Seite - 300 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 6300 was reluctant to pay heed to the Vardø observations at all. Like Lalande had done earlier, he simply discarded them. Unlike Lalande, however, Encke did not refrain from giving voice to prejudices against Father Hell as a representa- tive of the Jesuit order. Shortly before Encke made his calculations, a regime change had taken place at Hell’s observatory in Vienna. Hell’s one-time assistant and successor, the ex-Jesuit von Triesnecker, died in 1817. Von Triesnecker’s assistant Johann Tobias Bürg (1766–1834), who had been attached to the observatory since the 1780s, was not viewed as a suitable candidate for the post because he was deaf.147 Instead, the new director was recruited from outside. Originally edu- cated in Prague, Johann Joseph von Littrow (1781–1840) rose to the director’s chair of the Vienna University Observatory in 1819 after posts as an astronomer in Kraków, Kazan, and Buda. Shortly afterward, the observatory acquired the collection of manuscripts by Hell that it still keeps today. Johann Joseph gave the task of investigating Hell’s papers to his son, the observatory adjunct Carl Ludwig von Littrow. The results were published in 1835, in the sensational book P. Hells Reise nach Wardoë (Father Hell’s journey to Vardø).148 One of the charges against Hell that von Littrow—almost naturally—revived was the “delay” of the publi- cation of his data: A circumstance that appears to be worth pointing out is that in the entire diary [of Sajnovics] there is no trace to be found of the ban that was sup- posed to have been issued by the king of Denmark against publication of the Vardø observation. This fact confirms the assumption that has al- ready been put forward, that the whole thing may well have been invent- ed by Father Hell, to serve him as an excuse for the late publication of his report.149 Besides the points already made above regarding the possible commitment vis-à-vis the sponsor of the expedition, it may be reiterated here that the part of Sajnovics’s diary covering this period has been lost, along with nearly all his letters written from Copenhagen. 147 Kastner-Masilko, Triesnecker, 72. 148 According to Axel V. Nielsen, “Pater Hell og Venuspassagen 1769,” Nordisk Astronomisk Tidsskrift (Copenhagen) (1957): 77–97, here 96n27, it had already been printed in 1834, despite the information on the title page. 149 Karl Ludwig von Littrow, P. Hell’s Reise nach Wardoe bei Lappland und seine Beobachtung des Venus-Durchganges im Jahre 1769: Aus den aufgefundenen Tagebüchern geschöpft und mit Erläuterungen begleitet (Vienna: Carl Gerold, 1835), 163.