Prof. Winthrop Gets a Good Look at Venus

Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard College (portrayed here by John Singleton Copley, in an image that comes courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute) was among the many scientists who scrambled to observe the transit of Venus in 1761.

His report on the event to the worldwide scientific community included praise for “His Excellency FRANCIS BERNARD, Esq. Governor of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, inspired with a just zeal for the advancement of Literature, which he demonstrates on every opportunity.”

In 1761 Bernard was newly arrived in Massachusetts, and that April he helped secure government support for Winthrop’s research. In just a few years the governor would become very unpopular, with Winthrop quietly supporting that Whig opposition.

As the professor knew from Edmund Halley’s calculation years before, “Newfoundland was the only British Plantation in which one [observation] could be made, and indeed the most western part of the Earth where the end of the Transit could be observ’d.” Therefore, he set out for “the Savage coast of Labrador” with two recent Harvard graduates, Samuel Williams and Isaac Rand, both eighteen years old. They took along most of the college’s astronomical equipment, viz.:

an excellent Pendulum clock, one of Hadley’s Octants with Nonius divisions and fitted in a new manner to observe on shore as well as sea, a refracting telescope with cross wires at half right angles for taking differences of Right Ascension and Declination, and a curious reflecting telescope, adjusted with spirit-levels at right angles to each other and having horizontal and vertical wires for taking correpondent altitudes, or differences of altitudes and azimuths.

Winthrop and his assistants arrived in Newfoundland on Massachusetts’s provincial ship in late May 1761. They set up their equipment and checked and rechecked it, Winthrop wrote, “with an assiduity which the infinite swarms of insects, that were in possession of the hill, were not able to abate, tho’ they persecuted us severely and without intermission, both by day and by night, with their venomous stings.”

The morning of 6 June was “serene and calm.” Prof. Winthrop wrote:

at 4h 18m we had the high satisfaction of seeing that most agreeable Sight, VENUS ON THE SUN, and of showing it in our telescopes to the Gentlemen of the place who had assembled very early on the hill to behold so curious a spectacle. The Planet at first appear’d dim thro’ the cloud, but in a short time became more distinct and better defined.

Winthrop recorded the time of transit and sketched what he saw, telling his readers:

The above observations gave me so many differences between the Sun’s and Venus’s altitudes and azimuths, from whence by spherical trigonometry I deduc’d the Planet’s right Ascensions and Declinations and, from them, in the last place, her Longitudes and Latitudes. It would be neither of entertainment nor use to the Reader to insert the particulars of such tedious calculations. . . .

The comparison of the observations made in the N.W. parts of the world with those in the S.E., when all of them come to be laid together, will give the true path of Venus, abstracted from parallax, by which means the quantity of the parallax will at length be discovered. The right determination of which point will render this year 1761 an ever-memorable era in the annals of astronomy.

Those quotations comes from this edited version [P.D.F. download] of Winthrop’s report.

Winthrop planned to view the 1769 transit from Newfoundland as well, but a fire at Harvard destroyed the astronomical instruments. He asked Benjamin Franklin to send a new set from London, as this Dutch Transit of Venus website describes.

Unfortunately, there was a heavy demand for astronomical devices all over Europe as the second transit approached. Then telescope-maker James Short died before delivering Winthrop’s order. On 11 March 1769, Franklin wrote to Winthrop that he’d managed to get that brass reflecting telescope from Short’s estate, but he was still waiting for the other tools from another craftsman. During the 1769 transit, Winthrop was stuck in Cambridge.

(Thanks to Boston 1775 reader Robert C. Mitchell for some of the links used in this posting.)

Chasing Venus with Andrea Wulf, 29-30 May

Historian Andrea Wulf will speak about her new book, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens, at two local sites next week. On Tuesday, 29 May, she’ll talk to the Lexington Historical Society at 7:30 P.M. That event will take place in the Lexington Depot, and is free.

The next evening at 7:00, Wulf will speak at the Arnold Arboretum—an appropriate locale since her previous books include Brother Gardeners and Founding Gardeners, about horticulture in the eighteenth century. This talk will cost $10 for Massachusetts Historical Society and Arnold Arboretum members or fellows, $20 for others, and pre-registration is required (call 617-384-5277). Wulf will speak in the Weld Hill Research Building. (Boston 1775 readers may recall that Weld Hill was our best guess for the location of the Continental Army’s fallback position in the summer of 1775.)

Chasing Venus describes the international scientific endeavor to observe the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769, as predicted decades earlier by astronomer Edmund Halley. On those occasions the planet moved in front of the Sun, appearing as a small black dot against the light.

Earlier this spring the Boston Globe’s review of Chasing Venus described the scientists’ efforts:

The obstacles confronting the platoon of observers were formidable. Britain and France were at war, but this did not deter fellow astronomers from linking up with each other. Indeed, a Frenchman, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, took the lead. With contacts in Amsterdam, Basel, Florence, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, Delisle was a whirlwind planner and a hub of scientific back and forth. A skilled surveyor, his “mappemonde,” which highlighted the best spots around the globe to glimpse the transit, became an essential document for astronomers.

The theory of the transit was fine and good, but setting up the viewing stations proved a challenge. Getting to far-flung locations was dangerous work. For the 1761 transit, the British sent a man to St. Helena island, a tiny isolated speck in the south Atlantic. A colleague of Delisle’s, Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche trekked 4,000 miles from Paris to the depths of Siberia, only to be attacked by villagers who thought his fancy scientific instruments had magical powers: They blamed him for bringing on devastating floods. Two British fellows named [Charles] Mason and [Jeremiah] Dixon (surveyors of the famous line) were nearly smashed to bits by a French warship as they attempted to get to Sumatra. They nearly quit in fear and frustration.

But surely the most star-crossed (literally) of the Venus observers was the extravagantly named Frenchman Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière. His name notwithstanding, Le Gentil’s odyssey would be anything but nice. His was a story of tragic near misses. For the 1761 transit, Le Gentil was to journey to Pondicherry, then a French possession in India. War got in the way — the British laid siege to the town, and Le Gentil instead went to Mauritius, where he was waylaid by dysentery. On June 6, the day of transit, he was on a rolling ship, and he could not get an accurate fix on the planet. Eight years later, he made it back to Pondicherry for the 1769 transits, but weather marred the viewing. Poor Le Gentil had come so far “only to be the spectator of a fatal cloud.”

Wulf’s book and talk are timely because there will be a transit of Venus visible in Massachusetts on 5-6 June—assuming the weather cooperates. The Harvard Observatory has set up a viewing time for the public on the evening of 5 June.

TOMORROW: A Massachusetts scientist in 1761.

Boston N.H.P. Welcomes Visitors Real and Virtual Today

This morning Boston National Historical Park opens its new visitor center in Faneuil Hall—the reason I’ve been exploring stories of that landmark this week. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who oversees the National Park Service, will be in town for the public opening at 11:30 A.M., along with elected officials.

Yesterday the park released an “NPS Boston” app for mobile devices, produced with GuideOne and available through iTunes. (An Android version is on the way.) I downloaded this to my iPad and tried it out.

The app is designed to help people plan their visit to the historic sites in Boston linked to the park and find their way from one site to another. It also augments such a visit with a little background information.

At least in its iPad form, the app has to be used in landscape mode. It starts with a map of Boston, the relevant sites marked with blue teardrop pins and little diagrams. “Sites” under the top menu choice have two or more photographs each. Some points in the Charlestown Navy Yard even come with short videos, but those show industrial ropemaking and the like, so they might not satisfy visitors looking for Revolutionary history.

“Sites” covers all the locations on the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage Trail, landmarks of the Charlestown Navy Yard, and Dorchester Heights. Most are clustered in central Boston, with another concentration in Charlestown. Dorchester Heights remains off on its own, but at least it has equal billing.

The Boston Harbor Islands and Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters sites are parts of different national parks, and are therefore noted only on the Massachusetts map and at the end of the F.A.Q. list, though they also have Revolutionary significance and are within reach for people visiting the city for a day. Other maps show all the country’s other national parks, including Minute Man, Adams, Salem Maritime, Springfield Armory, and so on.

The “Tours” section of the app starts with the complete Freedom Trail, a shorter version for people who don’t want to spend “4-8 hours,” the Black Heritage Trail (now starting from Faneuil Hall rather than the monument to the U.S. 54th Regiment), and a “Create Your Tour” feature that will highlight the sites the user chooses. The last checks those pins on the map, but doesn’t calculate a route or walking time.

There are also “Thematic Tours,” all starting from Faneuil Hall. These include “Paul Revere’s Boston” and two tours of different lengths that combine sites on the Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail under the theme of political activism and rights. Another tour focuses on the Navy Yard only. All these thematic tours include very short audio recordings.

The app works best when one has a good wireless or cell connection. It appears to download elements as requested, so simply downloading the app and then going out of range means you might well be missing images, recordings, or the F.A.Q. It can use your own location information, though I’m not sure how that works since I was well off the map while testing.

I hope the programming contains room for expansion. For example, one question describes how much Boston has been expanded by landfill; a link to the peninsula’s original dimensions on the main map could show that more powerfully. A timeline could remind users of how the major events in Boston history line up. And the keyword “restroom” is nowhere to be found, though I have to believe it appears in a frequently asked question.

Free and up-to-date, the “NPS Boston” app is a useful program for iPhone and iPad owners visiting from near or far. For deeper information, visitors should still consult books, guides, and signage at the sites.

The Grasshopper on Faneuil Hall

Click on the thumbnail at the right to see a nice photograph of the grasshopper-shaped weathervane atop Faneuil Hall, taken by Steve Borichevsky.

That grasshopper was the work of Boston metalworker Shem Drowne (1683-1774), who also created a rooster weathervane for the New Brick Meeting in the North End, a wavy banner for Christ (Old North) Church, and an Indian figure for the Province House. (Drowne himself was a member of the First Baptist Meeting.)

An Indian appeared on the Massachusetts provincial seal, and therefore an appropriate figure to top the governor’s mansion. A rooster was an old Christian symbol. But what did a grasshopper mean in Boston?

Apparently what mattered was what a grasshopper meant in London. A weathervane in that shape topped the Royal Exchange built by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1571. The insect thus became a symbol of worldwide British commerce.

According to Lucius Manlius Sargent, the mercantile Faneuil family brought that symbol to Boston:

…a gilded grasshopper, as many of us well remember, whirled about, of yore, upon the little spire, that rose above the summerhouse, appurtenant to the mansion, where Peter Faneuil lived, and died. That house was built, and occupied, by his uncle, Andrew; and he had some seven acres, for his garden thereabouts. It was upon the westerly side of old Treamount Street. . . . The selection of a grasshopper, for a vane, was made, in imitation of their example, who placed the very same thing, upon the pinnacle of the Royal Exchange, in London.

Thus, Boston probably commissioned Drowne to make a big grasshopper weathervane for Faneuil Hall to honor Peter Faneuil for funding its construction and to signal arrivals from London that Boston was a commercial center, too.

Peter Faneuil’s Tombstone

On Monday, Boston 1775 reader Daud Alzayer asked me about how Peter Faneuil’s name appeared on his tomb. That turns out to be a rather hard question to answer.

In a Boston Transcript essay published before 1852 and collected in 1856 in Dealings with the Dead, the Boston antiquarian, temperance advocate, and slavery apologist Lucius Manlius Sargent wrote about Peter Faneuil’s tomb in the Granary Burying-Ground:

The remains of this noble-spirited descendant of the Huguenots of Rochelle were deposited, in the Faneuil tomb, in the westerly corner of the Granary Ground. This tomb is of dark freestone, with a freestone slab. Upon the easterly end of the tomb, there is a tablet of slate, upon which are sculptured, with manifest care and skill, the family arms; while, upon the freestone slab, are inscribed, at the top, M. M.—memento mori, of course,—and, at the bottom of the slab—a cruel apology for the old Huguenot patronymic—“Peter Funel. 1742,” and nothing more.

But a few paragraphs later, Sargent wrote that the inscription was “P. Funel,” nothing more. In 1856 Thomas Bridgman’s The Pilgrims of Boston and Their Descendants listed the burial site this way: “TOMB OF P. FUNEL, 1742” over a coat of arms. I don’t know of any drawing or photograph of the tomb from this period to nail down that text and how formal it looked.

Sargent imagined that Andrew Faneuil, Peter’s uncle, originally commissioned the tomb with his own coat of arms, and that years after Peter was interred there Bostonians began to wonder. “Whereabouts was it, that Peter Faneuil was buried?” Sargent’s imagination continued:

Some worthy old citizen—God bless him—who knew rather more of this matter than his neighbors, and was well aware, that the arms would be but a dead letter to posterity, resolved to serve the public, and remedy the defect. Up he goes into the Granary Ground, in the very spirit of Old Mortality, and, with all his orthography in his ear, inscribes P. Funel upon the tablet!

When might that have happened? The Old Style date “1742” suggests the carver worked before the British Empire shifted to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. But Peter Faneuil’s brother Benjamin lived in Boston and Cambridge until 1784, and his sons were prominent Loyalist merchants. Other members of the family remained in Massachusetts in the 1800s. Would a “worthy old citizen” really have done some unauthorized carving on their family tomb? Despite such unanswered questions, lots of people accepted Sargent’s guesses.

By the late twentieth century, however, authors were positing that the real reason for a “P. Funel” inscription was that a stonecutter had scratched that name on the slab in order to identify the customer it was meant for. Which would mean Andrew hadn’t commissioned that tomb; Peter had. So that theory also raises questions.

By then the mysterious inscription was long gone. In 1900, Abram English Brown reported that the top of the Faneuil tomb had been carved with Peter Faneuil’s full name, in the standard spelling, and the New Style date “March 3, 1743,” as well as the surnames of some family members who died later. That’s the way it appears today, as shown above courtesy of Find a Grave or in this Flickr image.

How Did People Pronounce “Faneuil Hall”?

In 1740, the New Rochelle-born merchant Peter Faneuil (shown at left courtesy of the New York Public Library) offered Boston money to erect a grand new building with space for town meetings and shops. By a very close vote (367–360), the town accepted his gift. Faneuil died six months after the building went up.

In his 1825 novel Lionel Lincoln, James Fenimore Cooper declared that Bostonians pronounced the name of that building “Funnel Hall.” Other American novelists repeated that phrase: Seba Smith in The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing of Downingville (1833); Thomas Chandler Haliburton in The Attaché: or, Sam Slick in England (1843); Eliza Leslie in The Young Revolutionists (1845); and so on.

Cooper was from upstate New York, Smith from Maine, Haliburton from Nova Scotia, and Leslie from Pennsylvania. None of them wrote from great personal experience with old Bostonians. Some late-1800s authors from Massachusetts attributed the “Funnel Hall” pronunciation to their grandfathers, but by then the earlier books might have affected how they understood the past.

One clue to how people of the Revolutionary period pronounced the name “Faneuil” is how they spelled it, In particular, people who had less formal education or hadn’t seen the name on paper might have written it phonetically. Eighteenth-century folks weren’t shy about respelling words to their liking.

In looking at period sources, I found most people used the spelling “Faneuil,” but “Fanuel” was also common. I’ve seen that variant in a 1734 Massachusetts General Court resolution, the record of Boston town meetings, reports to Customs officials, an itinerary of the Rev. Ezra Stiles, the orderly book of Gen. William Howe, and letters by Dr. Thomas Young, Henry Pelham, John Adams, Joseph Barrell, Belcher Noyes, and others. In the early 1800s “Fanuel Hall” was printed in guidebooks, town directories, and advertisements, suggesting that it was widely accepted.

I also found some rarer variants:

• Thomas Chute, record of writs delivered as an Essex County deputy sheriff, 1733-37: “Funel” as the surname of Peter Faneuil and his brother Andrew.
• John Rowe, diary, 1768: ”Fanewil Hall” and “Fanewill Hall.”
• Concord town meeting, 1768: “Fannel Hall.”
• Maj. Francis Hutcheson, 1775: “Fannel Hall.”
• John Adams, autobiography, written 1802-07: “Phanuel Hall.” (Was he trying to be cute?)
• scratched on Peter Faneuil’s tomb at an unknown date: “P. Funel.” (More about this variant tomorrow.)

I didn’t find anyone spelling “Faneuil Hall” as “Funnel Hall” except in post-Revolutionary newspaper articles that were obvious political parodies. That’s not to say people didn’t pronounce the name like “funnel,” especially when they referred to the Faneuil brothers decades before the Revolutionary War. But it makes it less likely.

The much more common “Faneuil,” “Fanuel,” “Fannel,” and the like suggest to me that most Bostonians pronounced the first vowel in “Faneuil” as an A, and then disagreed about the rest of the word. The same way we do today.

Boston National Historical Park’s New Location

This is a big week for Boston National Historical Park. Today the park is scheduled to close its visitor center at 15 State Street, across the cobblestones from the Old State House, and by the end of the week its new visitor center will open in Faneuil Hall.

Here’s how Faneuil Hall looked in the late 1700s (courtesy of Boston College).

In 1806 the architect Charles Bulfinch oversaw its expansion to its current dimensions. That produced more space for town meetings on the second floor, and more space for merchants on the ground level—where the visitor center will be.

TOMORROW: How did eighteenth-century Bostonians pronounce “Faneuil Hall”?

“Hung! Up by the Neck!”

A few days back I quoted Lt. Col. Stephen Kemble’s diary entry for 8 Sept 1775 about an American soldier who deserted into Boston:

another Rifle Man came in, a fine fellow, an Irishman, from Kings County, says…that a report has been spread that one of their Deserters, a Rifle Man, had been Hanged, which checked the spirit of their People coming over to us.

That report of a hanging body appears in the diary of Pvt. Samuel Bixby, stationed in Roxbury, on 2 August:

One of Genl. [George] Washington’s riflemen was killed by the regulars to day & then hung! up by the neck! His comrades seeing this were much enraged, & immediately asked leave of the Genl. to go down and attack them. He gave them permission to go and do as they pleased. The Riflemen marched immediately & began operations. The regulars fired at them from all parts with cannon and swivels, but the Riflemen skulked about, and kept up their sharp shooting all day. Many of the regulars fell, but the riflemen lost only one man.

Some authors, most notably David McCullough in 1776, have treated this report as true.

However, Bixby appears to be the only diarist or letter-writer on either side of the siege lines who reported a rifleman or his body being strung up this way. In fact, Lt. Paul Lunt wrote that the British “killed none upon our side” in skirmishing that day.

Most telling, less than two weeks later Washington complained to Gen. Thomas Gage about the treatment of American prisoners of war but said nothing of a man being hanged or a corpse displayed.

It therefore seems likely that Bixby heard an unfounded rumor. Americans may have deliberately spread the story to incite resentment against the British, or to discourage defections, or both. Or the report could have been a natural exaggeration of the Pennsylvania riflemen’s concern about a comrade captured on 29 July, Cpl. Walter Cruise.

Kemble wrote that the American soldier taken that evening was “an Irish Man from Virginia; says he was forced into the service.” But claiming coercion got Cruise nowhere. The royal authorities put him into the Boston jail, where on 1 August fellow prisoner Peter Edes wrote, “the rifle corporal, Cruise, kept close confined, and allowed nothing but bread and water.”

Cruise was shipped to Nova Scotia as a prisoner during the evacuation and not released until around the start of 1777 in New York. (The rest of his military career mentioned here.) But at least he wasn’t hanged.

A Hockey Game Broke Out

Since it’s mid-May, it’s still hockey season. The Canadian news media is bubbling with the news that a couple of Swedish researchers—Dr. Carl Gidén and Patrick Houda of the Society for International Hockey Research—have identified two of the earliest images and descriptions of the game of hockey.

Of course, those scholars are the first to say that hockey evolved out of older ball-and-stick games with other names. But the first recorded time that the word “hockey” was applied to the game was in a 1776 London publication called Juvenile Sports and Pastimes, by “Master Michel Angelo” (a pseudonym for Richard Johnson). That booklet also included the illustration above, showing boys playing a form of what we’d call field hockey.

The book’s description of the game concludes:

…tho’ you are allowed to push either of your antagonists aside, yet it is considered not only as foul play, but as very ungenteel also, to strive either to throw another down, or to trip up his heels. Such proceedings always produce ill-will, quarrelling, and sometimes fighting: but every young gentleman will wish to make his companions as happy as himself, since, without mutual harmony, the finest sport in the world will be rendered dull, insipid, and disgustful.

Gidén and Houda also recently reported that a collector in Maine bought the colored print reproduced below, published in London in September 1797. It shows two young men strapping on skates, one of them holding a hockey stick as in the earlier woodcut with a flat puck or cork “bung” on the ice before him. The collector posits that the spire behind the young men was the obelisk at George III’s Kew Observatory, and that the scene was inspired by the freezing of the Thames in 1796. This is now the earliest visual depiction of ice hockey.

Finally, while looking into this matter I came across this 1835 image of ice hockey by Virginian artist John Toole, held by the U.S. National Gallery and reproduced courtesy of the Windsor Star. Apparently the proceedings have produced ill will, quarreling, and fighting.

Paul Revere’s Iconography

The April 1774 issue of Isaiah Thomas’s Royal American Magazine included this portrait of local politician Samuel Adams engraved by Paul Revere. The full print can be viewed at the American Antiquarian Society website.

Revere wasn’t the most gifted artist in this form, but we have to give him credit for working the iconography. Starting on the left we have Liberty with a Phrygian cap on a staff trampling “Laws to Enslave America.” At top is the figure of Fame blowing a trumpet.

Below Fame is Adams drawn inexpertly but recognizably from the portrait by John Singleton Copley, in an elegant and modern Chippendale frame. At the bottom is the Magna Charta of British rights.

On the right things get really busy. I think the female figure is Britannia, embodiment of traditional British power. She bears the implements of Athena, including a helmet, spear, and shield with the face of Medusa. Britannia has caught a grenadier of His Majesty’s 29th Regiment of Foot (the principal unit involved in the Boston Massacre) as he’s trying to torment a rattlesnake, symbol of America.

The month before, Thomas had published Revere’s companion portrait of John Hancock in the same sort of frame with Fame above. In that image Liberty subdued the rattlesnake-grabbing grenadier with the help of the British lion, and on the left stood a bearded knight in full armor. Honestly I don’t know what he was supposed to be.