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

serviceable to me for the remainder of our journey, and especially in California.”
    Unlike the heavily traveled roads connecting the capital city to its principal Atlantic port, the roads ahead carried fewer travelers and more hazards. “The viceroy thought proper to give us a guard of three soldiers to defend us against the robbers who infest those parts,” Chappe noted. “Troops of fierce and unconquered Indians, called by the Spaniards, Indios bravos, attack travelers when they find themselves strongest, murder them—or at least, after stripping them and tying them to the neighboring trees, they carry off their mules and baggage.”
    The Mexican soldiers now joining the expedition as it forged westward on March 30 said that any Indios bravos the group encountered would not be handled peaceably. “Our guides told us . . . these banditti are easily known by a handkerchief [that hides their face],” Chappe wrote. “When a traveler sees an Indian thus masked, the safest way is to be beforehand with him, and to kill him if possible.” 22
O UTSIDE Q UERÉTARO (S ANTIAGO DE Q UERÉTARO , M EXICO )
April 1769
    Knowing the roads ahead would be rugged, Chappe chose horseback for his trek to San Blas—the Pacific port town that would be their launching point to the Baja peninsula. Doz and Medina opted insteadfor the same “litter” carriage on which they rode into the capital city. Chappe knew his equestrian mount didn’t make the journey any easier for him. But, he wrote, “I escaped a thousand mischances that befell our Spanish officers.”
    Images of danger and abject poverty dogged the voyagers on their 650-mile passage west of New Spain’s capital. “The farther you go from Mexico [City], the fewer habitations you meet with, and the road is often very rough, dangerous and full of precipices,” Chappe recorded. “In most places where we stopped, we hardly found bread, and every thing in that part of the country wears the face of the most pinching penury.” 23
    Some 140 miles west of Mexico City, Chappe paid witness to a high-altitude phenomenon that he’d also recorded during his Siberian voyages: lightning strikes that begin at the ground and then rise up to meet the storm cloud. A rare phenomenon now called “positive lightning,” these unusual electrical discharges were in Chappe’s day considered a possible cause of earthquakes. 24
    Chappe’s characteristically childlike sense of awe at this natural wonder set his musings in marked contrast to the scientific papers of many contemporaries. The voyaging French astronomer displays throughout his volumes no loss of objectivity when his imagination is truly captured. At the same time, vivid language seems readily at hand for him to describe in subjective terms the visceral excitement he’s clearly feeling.
    â€œI observed to the south a great black cloud at a moderate height above the horizon; the whole hemisphere about us had a fiery aspect,” Chappe recorded on April 3. “All the while it remained in this state, frequent and smart flashes of lightning appeared in three places of the cloud over these columns. . . . Soon after, the cloud came lower down, and then it was that we saw incessant lightnings rise like so many sky rockets, and flashing at the top of the cloud.” 25
T HE G ULF OF C ALIFORNIA
April–May 1769
    By now, the stories of previous transit voyages—and their lessons learned—had traveled around the world. In 1760 a fellow member of the French Academy of Sciences, Guillaume-Joseph-Hyacinthe-Jean-Baptiste Gentil de la Galaisière (“Le Gentil”), had set sail from France on a Venus transit expedition that took him 15,000 miles around Africa—evading chase, along the way, from a British man-o-war—and to Pondicherry, a French colonial outpost in India. But just before Le Gentil’s arrival, the British had taken