Page - 279 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

279Observing Venus and Debating the Parallax in May–June 1770),62 the observations of Chappe and his companions in Baja California in present-day Mexico (which reached Paris in December 1770),63 and those of Captain Cook’s crew in Tahiti, in what is now French Polynesia (which reached Paris in September 1771).64 For all these cases, there were good excuses for the delay. Lowitz continued his expedition in Siberia for several years until he was actually killed by rioting local inhabitants,65 and it took a while before the package containing his manuscripts arrived in St. Petersburg. Islen’ev’s site of observation had been Iakutsk, almost 8,500 kilometers east of the capital, and even he continued his expedition for a long while before re- turning to St. Petersburg. Chappe, along with nearly all his travel companions, had perished from a plague while still in America; and Cook and his team had observed the transit literally from the other side of the planet and still had some explorative tasks ahead of them before they returned home. The profes- sional astronomer of Cook’s crew, Charles Green, even lost his life in Asia. In the web of swift and open collaboration characterizing the Venus transit projects of the eighteenth century, Denmark–Norway had been—or had let itself be—left in a backwater in 1761. Its non-communicative mode of behavior continued in 1769, and it is reasonably clear that neither Hell nor the organiz- ers in Copenhagen asked for Lalande’s advice in the planning of the Vardø ex- pedition. The Venus transit report from Vardø did indeed arrive quite late, it was unusually—and perhaps unnecessarily—long and detailed, and both its lateness and its wealth of detail left it open to attack. Let us now briefly look at  the immediate reactions to Hell’s report among four of his peers who, be- sides being astronomers of an international reputation, had another thing in 62 On June 19, 1770, Johann Albrecht Euler sent to Hielmstierne (secretary of the Royal Soci- ety of Sciences in Copenhagen) the two reports, “which were published quite recently” (dkdvs). As of March 18, 1770, Lalande had still not received any news concerning the observations of Lowitz and Islen’ev (letter to Euler, dated Paris, March 18, 1770 [ran]). On April 16, Lexell informed Wargentin that the manuscript of Lowitz had just arrived and was about to be printed (letter to Wargentin in Stockholm, dated April 16, 1770 [cvh]). 63 Cassini iv, “Avant-Propos” in his edition of Chappe, Voyage en Californie (Paris, 1772), unpaginated. 64 Lalande, “Lettre sur le passage de Vénus […],” JS (December 1771): 825–26. Observations made at Jesuit observatories in China had the potential of being valuable as well. Indeed, the observations of two Jesuits—François-Marie D’Ollières (1722–80) and a certain Dollas—in Beijing are commented on by Lalande in a paper originally read in 1771 at the Académie Royale des Sciences, but he does not state when the letter containing their observations reached him, cf. Lalande “Mémoire sur la parallaxe du Soleil, déduite des observations faites dans la mer du Sud, dans le royaume d’Astracan, & à la Chine” (1774), 789–91. 65 See, e.g., the “Précis de la vie de M. Lowitz,” in Bernoulli, Nouvelles littéraires de divers pays, 6:41–50.