheim stay, Hell remained busy. He accepted an honorary diploma, awarding him in absentia membership in the Danish Academy of Sciences; the consul in Trondheim hosted the visiting dignitaries for a concert in their honor; the scientifically minded bishop shared his natural history collection with Sajnovics and offered to give the holy father a microscope for better conducting his research.
    Then, on a clear and crisp mid-September morning, Hell and his team set off over the terrible roads out of Trondheim for the inland part of their journey. Like the sea voyage they’d just completed, the trip to Oslo would be much like the previous year’s odyssey—only in reverse.
    However, this time some of the locals now knew about the Venus transit expedition and were eager, as the scientists returned south, to inquire how it went. The night after Hell and Sajnovics set out fromTrondheim, they took dinner in a tiny hamlet where the locals excitedly asked about the astronomical mission, as they understood it at least. They’d learned from Horrebow and his assistant, when the Danish observers were passing through, that astronomers had been “searching for a lost star.” So, Sajnovics recorded, the locals wondered if Hell and Sajnovics’s