Andrea Wulf

Review Founding Gardeners: Washington Times

“Andrea Wulf, a British horticultural historian, is one of those rare and talented writers with a distinctive narrative voice. Just as in “The Brother Gardeners” (2009), she infuses her text with such liveliness, grace and original scholarship that the reader happily follows the author at a brisk trot wherever she may lead. And what a journey. For the first time, we are vividly shown how the Founding Fathers reinvented a system of agriculture geared to the needs of the young country”, Washington Times

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Chasing Venus: 29 August 1768 - William Wales at Hudson Bay

And another blog entry that I wrote for the Transit of Venus project:

William Wales arrived at his destination in Hudson Bay in August 1768. He reached Fort Prince of Wales on 10 August. It was a bleak place of bare rocks with little vegetation – some dwarf willows and birch as well as some gooseberry bushes - but nothing, Wales noted, ‘that would bear the name of trees’. Luckily they had brought timber and a prefabricated observatory that had been designed by engineer John Smeaton. In fact judging from this entry in Wales’ journal they must have had had several observatories which they placed on the fort. ‘“We laid the foundation of the observatory in its proper place and position, which was on the S.E. bastion, the higher and lower observatories nearly N.N.E. and S.S.W. of each other respectively.” On 29, 30 and 31 August, Wales wrote, he and his assistant ‘were employed on the observatory’.

Diligently following their detailed orders, they concentrated on their work place rather than their own accommodations. For two weeks they slept on the bare wooden floor planks of their cabin before the carpenter finally found time to build two beds. They were pestered by mosquitoes, enormous flesh flies as well as millions of tiny flies which, Wales moaned, were so obnoxious that it was impossible ‘either to speak, breathe or look, without having one’s mouth, nose or eyes full of them’.

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Chasing Venus: August 1768 ... enter the Swedes

And another post I wrote for for the Transit of Venus:

Just to add something to Steven’s post from 26 August in which he follows Captain Cook and Maximilian Hell. By the end of August 1768 the Swedish astronomer Fredrik Mallet was also on his way – he was traveling to Pello in Lapland, north of the Gulf of Bothnia. Mallet was ordered to observe the transit by the Swedish Academy of Sciences. Lapland was an important location because the entire transit would be visible there and it acted as counterpart to the South Sea expedition (because the difference of the duration of the Venus was the greatest).

Mallet was passionate about astronomy and mathematics but continuously failed to get a paid job – he also seemed to have been prone to melancholy or depression. He worked (unpaid) as an astronomer at the observatory in Uppsala and with clockwork regularity had been ignored again and again when positions had become available – so often that Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin, the secretary of the Academy in Stockholm, admitted that even a man ‘plagued less by melancholy than Mallet’ would have despaired. Mallet left Uppsala in mid-August 1768 but his assistant became so ill that they got stuck for several weeks in Öregrund which was only fifty miles from Uppsala. Unsurprisingly Mallet got frustrated and called it the most ‘deplorable’place and began to doubt if he would ever reach his destination. Winter was approaching in Lapland and he had still most of the journey before him.

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Chasing Venus: By Order of the Royal Society

In my last entry I wrote about William Wales freezing at Hudson Bay although he had specifically told the Royal Society in London that he wanted to be observe Venus in June 1761 in a warm climate. Here is another story of the Royal Society’s stern regime.

Brits Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason (famously known for the eponymous Mason-Dixon Line) were sent to Bencoolen in Sumatra for the 1761 transit. When their ship theHMS Seahorse was attacked by the French just off the coast of Plymouth, they were left with eleven dead and forty-two wounded – and had to return to repair the vessel. Dixon and Mason were terrified and wrote a letter to the Royal Society, explaining that they would never be able to reach Bencoolen in time (it was already January 1761). According to their calculations the next best place would be Scanderoon in Asia minor at the most northeastern corner of the Mediterranean. At no other location, Mason and Dixon explained, would they be able to ‘perform what the world in general reasonably expect from us’. And in the vain hope of getting some sympathy from the fellows, Mason added a postscript which described that he had been suffering from ‘continual Sickness’ while at sea.

Probably traumatised by the battle, they wrote that the Royal Society would ‘gain no Honour’ if they were ordered to Bencoolen. The fellows however thought this was mutiny and ordered the two disobedient astronomers ‘to go on Board the Sea Horse, and enter upon the Voyage’. The Royal Society reminded them that they were bound by their contract. Their unwillingness to depart would not only harm the nation but would also prove to be ‘fatally to themselves’ – the whole affair would cause a ‘scandal’ and ‘end in their utter Ruin’. To make clear that this was not just a polite nudge, the fellows ended the letter with the threat that Mason and Dixon would be prosecuted in court. The two astronomers were going to Bencoolen, if they wanted or not – otherwise they would be punished as mutineers ‘with the utmost Severity of Law’. Nothing, it seemed, was to stand in the way of the Royal Society’s plans.

Mason and Dixon followed the orders BUT … and this is the nice bit about this story … in the end they went to the Cape of Good Hope and took some of the best observations of all astronomers. Of course, the Royal Society had no idea where their astronomers had stopped.

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Review New York Times: "Paradise Lust" by Brook Wilensky-­Lanford

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