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| Tuesday, 25 May 2004 |
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Rare astronomical event next month has significance for South Pacific AUCKLAND, May 20 (AFP) When Venus passes across the face of the Sun next month it will evoke memories of events that in a curious way define the modern political and cultural nature of much of the South Pacific. A "Transit of Venus" will occur on June 8. The last time was in 1882 and the next will be in 2012. Without a transit on June 3, 1769, the English 18th century explorer James Cook would not have been in the Pacific and New Zealand, and perhaps a big chunk of eastern Australia, might have been French today. English astronomer Edmund Halley (1656-1742) realised transits offered the chance to determine the distance between the Sun and Earth. Observers around the world watched a 1761 transit, inconclusively. London's Royal Society knew the 1769 transit was crucial because another would not occur for 105 years and called for a big effort to outdo the French. Polynesians had occupied what is now French Polynesia for around 2000 years. In 1767 the English explorer Samuel Wallis aboard Dolphin arrived in Tahiti and killed many people with cannon fire. A distinctly more sensual experience awaited Frenchman Louis de Bougainville a year later. News of the Wallis and Bougainville find came just as the Royal Society was working out where to post transit observers: Tahiti was right under its track. The Royal Navy appointed Cook to take the small ship Endeavour to Tahiti where he and several scientists, including naturalist Joseph Banks, would monitor the transit. Those were the public orders but Cook was also given secret ones commanding him, "to proceed to the southward in order to make discovery" of the great southern continent, Terra Australis, that was believed to exist. Cook made Tahiti on April 13, 1769, anchoring in Matavai Bay, east of modern Papeete. The locals, who recalled Wallis' visit, were keen to make peace with Cook and they quickly agreed when the Englishman took a piece of land, now known as Point Venus, and built a fort. The day itself was, Cook wrote, "as favourable to our purposes as we could wish". But the humid atmosphere in the tropics prevented a precise view, upsetting Cook who was a stickler for accuracy. Banks had gone to nearby Moorea and had the same problem but was not nearly so upset, passing the night with three women lent to him by a chief. Anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond, an expert on the Polynesian perspective of European voyaging in the Pacific, said Tahitians quickly understood the transit. "One of the things about Tahitian society at that time was that the Tahitians were very obviously interested in the stars as well," she told AFP. "They were maritime navigators and explorers and they had an extensive knowledge of the skies around their islands as well as the seas." A Tahitian priestly leader, Tupaia, became friendly with the English and was able to draw up a chart of the islands around Tahiti that included Tonga and the main islands of New Zealand. "Tahitian navigators, just like other Polynesian voyagers, used star paths where in the seas familiar to them they would set out from the land, take back sightings and set themselves up on a pathway and they would have a sequence of stars they would use on a voyage... "The ancestors of Polynesians were the first blue water sailors." Salmond, author of "The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas", published last year, said without the transit someone else might have discovered the true nature of the South Pacific - small islands and no continent. It could probably have been the French and one of their traders, Jean-Francois Surville, was just off the New Zealand coast as Cook arrived. The big event was not the transit but Cook: "His voyages are absolutely cosmic." When all the data was collated, including Cook's, scientists were able to work out that the Sun was 153 million kilometres (94 million miles) away and with a precision within one percent of today's values. |
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