here is my latest entry on Transit of Venus Project
Out of the Diaries: 6 February 1761
On 6 February 1761, the French astronomer Le Gentil wrote a letter from Mauritius (then called Île de France) to a friend in France, updating him with his progress (or to be precise his lack of progress). Le Gentil had been the first in the race when he had sailed from France on 26 March 1760 to view the transit from the French trading port Pondicherry at the south-eastern coast of India.
His journey seemed doomed from the beginning. They had encountered storms and zigzagged the ocean in order to escape from the British who all too often loomed on the horizon. On 11 July 1760 he had finally arrived in Mauritius from where, so Le Gentil had been told, he would be able to find a ship bound for Pondicherry. Only two days later a vessel arrived from India with the devastating news that what was left of the French possessions in India was crumbling under British attacks. Pondicherry lay under siege.
To make matters worse, much of the French fleet that had been stationed at the naval base in Mauritius and that was to sail as reinforcement to Pondicherry had been destroyed by a hurricane earlier that year. ‘I do not know when I will be able to leave’, Le Gentil wrote despairingly to Paris. For the time being he was stuck on Mauritius. With Pondicherry besieged, no supplies were arriving from India and the dishonest officials of the Compagnie des Indes in Mauritius sold the goods left in their stores at ridiculously inflated prices. ‘Life is horribly expensive’, Le Gentil wrote to his friend, moaning in particular about the rising cost of wine. To add to his misery Le Gentil was also struck down with debilitating attacks of dysentery. His illness, he was certain, resulted from frustration. His ‘mortification and concern’ about the transit observations had made him sick.
But Le Gentil was not going to give up that easily and decided to look for alternative locations from where to view the transit. Tenaciously he tried to concoct a plan, he wrote to his friend, but felt that he was wasting his time on ‘chimerical projects’. He first picked Batavia (today’s Jakarta) as an alternative to Pondicherry but had given up on the idea. The only option, so Le Gentil decided, was to sail on a small local ship to Rodrigues, an island not too far from Mauritius and known mainly for its turtles.
But with his seemingly unwavering talent for attracting problems, Le Gentil had managed to pick out of the vastness of the ocean the one small speck of land that the academicians had chosen for another French observer, Alexandre-Gui Pingré who had already sailed past the Cape Verde islands and was now nearing the equator.
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