James Cook

James Cook and the Transit of Venus:
"James Cook and the Transit of Venus

The best reason to watch the 2004 transit of Venus is history.

Every 120 years or so a dark spot glides across the Sun. Small, inky-black, almost perfectly circular, it's no ordinary sunspot. Not everyone can see it, but some who do get the strangest feeling, of standing, toes curled in the damp sand, on the beach of a South Pacific isle....

Sea gulls fluttered upward, screeching. City odors drifted in from Plymouth, across the ship, shoving aside the salt air. Sails snapped taut. The wind had changed and it was time to go.


On August 12, 1768, His Majesty's Bark Endeavour slipped out of harbor, Lt. James Cook in command, bound for Tahiti. The island had been "discovered" by Europeans only a year before in the South Pacific, a part of Earth so poorly explored mapmakers couldn't agree if there was a giant continent there ... or not. Cook might as well have been going to the Moon or Mars. He would have to steer across thousands of miles of open ocean, with nothing like GPS or even a good wristwatch to keep time for navigation, to find a speck of land only 20 miles across. On the way, dangerous storms could (and did) materialize without warning. Unknown life forms waited in the ocean waters. Cook fully expected half the crew to perish.


It was worth the risk, he figured, to observe a transit of Venus."....

read more