Andrea Wulf

Founding Gardeners in Daily Telegraph

Short and sweet paperback announcement for Founding Gardeners in the Daily Telegraph.

"illuminating history"

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Chasing Venus: Out of the Diaries - 22 January 1761

my latest ... on the Transit of Venus Project blog.

Out of the Diaries: 22 January 1761

On 22 January 1761, the French astronomer Chappe d’Auteroche arrived in Warsaw. He was on his way to Tobolsk in Russia – a dangerous journey across war-torn Europe. The weather had been dreadful – when incessant rain had turned the roads into mud, he had then swapped his carriage for a boat but thick fog allowed them only to travel during the day. All the while the celestial clock was ticking.

The journey had been beset with problems. In Vienna he had bought a new carriage and on 10 January, the fateful day that Mason and Dixon’s ship was attacked by the French and Pingré zigzagged across the ocean to escape the British, Chappe’s carriage (including half a ton of instruments) had crashed into an icy ditch somewhere between Brno and Nový Jičín, in today’s Czech Republic. It had taken hours of pulling and shoving to free the battered vehicle. Chappe had enough. It had been the first time that the usually optimistic Chappe allowed himself to contemplate defeat. ‘I began to fear’, he wrote in his diary, that ‘we should not reach Tobolsky in due time’. Tobolsk was one of the most important locations because the entire transit would be visible and would be at its shortest – making Siberia the perfect counterpart to the longer transits in the East Indies (for example Bengkulu where Mason and Dixon had been dispatched to).

While his colleague Le Gentil was suffering the humid heat in Mauritius, Chappe endured a cold he ‘had not before experienced’. Even inside the carriage the temperatures were so low that he fumbled out his thermometer with numb fingers and scrawled in his journal ‘eleven degrees below 0’. The jovial Chappe was delighted when they finally arrived in Warsaw where he was welcomed in style. It was the season of the carnival – a ‘season devoted to pleasure’, as Chappe noted – and the French astronomer attended a great many festivities with the Polish aristocracy. The French ambassador even introduce Chappe to the King of Poland.

Chappe’s diary entries from Warsaw show that he was not only an astronomer but also a connoisseur of women – describing in detail their dress and ‘undress’. No matter how difficult his voyages, he always found time to investigate women with the taxonomic precision of a scientist. No matter how cold or exhausted he was, he remained an expert of the female sex and remarked appreciatively on their sparking eyes, the ‘slenderness of their waists’, and ‘well-shaped servant maids’. The women in Warsaw, he declared, were beautiful and sociable but also ‘strictly virtuous’.

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Review Founding Gardeners in Notes & Records of the Royal Society

“She quotes freely and interestingly from their papers so that the voice of each man is heard among the plants she colourfully describes. Importantly, she shares their passion for plants and gardening, which is readily apparent in prose that is never dry but always lively and attractive.  […] enjoyable and well–researched book … refreshing … Wulf wears her considerable knowledge lightly. The only slight quibble is that she might have written a further 100 pages. I would have read them quite happily. One only has to wonder where she will take us next in her exploration of history through its gardens and plant collectors,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 2011

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Chasing Venus: Out of the Diaries - 17 January 1761

Here is another one of my blog entries for the Transit of Venus project:

Out of the Diaries: 17 January 1761

On 17 January 1761 Nevil Maskelyne and his assistant sailed to St Helena to view the transit there – one of the few observation locations in the Southern hemisphere and therefore an important counterpart to those in the far north. St Helena was a lone speck of land in the South Atlantic and had been in the possession of the British East India Company for nearly a century. It was an important stopover on their trading route and Maskelyne was hitching a ride on an East Indiaman.

The twenty-seven-year-old Maskelyne was a curate in Chipping Barnet, a small town to the north-west of London, but he seemed to have preferred astronomy to the Bible. Maskelyne had been a fellow of the Royal Society for a few years and had volunteered to sail to St Helena. Not only had he made sure to have the best instruments but he also managed to receive a very generous liquor allowance – the bill for wine and spirits accounted for almost one-quarter of the entire budget for the expedition.

Maskelyne’s ship was accompanied by several heavily armed vessels which were sailing to the West Indies.  At the Canary Islands the convoy turned west while Maskelyne’s ship continued south. During those long weeks on board he tested his lunar method of determining longitude at sea. Night after night, Maskelyne peered through his telescope, measuring the moon’s path across a tapestry of fixed stars. Page upon page, he scribbled his observations and calculations in his note book. ‘My principal attention on board’, Maskelyne later told the Royal Society, was ‘to be satisfied … of the practicability of that method’. There was only one problem with his lunar method: it involved such complicated calculations that sailors couldn’t glance quickly into the sky to work out their longitude. Each of the calculations was so complex that the whole process took around four hours, which was no problem for Maskelyne who adored lists and order.

But it was not all hard work on board ship. Traveling with more than one hundred gallons of wine and rum as well as five gallons of spirits and over seventy bottles of claret, Maskelyne noted that it was ‘a very agreeable voyage’.

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Transit of Venus 2004 was Number 1 Most Popular Event according to Google

Google lists the transit of Venus 2004 as the Number 1 Most Popular Event in 2004. 

If that doesn't bode well for 2012 ...

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Out of the Diaries: 10 January 1761

And here is my latest entry for the Transit of Venus project blog 

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Now I’ve finished the manuscript of my book “Chasing Venus” (well almost), I’ve a bit more time to follow ‘our’ astronomers on their journeys to observe the transits in 1761 and 1769. Take Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, for example. On 10 January 1761 they were finally on their way. They were travelling on behalf of the Royal Society in London to view the transit of Venus in Bencoolen (today’s Bengkula) on the island of Sumatra. Their ship had sailed from England on 6 January 1761 but only four days later the Seven Years’ war brought their voyage to a violent stop. At eight o’clock in the morning the shape of a lonely frigate appeared behind their vessel – a thirty-four gun French vessel which was ‘crouding down upon him’, the captain said.

Heavily loaded, Mason and Dixon’s vessel was so slow that the enemy quickly caught up with them. Within two hours the French were close enough for Mason and Dixon to see their faces – they were within ‘pistol-shot’. A mast came crashing down, hit by a French cannon another was badly damaged. Splintered wood, torn sails and jumbled ropes covered every surface. Suddenly the first Frenchmen were standing on deck of the HMS Seahorse. The dull life in the Royal Observatory in Greenwich where Mason had worked as the assistant to the Astronomer Royal must have felt like a distant paradise.

Though the French had at least double the number of men, the British were not giving up. At noon, after a battle that had lasted a little more than an hour, the French retreated but it wasn’t a joyous victory for the HMS Seahorse – of their 160 men, eleven had died and forty-two wounded, ‘many of whom’, Mason noted ‘I believe mortal’. The captain decided to sail to Plymouth to have the ‘shattered’ ship refitted. Only days after they had begun their adventure, Mason and Dixon had to admit that it would be ‘absolutely impossible’ to reach Bencoolen.

Strangely, and by sheer coincidence, some 400 miles away from Mason and Dixon, the ship of the French astronomer Alexandre-Gui Pingré was also attacked on the very same day. It was only his second day at sea when Pingré woke to fierce shouts. The captain bellowed orders and a cacophony of voices, feet and metal echoed through the ship. As the captain commanded his men to the cannons, they tore down partition walls. Luggage, timber, ropes and cannon balls tumbled into chaos. Where their cabins had been, passengers now saw heavy artillery pushed into position. Only two or three miles away a fleet of five British warships was preparing to attack. Pingré’s ship veered, zigzagging across the sea with the British looming behind them. Then, the wind suddenly changed and they saw a change to escape.

 

Andrea Wulf on "Chasing Venus" published in May 2012

 

Chasing Venus: Irish Times - Books to read in 2012

The Irish Times included "Chasing Venus" in their list "The books to read in 2012"

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Founding Gardeners in Portland Press Herald and in The Free Press

Here is a nice mention of "Founding Gardeners in Portland Press Herald

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and in The Free Press

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