Page - 271 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

271Observing Venus and Debating the Parallax almost imperceptibly collapsed into and drew mutual reinforcement from one another with an ethics of service to mankind through the production of useful knowledge. Even among the numerous instances in which this could be dem- onstrated, the Venus transit represents a liminal case, where success depended on international cooperation and the sharing of research results on an unpar- alleled scale. As already noted, the results of 1761 being unsatisfactory, the number of observational posts increased by 1769.45 The most famous expedi- tion assigned, among many other tasks, to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, was undoubtedly that of Cook, the location in this case being the island of Ta- hiti. Cook’s 1768–71 circumnavigation, of which the transit observation was to be a principal episode, was also paradigmatic in the sense that it perhaps most colorfully represented the unprecedented dimensions of cross-disciplinary ef- fort manifest in the ventures: astronomical–geographical–cartographic mea- surement was to be accompanied with the collection of botanical, zoological, and mineralogical specimens as well as cultural, historical, and anthropologi- cal inquiry into the customs and manners, institutional and religious practices, languages, and so on of the indigenous inhabitants of the lands hitherto unex- plored by Europeans.46 But Cook’s venture was only one, albeit the most com- plex and for obvious reasons the best known, among many, the others differing from it in scale rather than kind, whether they took place in the Pacific, in Cali- fornia, at the Hudson Bay in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia.47 The many dozens of Britons, Frenchmen, Russians, and Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlighten- ment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 45 See above, 136. 46 The complex cross-disciplinary effort of the voyage is well documented in the vast litera- ture on Cook and the Pacific since the 1980s. On the strictly astronomical aspects, see Richard van der Riet Woolley, “The Significance of the Transit of Venus,” in Captain Cook: Navigator and Scientist, ed. G.M. [Geoffrey Malcolm] Badger (Canberra: Australian Na- tional University Press, 1970), 118–35; Wayne Orchiston, “From the South Seas to the Sun: The Astronomy of Cook’s Voyages,” in Science and Exploration in the Pacific: European Voy- ages to the Southern Ocean in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Margarette Lincoln (Woodbridge: Boydell Press/National Maritime Museum, 1998), 55–72. 47 On the fortunes and achievements of some of these teams, see Woolf, Transits of Venus, passim; Helen Sawyer Hogg, “Out of Old Books: The 1769 Transit of Venus, as Seen from Canada,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 41 (1947): 319–26; Hogg, “Out of Old Books: Le Gentil and the Transits of Venus, 1761 and 1769,” Journal of the Royal As- tronomical Society of Canada 45 (1951): 37–44, 89–92, 127–34, 173–78; Angus Armitage, “Chappe d’Auteroche: A Pathfinder for Astronomy,” Annals of Science 10 (1954): 277–93; Nunis, 1769 Transit of Venus; Don Metz, “William Wales and the 1769 Transit of Venus: Puzzle Solving and the Determination of the Astronomical Unit,” Science and Education 18, no. 5 (2009): 581–92; Jean-Loius Pictet and Jacques-André Mallet, Deux astronomes