Their names are Cook, Bougainville or La Perouse. Adventurers of the Enlightenment, who undertake perilous journeys in search of a new continent or unknown flowers. And raise their standards high, for the sake of their homeland and scientific progress.
This article is taken from the journal Les Dossiers de Sciences et Avenir, issue 218, July/September 2024.
In the second half of the 18th century, the South Seas fascinated France and England. The Pacific Ocean, little known to Europeans, would allow the navigators of George III, Louis XV and Louis XVI to experience glory, but also for many a tragic end. Explorers who could truly be described as “Educated sailors“As Clémence Laurent, collection director at the National Maritime Museum, put it.”Bottle feeding“In the spirit of enlightenment, they will go to sea in the name of the crown, but also in the name of science.
So when James Cook made his first voyage around the world in 1768-71, it was of course a question of new lands to discover, but also of stars to observe. Astronomers, like his compatriot Edmund HaleyIn fact, he predicted that the Earth, Venus and the Sun would all be perpendicular to the same axis on June 3, 1769. However, by measuring the time, each time differently, that Venus begins its transit in front of the Sun at several distant points in the world, and thanks to clever triangulation calculations, we can know the distance separating our planet from the Sun… and therefore all the distances in the Solar System. We have yet to be able to observe this phenomenon in many places around the world and under completely clear skies.
The South Pacific would be an ideal location for observation. Two years after Samuel Wallis’s voyage and discovery of Tahiti, England was forced to send an expedition there. To lead it, Captain Cook was the right man: he had distinguished himself during the Seven Years’ War, but he had also written a memoir of a solar eclipse in Newfoundland a few years earlier. When he left Plymouth on 26 August 1768, he took with him the astronomer Charles Green, the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander, landscape painters, not to mention the aristocrat and the botanists.[…]
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