The Quiet Before, page 4
Encouraging their participation was only the first step. Peiresc still had to teach them how exactly to carry out a methodical observation. If he was going to trust their findings, he had to put some standards in place; this thinking, too, was an innovation of the age. He needed to guide them on how to hold their bodies when looking through a telescope, how to verify evidence. The lessons came in different forms. For those who passed through Aix, Peiresc was slowly setting up what would eventually be known as the École Provençale, a veritable training program for aspiring amateur astronomers. He had already built a simple observatory on his roof. Those who couldn’t make it there or were already stationed abroad were sent detailed instruction manuals.
In one May 1635 letter to Father Agathange de Vendôme, who would be viewing the eclipse from Cairo, Peiresc was quite explicit about where and how to observe: “You must try to view from above the pyramids or some other elevated site, in order to see the sun rise on the horizon, and to note the progression of the eclipse. But you should not simply trust the naked eye. You must use the telescope…because with the naked eye, the illuminated moon appears larger than it is in fact, and as a result, the eclipsed part smaller.” Father Agathange would have to use a quadrant to take measurements of fixed stars and of the height of the sun at noon (for latitude), and it was best to do this, Peiresc wrote, the day before. The priest would need to be exacting about how he marked time, either with a well-calibrated clock or, better yet, by checking the position of the stars.
As it turned out, Agathange was not a quick study, and upon reading his disorganized report on the eclipse, Peiresc decided that he would have to better prepare him for the next one. In a letter, in which he managed to keep his annoyance just barely at bay, Peiresc wrote that he would be sending a new set of instructions.
One of Peiresc’s more unusual eclipse observers was Thomas d’Arcos, a former secretary to a cardinal who had been taken captive by pirates and brought to Tunis, where he had been living as a slave for five years when Peiresc first contacted him in 1630. D’Arcos immediately attracted Peiresc’s attention by describing how he had seen the bones of a giant, touched them with his own hands. Always on the lookout for curiosities, Peiresc was intrigued and wrote back offering to help gain d’Arcos’s release and even involve high officials, up to the French king, if it proved necessary. By the time Peiresc’s offer arrived, d’Arcos had managed to secure his own freedom, though he remained in Tunis and even converted to Islam a few years later, changing his name from Thomas to Osman.
D’Arcos would often send Peiresc mysterious material objects that were the subject of local folklore, and the natural philosopher took it as his job to demystify them. One exchange involved a strangely shaped stone that the Moors claimed contained the soul of a past emperor trapped inside. Peiresc examined it closely and wrote back that it was simply a fossilized sea urchin. D’Arcos wrote again, insisting that if the stone was washed in blood, the voice of the condemned emperor would sound. The letters usually had this dynamic: d’Arcos providing the local myths or “musings” and Peiresc searching for the verifiable. The giant, whose teeth (each weighing three and a half pounds) d’Arcos sent to Aix, turned out to be, upon Peiresc’s close inspection, the remains of a long-extinct North African elephant.
Many items made their way across the Mediterranean. From d’Arcos came bejeweled dagger handles, live chameleons, and coins from ancient Carthage, and from Peiresc, barrels of wine, requests for specific Arabic books, and, eventually, thirty-five hundred words on the longitude project and how d’Arcos could participate.
Peiresc’s obsession with observing the eclipse then dominated the correspondence, with a constant flow of lessons coming from Aix. Like the folklore and myth that Peiresc debunked, this was also a chance to nudge d’Arcos, a kindred if lost spirit, toward thinking like a natural philosopher. Peiresc wanted to station him in Carthage, believing the historic site would be an auspicious location. When d’Arcos failed to collect any data for an eclipse of March 3, 1635—a trial run for the August eclipse—complaining that his gout prevented him from taking part, Peiresc responded with irritation, asking that he do everything to observe the next one, which would begin “around 2:30 after midnight.” Two weeks later, Peiresc wrote again, and his detailed explanation offers a hint of the type of instruction he was pressing on the other missionaries: “Since the last letter written in haste on the subject of the eclipse…I took it upon myself to send you in any case a small quadrant of cardboard that you can stick on a piece of wood or on stronger cardboard and raise the two sights that lay flat in order to bring them at a right angle to the plane of the instrument.” And on and on he went. “Take the height of the top or bottom of the edge of the moon when you observe the beginning or progression of the eclipse.”
It’s exhausting to imagine the volume of words Peiresc committed to moving his collaborators along. All through the spring and summer of 1635, the letters nudged and cajoled and flattered the men. Peiresc was tutoring them not only in how to carry out a scientific experiment but in how to think differently, how to become scientists. And if, in his many modes, his ink bottle running dry, he sometimes veered toward the desperate, it was because he needed them—he simply couldn’t uncover the mystery of longitude by himself.
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ALL AROUND THE MEDITERRANEAN on the night of August 28, as Peiresc anxiously paced his roof, the amateur observers did their best to obey his detailed instructions. Some lacked confidence or the right equipment—Cassien de Nantes, in Cairo, had to admit that although he had tried to be meticulous, “absent the instruments, I could not notate the measurements you asked for.” Some were bumbling; some lost interest.
In Aleppo there were a couple of participants. Father Celestin, the Carmelite monk, had tried to follow Peiresc’s suggestion that he view the eclipse from atop Mount Casius, a small mountain on Syria’s northern shore, high above any ground fog. He started gathering an expedition of a few dozen men in the weeks before the eclipse, but Peiresc grew wary of the plan, thinking it would be too expensive, “a bit too grand for me,” and that Celestin and his crew might not be well received by the locals whose “jealousy and bad faith” would be dangerous to the project. “One must abstain from even the most innocent actions when they are a little outside the mainstream,” the cautious Peiresc wrote about what would surely be the strange sight of monks on a mountain staring intently at the night sky. Peiresc sent a merchant friend headed to Aleppo to call off the trip. As it turned out, Celestin hadn’t even received the telescope Peiresc had sent for him to use and had to view the eclipse with the naked eye. Looking at Celestin’s observation notes, Peiresc despaired. Fortunately, there were two others that night in the Syrian city taking part: the Capuchin monk Michelange de Nantes and a merchant and chancellor of the French consulate, Balthasar Claret. Peiresc put a lot of faith in Claret, who had been an apothecary earlier in his life and so knew how to handle instruments and understood the value of accuracy. Claret stood on the roof of the consulate and took careful measurements that Peiresc would later find to be impressive and useful.
There was much anticipation in the months after the eclipse. Despite his misgivings, and the messages of mishaps and lost telescopes, Peiresc was still hopeful that taken together, the various observations would amount to some new discovery. But his letters are filled with anxiety, conveyed in endless questions back to his collaborators. Did they use their right or left eye? What kind of telescope? Who else was present? By November 1635 he had received most of the data from Italy and France. Early in December he wrote again to the Capuchin priests in Syria and Egypt urging them to send their observations and was frustrated when some of their notations arrived and seemed to be copied out of existing astronomical tables. Peiresc wondered to one of his collaborators how anyone could “prefer to believe what mathematicians say about longitude, latitude, and the dimensions of the stars rather than examine the truth.”
By early 1636, he had begun using third parties to badger those who had still not sent all their notes to him. Some of the missionaries hesitated for fear that their work had not been exact enough. Peiresc assured them he wanted to see everything and begged them to send what they had. He dispatched a friendly merchant to Michelange de Nantes with the hope of “knocking some sense” into him, conveying that he shouldn’t be inhibited by any worries about incompleteness. Peiresc hoped to see “the whole ‘tissue’ of his observation” because “even the faults and equivocations very often also serve.” He wanted these missionaries, steeped as they were in infallible doctrines, to understand that arriving at knowledge often meant collecting broken shards.
When all the usable measurements were returned—from Rome, Egypt, Padua, Naples, Lebanon, Florence, Tunis, Paris, Holland, and Germany, among other places—Peiresc plotted these points on the existing maps of the Mediterranean and found something that he immediately declared in a letter to be “astonishing and worthy of being noted.” Not only did he see how wrong was the accepted terrestrial longitude of numerous cities, but the entire eastern Mediterranean was revealed to be two hundred leagues (about seven hundred miles) shorter than had been assumed. And this made sense given the experience of sailors, who often had to deviate from their primitive maps, making adjustments to their routes based on their own knowledge of the sea and its coastline, maneuvers “for which they could never understand the cause and reason,” Peiresc wrote. The new corrections had the effect of “reducing the space” of the sea, so that “there was nothing so easy to understand.” It was a clearer transcription of nature.
Peiresc thrilled at how collaborative it had all been in the end, the work of serious, curious people joined together through him, the hub. And coursing through the many correspondences, in each exchange of letters, was his attempt to instill a sensibility. This mattered more to him than any specific skill. The reward of patience was the slow spreading outward of a net of common understanding. Through the letters, he was recruiting disciples to this new, and still perilous, way of testing perceptions against reality. In a way, it was this aspect of the experiment, that it was carried out by a diffuse group of missionaries and merchants, that had also most surprised sailors and cartographers. Gleefully, Peiresc wrote to d’Arcos, he was now able to explain to the “very most expert mariners of Marseille…and those themselves who made marine charts” why for centuries the maps used to sail the eastern Mediterranean were useless. And these men, so knowledgeable about the sea, upon hearing the way he had discovered its true shape, were “ravished and almost beside themselves.”
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THERE EXIST HALF A DOZEN portraits of Peiresc, drawn at different points in his life, capturing his fading vitality. But in all of them, his eyes are what overwhelm: they appear an almost solid black, pupil and iris nearly one. His lips form a straight line, his broad white collar and black skullcap, unchanging, simple, giving him the appearance of a weary monk. In the last portrait, done in charcoal by the French artist Claude Mellan on his way back from Rome in 1636, Peiresc’s eyelids are even heavier, his aquiline nose points sharply down, his lips are still pursed: a tired, learned man, eager to get back to his letters. By then the many sicknesses that he had battled over the years—including terrible urinary tract problems—had taken their toll, and his bladder had almost completely disintegrated, leaving him feverish and in pain much of the time.
When he died on June 24, 1637, at the age of fifty-six, less than two years after the eclipse, it was in medias res. Almost all of his many projects were left incomplete. To others in the Republic, his death was a sudden void where there had been a flurry of activity. Tributes came from all over the Continent, from the learned community of men who had been his intellectual partners all those years, from merchants and sailors on the docks of Marseille, and from the intrepid explorers who had found a patron in Peiresc. Cardinal Barberini organized a memory book that lamented his death in all the known tongues of the world, elegiac poems in forty languages, including Quechua, Coptic, and Japanese—a “complaint of the human race.”
More than anything else, those 100,000 pieces of paper that form his vast archive were his greatest contribution. They were remnants of communication, of the hours and hours he had committed every day to writing to his correspondents, collecting fragments of information, new objects, new theories, passing them along, swapping them with others, for decades. When his friend Gassendi wrote his biography, it was partly to capture the character of a man who was so influential and yet left no clear monument to himself. The book, one of the first major accounts of the life of a scholar, honored in Peiresc what he himself most valued: conversation as a conduit to knowledge.
Among the many unfinished projects left lying in his study after his death were his plans for mapping the surface of the moon. He had been trying to get an accurate rendering of the lunar landscape for more than two decades, ever since he first saw the moon through a telescope and was shocked to discover that it was as rough and misshapen as a giant boulder, not the smooth slab of marble he had always imagined. In the summer of 1636, Peiresc found the man for the job: Claude Mellan, the same French artist who would draw his portrait that year. When Mellan passed through Aix that August, Peiresc commissioned him to make copperplate engravings of the different phases of the moon, sitting with him on his roof as he looked into the telescope and sketched.
Mellan completed only three engravings based on his drawings from Aix—the moon when full, and in its first and last quarters. The images are incredibly exact for their time, capturing the pocked, glowing skin of a mysterious, unexplored world. But like so many other of Peiresc’s endeavors, this project died when its patron did. The engravings were important to Peiresc, not as a prize to be captured and pinned to a wall, but as a lunar atlas of sorts, the first of its kind, a reference. With all the glorious imperfections of the moon’s surface presented in detail—its craters and mountains—a group of observers could carry out their investigations with even more precision. Together with telescopes, they could use the map to track the progress of a future eclipse. And then do what they’d been taught: share with each other what they had seen.
Chapter 2
COHERENCE
Manchester, 1839
UNSCROLLED, THE PETITION—pages upon pages pasted together and crowded with signatures—extended nearly three miles. The signers were men and women who sweated for their bread: a textile worker from Bradford, a south Wales coal miner, a group of weavers from Ashton-under-Lyne, a London cabinetmaker, an alehouse keeper. Altogether the names of 1,280,959 people were collected there. Rolled up and placed in a cylinder, the petition was enormous, almost immovable, the physical representation of a new constituency. And on June 14, 1839, when it was finally maneuvered carefully onto the floor of the House of Commons and up to the clerk’s desk, it was met with laughter so resounding that the volume of the members’ guffaws was set down in the House record. “That ridiculous piece of machinery,” one member yelled out, pointing at the scroll and interrupting the speech by the Parliament member with the thankless job of presenting the grievances.
The laughter continued as a prayer composed by the petitioners was read out, beginning with their most radical hope: “That it might please their honorable House to take the petition into their most serious consideration, and to use their utmost endeavor to pass a law, granting to every man of lawful age, sound mind, and uncontaminated by crime, the right of voting for Members to serve in Parliament.”
They were asking for universal suffrage. There was nothing new about this cry, even if the means of expressing it, essentially depositing a keg of gunpowder on the floor of the House, was shocking and unprecedented. For centuries—from the Magna Carta to Thomas Paine’s impassioned defense of natural rights—British national identity was rooted in the fantasy of their island as a perfect democracy. But this was a lie; only a small upper crust had ever had access to the franchise.
That a petition capturing working-class desperation could barrel into Parliament at all was largely the result of one man’s energy and ego, a man who both understood just how utterly quixotic this effort was and, nevertheless, pushed it forward with all his might. Feargus O’Connor, all Irish brogue and ginger muttonchops, was the bombastic, magnetic, loudmouthed leader of what could now be rightly called a movement. He had taken what was essentially a technicality of British law—enshrined by Edward I in the thirteenth century, allowing any subject to petition the Crown and Parliament for redress—and he had used it at a scale and toward a revolutionary purpose that was unprecedented. For a people excluded from political representation, who didn’t matter to anyone in power because they had no power, this was a solitary but largely unused lever, “the only peaceable and constitutional mode,” as Edmund Burke put it in 1775. Until then it had been employed mostly for small, local, and personal matters, and yet here they were, hoping this loophole would appear as menacing as a noose.
Instead, there was ridicule. The petition had given this newly self-aware working class an aim, had bound them together, turning the particles of anger that hung in the air above factory floors and in the small, dank living spaces of coal miners into something more. The act of signing their names to this document had unified them, taking their inchoate frustration, their resentment at a life of never-ending labor exacerbated by disenfranchisement, and sharpened it into a common purpose. This O’Connor could already claim as a victory. But what if this spear simply bounced off its target? He never imagined Parliament would just agree to their demands. But if they treated their efforts as nothing more than a joke, what would happen then? For all the petition had done to empower and embolden and cohere, O’Connor had also seen blood thirst in the eyes of these men and women, and he worried that if this effort—their last, best hope—failed, there would be chaos.
