The Day the World Discovered the Sun Read Online Free PDF

seeking higher ground brought reports of townsfolk drowning in the flood.
    Some superstitious locals didn’t wait for the rains to abate to begin pointing fingers at the strange man from out of town. As if to punctuate the fury from above, mudslides broke off chunks of Chappe’s mountain, sending clumps of hilltop booming into the plains below.
    The rains eventually receded but the Irtysh did not. From the observatory, Chappe wrote, the flooded regions of Tobolsk looked like “a number of islands scattered on [a] watery surface and extending as far as the sight.” Standing on the muddy grounds of his now completed observatory, Chappe gazed at the unfortunate town below. Tobolsk’s governor had already assigned a second sergeant and three grenadiers to Chappe’s entourage.
    The guard now tailed Chappe wherever he went—which, by consensus, would be the hilltop and the hilltop only. Chappe started sleeping at the observatory, fearing his presence in town might incite an angry mob. For this reason, some on the hill advised Chappe not to visit the observatory without his armed guard to protect him. The locals, Chappe said, “imagined they should see no end to their misfortunes till I was gone from Tobolsk.” 22

Chapter 2
THE CHOICEST WONDERS
O FFSHORE OF S ALCOMBE , E NGLAND
February 14, 1760
    Sharp winds and stinging rain greeted all hands on His Majesty’s warship the Ramillies , 1 who had lost her course and fallen away from a military blockade of the French coastline somewhere in the English Channel. A ninety-gun ship of the line, Ramillies had seen action in seven naval battles over five wars. But now the seas were battling her. The storm had sprung gushing leaks in her hull.
    Her navigator recognized a welcoming headland on the nearby Devon coastline. Captain William Whitrong Taylor ordered Ramillies hoved-to for repairs, assured by the promise of a sheltering bay. But as she drifted closer to land, the winds and surf only battered harder. Rocky coastline stretched well beyond where the bay’s inlet should have been. The inlet was actually far west—one-third of a degree longitude west—from where Captain Taylor thought it was. In fact, the Ramillies had drifted into perhaps the most deadly length of shore in the entire channel. Before long, the captain realized this too. He shouted contravening orders to his commanders on deck. But the emergency coursecorrection snapped the mainmast and mizzenmasts and shredded the remaining sails to ribbons.
    Dropping two anchors seemed to rescue the moment, but the panicked crew failed to notice the dual anchor lines twisting around each other. Tension built until a snap unmoored the ship and sent it hurtling stern first into a cliff side. Seven hundred men died gruesome deaths that night. And the next morning, the Devon locals onshore ignored the bloated bodies bobbing in the surf to rescue hardtack for their pantries and stray shards of hull for their lumber piles.
    Ramillies was just the latest sacrificial offering on the altar of longitude. In 1707, more than 1,400 sailors died when four British naval ships sank off the Isles of Scilly. The fleet’s navigators had mistaken the craggy English archipelago for Ushant—an island that marks the southwestern entrance to the English Channel. To commemorate the Scilly disaster, Parliament ultimately passed the Longitude Act of 1714—legislation that established a princely prize (up to £20,000) for a practical method to reliably find longitude at sea.
    In the generations since, no one had claimed it, though many had tried. The bureaucratic body set up to administer the prize, the Board of Longitude, had considered some bizarre proposals over the years. One, for instance, would have set up a network of anchored gunships throughout the Atlantic that fired clock-synchronizing exploding projectiles into the sky every midnight.
    The board’s most promising prospect involved