Free The Day the World Discovered the Sun by Mark Anderson

England was staking its lot on a long-shot mission into largely uncharted South Seas waters. Who knew if the English vessel would ever be heard from again?
    Landing at Vera Cruz and following familiar trade routes through New Spain, on the other hand, was nothing so outlandish. Attempting a surefire mission like Chappe’s and failing would have proved both an embarrassment and a disgrace—an insurance policy that never insured.
    Little surprise, then, that when Vera Cruz’s governor learned that the nutshell bobbing out in the harbor carried the king of Spain’s imprimatur, he ordered a safer berth for the boat. The mission’s two Spanish co-observers, Salvador de Medina and Vicente de Doz, first offloaded onto a harbor vessel to port them to shore. Two hours later, another craft came for Chappe and his assistant Pauly.
    The sky loomed. The waves slapping against the boat’s sides and spraying its passengers were only increasing in size. As rain began peltingthe travelers, Chappe’s craft landed and offloaded him into the dank little city founded by the legendary conquistador Hernán Cortés. Little more than a decaying way station for Mexican loot, Vera Cruz was hardly the most cosmopolitan of cities. “The town is not very considerable either in point of size or the magnificence of its buildings,” a contemporary visitor to Vera Cruz observed. “For on the one side being exposed to vast clouds of dry sand and on the other to the exhalations of very rank bogs and marshes, it is so very unwholesome that scarce any Spaniard of note resides there constantly.” 16
    Still, it was land. And considering the sky’s outpourings, land of any kind was becoming more and more welcome by the minute. Chappe may not have been fluent in Spanish, but he didn’t need proficiency to understand the import of the chatter in town: “Huracán!”
    Now cut off from his assistants and some of the finest scientific instruments available anywhere in New Spain, Chappe watched helplessly as the storm tides and pounding winds battered his brigantine. A wise hand onboard the craft maneuvered it into the lee of the nearby island fortress, San Juan de Ulua. The tempestuous waters mercilessly tossed the little nutshell and would surely have crushed it had the pilot not sought shelter. But shadowed by the mighty stone castle, the passengers and precious cargo were spared to continue their journey, now venturing inland.
M EXICO (M EXICO C ITY )
March 26–29, 1769
    On his eight-day cross-country trek to the capital city of New Spain, Chappe had seen enough of Spanish rule to understand how it worked—and how its boot resembled the Russian model the Siberians lived under.
    Despite the colossal plunder conquistadores were extracting from New Spain, Chappe attended a mountainside fair near the high-altitudehamlet of Xalapa that conspicuously lacked shiny metals. “The Mexicans give in exchange cochineal [dye] and money, for as to gold or silver bullion, no body is allowed to have any,” Chappe recorded. “A breach of the regulations respecting the mines is the greatest crime that can be committed. A false coiner is hanged; a murderer is only imprisoned or banished.” 17
    The entourage consisted of two sedans—one containing Chappe and Pauly, the other containing their Spanish counterparts Doz and Medina—preceded by a mule train that the rest of the crew either rode on or rode herd over. As Easter weekend approached, the train reached the outskirts of Mexico City. The roads beyond Xalapa led toward a peak that provided, Chappe said, “a most singular prospect: We stood so high that the clouds were our horizon.” The aromatic spring air and lush scenery on the way down heightened the contrast to the scenes of human misery before their eyes. The Spanish colonial forces had put what remained of the original population to work extracting mineral resources. “The