There is one other passenger whom I knew through correspondence, Mr. Walkey, an amateur astronomer. He is going out for the Bible Society to live on a house-boat on the Amazon travelling up and down the various tributaries. He expects to be out there most of his life.
—Arthur Eddington, aboard the Anselm, letter home, March 11, 1919
FOR MANY SCIENTISTS, the art of discovery is a lifelong pursuit. Albert Einstein had compared the state of mind it requires to that of “the religious worshipper or the lover.” That strenuous day-to-day commitment, he believed, came “straight from the heart.” He would know. At the age of thirty-seven, he had created a work of harmonious art when he conceived of the general theory. People who are not mathematical may wonder why scientists use phrases like work of art or masterpiece when they are referring to a certain theoretical discovery. A theory has only calculations to gaze at, after all, and not framed images like The Last Supper, or Starry Night. An artistic masterpiece, a work created by a human being in his or her lifetime, eventually surpasses the artist who envisioned it. All masterpieces have balance and harmony. And what about harmony? The ancients believed in the mathematical principles of sound. In Plato’s day, harmony was an essential component in understanding how the universe behaves.
Being a scientist enabled by mathematics is somewhat like being a composer of music. A musician writes a musical score that gives instruction to the musicians who will play it. When conductors see a certain note for an instrument, for example, they can decipher and transpose the music instantly. Eddington was a mathematician who read the theory of general relativity that Einstein had “composed,” and the astronomer saw the artistic and universal harmony in it. Imagine a planet without sound, but with musical scores understood only by those residents on the planet who can read music. That was similar to what Einstein was dealing with. A few mathematicians around him could understand his theory. Now, he was waiting for astronomers to turn on the sound.
The astronomical instruments and the dismantled huts for both expeditions had been packed by Davidson and shipped to Liverpool. The men would follow a week later, carrying with them the glass lenses and the photographic plates, which were packed in hermetically sealed tin boxes. There was no doubt in Eddington’s mind that Einstein’s prediction of light deflection was correct. The expeditions were not really necessary, not when it came to convincing him of the theory’s validity. And with the war ending, conscription was no longer a problem. But Eddington still hoped that this alliance with a brilliant German physicist, on the heels of such a significant discovery by British astronomers, would begin to restore relations between scientists of combatant countries. The unbiased universe, however, was waiting to divulge its answer, regardless of nation, war, or weather. Maybe Campbell would be first in line. Where were the Lick results from the 1918 eclipse?
The war was still going on when the 1918 eclipse plates were made. Curtis had accepted a war-related job at Berkeley. He had taken his brief look at the plates and noted that faint stars had indeed been recorded and that there had been some interference by clouds. And Campbell had released this information to the scientific world, hoping that “the definitive results may appear in print without undue delay.” That was it. Curtis had then left his work at Berkeley and gone to Washington, DC, a couple months after the eclipse for a job at the Bureau of Standards, also war-related. Intensely patriotic, Campbell agreed to this move, assuming that Curtis would return by January 1919, when they could take the comparison plates and determine the results. When the war ended that November, Campbell felt it was time to get back to the job of astronomy. But Curtis had become involved in more activities that held him in Washington, and the eclipse results went into limbo. “I almost wish you had ordered me back,” Curtis wrote to his boss. That Campbell didn’t may have been a stroke of luck for the British.
On March 5, Eddington and Cottingham took their personal baggage and left Cambridge by train, with Greenwich Station as their destination. They would spend two nights with Dyson at Flamsteed House before leaving for Liverpool. Being employed by the observatory, Davidson and Crommelin were already in Greenwich. It was a good time for the men to be headed to warmer places. Great Britain was experiencing an extreme cold spell. It was the most frigid March in many decades, possibly a hundred years. Snow still lay on the ground and often blew into thick drifts. On the first day of that month, the zodiacal light, or “false dawn,” was reported glowing in the skies over Oxford. The ancients would have taken this sighting as a sign from the gods.
Having Eddington down from Cambridge perhaps reminded Dyson of his university years there. He liked to tell his children of those cold winters with ice on the River Cam and how the snow was deep in Trinity Great Court but would be replaced by colorful geraniums and green turf come spring. All of Dyson’s eight children were still living at home, ranging from twenty-three to five years old, with a lot of teenagers in the middle. Eddington knew this family well from his years at the observatory as chief assistant, when Dyson would bring him home at the midday meal and say, “Carrie, can you find some dinner for Eddington?”
With the winds of March whistling down the many chimneys of the historic house, Eddington and Cottingham joined Dyson in his study on the night before their leaving. Dinner was over, and a fire blazed in the hearth. They sat in comfortable chairs to enjoy a pipe smoke and discuss the upcoming expeditions. Cottingham, a brilliant clockmaker by profession, understood and designed astronomical mechanisms. But he was new to Einstein’s theory. Dyson explained to him that the German physicist predicted that light would bend at 1.7 arc seconds. Cottingham considered this idea and then asked, “But suppose we find double this amount?” Puffing on his pipe, Dyson smiled. “If you do,” he said, “Eddington will go off his head and commit suicide, and you will have to come home alone.”1 That night, as the men sat in Dyson’s study, warm from the fire and safe from the outside cold, they had no way of knowing that this part of their conversation would still be told a hundred years later.
The next day, a Friday, Dyson came down from the hilltop observatory to see the expeditions leave Greenwich for Euston Station, where they would catch a train to Liverpool. They had tickets to sail on the RMS Anselm the next afternoon. It was an exciting moment as the four men boarded the train, carrying with them the hampers packed with the lenses and plates. The astronomer royal bade them farewell.
Dyson had been the driving force behind the expeditions once Eddington fully embraced Einstein’s theory. Being left behind at Greenwich Station, he must have felt what his wife and older children knew: he missed the early days of his career when he would study the heavens all night long. At dawn, he would leave the observatory and come wearily home for a breakfast in bed before falling asleep. Those were the years when he was the chief assistant. Back then, he could sail the world with the jovial Atkinson and his other astronomer colleagues. He could circumnavigate the globe, as he had in 1901. But this eclipse path was too far away. He could not be absent from the observatory for months, especially at a time when the luckier members of his staff were returning from the war. Morale would be low, and he had administrative duties as well. Still, on those rare occasions when an assistant became ill and a telescope was vacant, Dyson was always eager to fill in.
Eddington, Cottingham, Crommelin, and Davidson arrived at Euston Station an hour and a half before their train left. Managing their personal luggage took some time. Because the hampers carrying the lenses had been labeled GLASS on the outsides, each case cost thirty extra shillings to ship. By the time the train reached Liverpool, at a quarter to four in the afternoon, a freezing rain was falling. There appeared to be no porters available at the train station to help with the bulky baggage, and they were told the local hotels were mostly filled. It seems they had taken considerable measures to reserve places to stay in Africa and South America, but had neglected to book rooms for themselves in England. A porter who represented a baggage agency finally turned up. He agreed to have the crates and luggage delivered to the dock the next morning. Taking just their hand baggage, the men set out in a taxicab to find a hotel for the night. After driving around in the sleeting rain to several places, they managed to find a comfortable establishment with vacancies. They checked in and stayed in their rooms for the evening, hoping for a good night’s sleep. The weather was miserable, and the next day would launch them on their arduous journeys.
After breakfast on Saturday morning, March 8, they went down to the dock to wait for their baggage and equipment to arrive. The company had promised to deliver it by 10:30, but by 11 o’clock, it had not yet turned up. Now, with the emigration officer on deck to check passports, the men were obliged to board the Anselm with still no sign of the baggage agency. Because they were astronomers from famous observatories and endorsed by the astronomer royal, the customs official looked quickly at their passports and asked nothing about their cargo, which wasn’t there anyway. The great worry now was that they would need to come ashore and make plans to leave the next day. Or, if something unpleasant had happened to their equipment, not leave at all. Once Eddington learned that a dozen other passengers were also waiting for their luggage from the same company, he and the other men relaxed. At 12:30, when the suitcases and crates finally turned up at the dock, the relief was enough to warrant a celebratory lunch aboard ship.
The 400-foot Anselm, with over sixty first-class cabins, was a steamer owned by the famed Booth Steamship Co. Founded in 1866 by brothers Charles and Alfred Booth, the company was headquartered in Liverpool. Since its inception, it had offered service that included passenger cruises to Brazilian ports and up the mighty Amazon River. In 1903, the company added lines to Lisbon, Portugal, and Funchal, Madeira. The British middle class was now traveling the world, just as young aristocrats had done in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they embarked on “the Grand Tour,” a journey around Europe’s various cultural centers as part of their education. The Booth lines were more than eager to carry these travelers to exotic places around the globe.2
Having booked passage on the Anselm, the astronomers could visit the observatory at Lisbon and meet the men who had helped accommodate the Príncipe expedition. But once in Madeira, Eddington and Cottingham would catch a later steamer on to Príncipe, some five thousand miles of sea travel from Liverpool. Crommelin and Davidson would remain on the Anselm, crossing the Atlantic Ocean, to arrive at Pará, Brazil, a distance of thirty-five hundred miles from England.3 The Booth brothers and their company were famous enough that Eddington was impressed when one of the managers came aboard before departure and spent a few minutes speaking to the astronomers.
At 2 p.m., the ship went slowly through the chain of docks—this interconnected port system was then the most advanced in the world—and down the River Mersey, headed for the Irish Sea and the coast of Wales. “We saw the lights of Holyhead at 9 p.m.,” Eddington wrote home, “and stopped for a few minutes to drop the pilot.” The captain had apparently hired a ship’s pilot who knew the local waters well and could navigate the Anselm through the dangerous stretch around the Isle of Anglesey, known for its many shipwrecks. Once the steamer reached open water, the captain “dropped the pilot” and the Anselm steamed down past St. George’s Channel and Land’s End, headed for the Bay of Biscay.
After those evening lights seen at Holyhead, and until they made port at Lisbon, Portugal, the passengers would have only a vague idea of their position or course. The end of the war was only four months old. Peace had yet to be negotiated and the Treaty of Versailles was yet to be signed. The treaty would happen three months in the future, on June 28, 1919, exactly five years to the day since Archduke Ferdinand had been assassinated. In the aftermath, the times were hardly peaceful. Revolts and protests were going on all over Europe, including in England. Given the present status of the political environment in Europe, a maritime regulation still in effect forbade a ship’s captain to disclose any sensitive information. But after two years of planning, the British expeditions were finally under way.
And what about the man who had caused all this ruckus in the first place? What had Einstein been up to since the publication of his general theory in English in the autumn of 1916? The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute—he had been promised the directorship as part of his 1913 enticement package to come to Berlin—was finally in the building stages. The outbreak of war had put it on a back burner until private funding arrived. At the end of 1917, Einstein had hired the steadfast Erwin Freundlich as the institute’s first full-time employee. Freundlich would be freer to pursue light deflection and even made plans to study astrophotography. But he would not be going on an eclipse expedition. His instruments were still in Odessa, Russia, and it would have been impossible to find funding in wartime Germany. Nonetheless Freundlich was still struggling to support the general theory and still under a barrage of criticism, especially from the naysayers who could no longer attack the more prominent Einstein. If they wished to refute the credibility of his theory, it was easier and safer to attack someone they perceived as his underling. At least Freundlich was free of his former boss at the observatory, the formidable Hermann Struve.
Also in 1917, Einstein wrote his first paper on cosmology, as if wanting now to know the origin of the universe that he was hoping to better understand. His pace of research publication continued to explode. In addition to work on gravitation, his papers during this time covered the topics of electricity and magnets, heat, quantum radiation, X-rays, and even water waves and flight.4 This had to have been an anxious period for him as the British expeditions got ready to sail. Most of Einstein’s colleagues still embraced the physics of the nineteenth century. Their universe was orderly and explained by the laws of mechanics, as if it had been constructed from gadgets in a workshop. James Clerk Maxwell’s discoveries had already begun the dismantling of “the clockwork universe,” as it was called. Would light deflection according to Einstein’s theory prove that the universe was very different from clockwork and far more exciting? He wanted others to understand it as well as they could. Between September 1918 and February 1919, he even found time to teach a course on relativity at the University of Berlin, as well as one for the university’s war veterans.
On a personal level, things were stressful for the physicist. Three weeks before the expeditions left Liverpool, on Valentine’s Day, no less, he and Mileva Marić Einstein were officially divorced, their own personal war finally ending, at least on paper. With Mileva and their sons having left for Zurich two days before war was declared in 1914, and with the divorce made final in February 1919, it seemed as if the family’s inner turmoil had mimicked the chaos of the outer world. As with all wars, negotiations and settlements would follow. In asking for a divorce this second time, Albert was far more generous. In January 1918, he had written to Mileva with an amazing offer. Along with a larger annual stipend, he would give her any monies coming from a Nobel Prize, should he win it. At first, Mileva was distraught. She was still battling depression. And now their youngest son, Eduard, was also having mental and physical issues. She eventually agreed, and proceedings for the divorce got under way. This meant that Albert must admit he had committed adultery with his cousin, Elsa Einstein Lowenthal. He made this admission at the end of that year.5
No one, not even his mother—Pauline had been battling stomach cancer for some months—was happier than Elsa. She had championed her cousin Albert’s divorce for several years, since the earliest days of their liaison. Elsa had not been pleased that it wasn’t forthcoming soon after Mileva had left Berlin with the boys. In Albert’s opinion, his devotion to his cousin and his separation from Mileva should have been enough. He even counseled her not to feel ashamed of their unmarried relationship. He had written just the opposite to Mileva, three years earlier. But at the outset, Elsa had desired more than just the physical man in her life. She wanted him as her husband, and she wanted to share any success in his career. When Albert became ill with severe stomach pains in early 1917, she had the opportunity to prove to him how indispensable she was. Living alone, and with the restrictions of war, he had not been eating well. He had also lost a considerable amount of weight and suspected the pains might be an indication of the cancer that was afflicting his mother. Elsa moved him to an apartment above her own and began nursing him back to health with good food. She even laid in a supply of cigars.
Thus, the following January, Albert had mailed the letter to Mileva, asking again for a divorce. On Valentine’s Day 1919, as the expeditionary equipment was being shipped to Greenwich for packing, Albert Einstein was again a single man.
Arthur Eddington was happy to be taking a steamer trip again after years of grisly war and his personal troubles with conscription. He was even pleased with the size of his and Cottingham’s cabin, next door to their companions, both rooms high enough above the water that they were quiet. The men read leisurely in their cabins or in rented chairs on deck. The sunshine and warmth as they sailed farther south were a welcomed change from the English winter. Eddington played chess with Crommelin and another passenger. But what was most obvious to him was the end of rationing after more than a year of limitations. “It seems curious to have done with rationing entirely—unlimited sugar, and large slices of meat, puddings with pre-war quantity of raisins & currants in them, new white rolls, and so on.”
At meals, Crommelin and Davidson had been given reserved seating at the captain’s table, a designated honor among ship’s passengers. This social honor was bestowed on Crommelin probably because, among the scientists, he was the best known to the public for his work on Halley’s Comet, which had been visible in the nighttime sky over Britain in 1910. Eddington found it amusing, however, that Crommelin and Davidson were seated too far away from the captain to speak to him.
In the Bay of Biscay, they hit wind and scattered showers, enough so that some of the passengers, including Crommelin and Cottingham, succumbed to seasickness and stayed inside their cabins. On the morning of March 12, they reached Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, on the northern banks of the Tagus River. They were met on the quay by Frederico Oom, assistant director of the observatory and son of its first director of the same name. Eddington was uncertain of the local time when he stepped ashore. In 1916, William Willet’s concept of daylight saving time had been adopted by England and other countries. “I cannot say what the time was because we had three times—ship’s time, Greenwich Time and Summer Time, each differing about an hour; it was most confusing. Although summer-time is legally in force in Lisbon and, I believe, in Madeira most people stick to the old time.”6
It had been Oom and the current director, Cesar Augusto de Campos Rodrigues, who had responded over the months to Eddington’s letters with questions about Príncipe. The Portuguese astronomers had set up introductions to local dignitaries who would act as hosts on the island and help make arrangements there for the British party. Oom took them by motorcar to tour the observatory. The streets of Lisbon were filled with soldiers, given the revolution, and the police force had been disbanded. But the observatory sat in a peaceful park on a sloped hill facing the Tagus. It was surrounded by almond trees in bloom, a sea of pink and white blossoms, a different world from the snowy one they had left behind. They were introduced to the aging Director Rodrigues, a vice admiral, although Eddington thought he looked nothing of the part. Rodrigues would pass away on Christmas Day, later that year. After signing the guest book, they took a trip around Lisbon in the motorcar, enjoying the red-tiled rooftops of the houses. Back at the dock, they again boarded the Anselm.7
Forty hours later, they spotted the archipelago that made up the Madeira Islands. The ship sailed around Madeira, the largest island, to its capital of Funchal, and all four men went ashore for a stroll around the city. From here, they would part ways for the time being, until they met again in England several months later. To the eyes of the locals, it would be difficult to separate these four Englishmen from the regular tourists and businessmen visiting Madeira. And yet, ahead of them lay what many consider the most important scientific experiment of the twentieth century. It was an experiment that had eluded Charles Perrine and was still causing William Campbell restless nights. Perhaps the British would be more successful.
After a farewell lunch at a local restaurant, they strolled back to the dock where Crommelin and Davidson set sail again on the Anselm. Eddington and Cottingham then took a “bullock sleigh” taxi to a hotel, its runners greased with fat so that the bulls could pull it more easily over the cobblestone streets. They would wait in Funchal for nearly a month before boarding the next steamer to Príncipe.
Andrew Crommelin and Charles Davidson, both of them having been at the Royal Observatory for many years, were two of Frank Dyson’s most valued assistants. From Madeira, they would cross two thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean, headed for Pará, in northern Brazil. They arrived on March 23, fifteen days after setting sail from Liverpool. As was usually the case when scientists visited a foreign country to study eclipses, they were given carte blanche. Thanks to the Brazilian government, arrangements had been made with customs officials so that the astronomers would not be put through the usual formalities when entering the country. The British consul in Brazil made the arrangements ahead of time. The two men were granted free railway travel and guaranteed daily telegraphic transmissions. And should it be needed, they would even be given military and police protection during the eclipse. Brazil, like Portugal, was ready to assist the British expeditions.
Crommelin and Davidson were ushered through customs with their packing cases holding the glass lenses left unopened. The two men would not go directly to Sobral. With the eclipse still more than two months away, and with no recent communication with Morize, they decided to take advantage of the Booth Line’s promise to carry passengers “1,000 miles up the River Amazon.” The company booklet advised that the cruise was not for invalids, the elderly, or pulmonary tuberculosis cases. But anyone with “jaded and tired nerves” was encouraged to take it for a change of scenery and the relaxation. Back on board the Anselm, the Englishmen set off for Manaós, in the heart of the Amazon rain forest at the confluence of the Rios Negro and Selimões. If they knew that their steamer had collided in 1905 with the Cyril, another Booth Line vessel, Crommelin never mentioned it in his writing. The Anselm sustained bow damage—and was found responsible for the collision during a later enquiry—but the Cyril sank in seventy feet of water, with a fortune in rubber. This was not the kind of information the Booth Line would care to advertise in its booklet of what to expect on the cruise, especially not to a passenger with “jaded nerves.”
Crommelin was quite well known to the public. Astronomers had expected Halley’s Comet to reappear sometime in 1910. Crommelin, along with his colleague Philip Cowell, had traced historic references to the comet all the way back to 240 BCE. Thus, they were able to predict within three days when in 1910 it would be visible in England. Newspapers had made the public well aware that the comet was coming, pulling a 24-million-mile-long tail behind it. The earth’s orbit was such that the planet would pass through this streaming tail for six hours. There was even talk of the comet’s colliding with earth and that its tail was a river of poisonous gas.
Its appearance was more a social event than one of astronomical discovery. Nonetheless, given Crommelin’s and Cowell’s impressive work in predicting its return, the RAS Club had honored the two men at its monthly dinner that June. Dyson was still astronomer royal for Scotland until receiving his appointment as astronomer royal a couple months later. But he traveled from Edinburgh for the event, as did Eddington and Davidson from Greenwich. These were occasions of good fellowship and so, with Crommelin and Cowell in attendance as guests of honor, Turner delivered one of his songs, which began with these verses:
Of all the meteors in the sky,
There’s none like Comet Halley,
We see it with the naked eye
The first to see it was not he,
But still we call it Halley,
The notion that it would return
Was his originally.8
Crommelin had become an expert on comets. Coming from a well-connected Huguenot family, he bore the full name Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin. He was a descendant of Louis Crommelin, who had founded the Irish linen industry in Ulster before the turn of the eighteenth century. After his birth in 1865 in what is now Northern Ireland, Andrew’s family moved to England when he was three years old. From Marlborough College, where he excelled on the shooting team, he went on to Trinity College on a scholarship, becoming twenty-seventh wrangler. For a time, he was on the teaching staff at Lancing College and, later, had even considered electricity as a scientific vocation.
But astronomy was where Crommelin’s passion lay. When he was accepted as an assistant at the Royal Observatory in 1891—William Christie was then the astronomer royal—he began computing data of cometary orbits. He left the Protestant faith that same year to become a devout Roman Catholic. Often rumpled in appearance, Crommelin was known for his encyclopedic memory, his courtesy, and his scientific fellowship. He often willingly served as a mentor to young astronomers. In 1897, he married Letitia Noble, daughter of a reverend, and they had four children, two boys and two girls.
Crommelin had previously participated in four eclipse expeditions, his earliest being Norway, in 1896. The Norway mission was also the first expedition for the newly formed BAA group, so J. J. Atkinson and fifty-seven other amateurs were also along, as were luminaries like E. Walter Maunder and Arthur Hinks. Crommelin and his wife had gone to Algiers in 1900, to view the eclipse from the rooftop of the Hôtel de la Régence with Maunder and his family. He observed his third eclipse aboard a ship anchored off the coast of Spain, in 1905. And he had viewed the 1912 partial eclipse in Paris, the same one that had brought Dyson and Atkinson cruising the city streets in Atky’s two-seater. His sister, Constance Crommelin, had married the poet John Masefield, who was already famous for such poems as “Sea-Fever” and who later became poet laureate of England. By the time Andrew Crommelin set sail on the Anselm with Davidson to steam a thousand miles up the Amazon River, he had just turned fifty-four years old.
Charles Rundle Davidson was born February 28, 1875, in Walton, Suffolk, the youngest of eight children. His father, Alexander, was chief boatman in charge aboard HMS Penelope. The children stayed with their mother, Emma Soper Davidson, in various coastguard cottages while their father was at sea. Alexander later became a gunnery instructor in the Royal Navy. Young Charles was educated at the Royal Hospital School, in Greenwich, which was a part of the Royal Naval College. The school provided an education to boys who might enter the Royal Navy, so he was taught nautical skills. As the Royal Observatory recruited young men from the local schools, particularly the Royal Hospital School, he was appointed in March 1890 as a fifteen-year-old computer.
In those days, the staff was divided into junior and senior ranks. The junior-ranked Davidson was quickly promoted to established computer in 1896, recording astronomical data. Christie eventually considered him the expert and supervisor on all matters pertaining to the instruments at Greenwich. When Frank Dyson first joined the observatory in 1894 as the newly married chief assistant, he would forge a lifelong association with both Davidson and Crommelin. While Dyson admired Crommelin’s vast knowledge of comets, it was from the technically precise and meticulous Davidson that he learned much about his profession as an astronomer.
When it came to the design, construction, adjustment, and testing of optical apparatuses used during eclipse expeditions, Davidson had a rare degree of skill. Meticulous, he had a reputation for always keeping the photographic plates in his sight when traveling. It was mostly from Davidson that Dyson would ultimately come to see astronomical theory as having its fundamental place. Both men believed that top-notch work should be based on practical observation and then tested by it. Observation should be the first duty of any observatory. Dyson would occasionally remark on a brilliant theorist’s inability to make practical observations: “If he’d ever observed through a telescope, he wouldn’t say such things.” Sir Frank was a good man to have sent these expeditions to test the calculations of a brilliant theorist through hands-on observations. He trusted Davidson to head the expedition to Brazil.
Dyson’s friendship with his fellow astronomers at the observatory grew over the years. He and Davidson, who was known for a dry sense of humor, had a particular relationship. Dyson was a seasoned pipe smoker who always needed a match whenever his pipe went out, as it often did when he was concentrating on some observation or duty. If anyone smoked more than Dyson, it might well have been Albert Einstein. The joke at the observatory was that you could follow Dyson by the trail of burned matches left in his wake. “Got a match, Davidson?” he would ask, after patting all his coat pockets and finding none. Davidson quickly understood that a box of matches was almost as important to Dyson’s work as were the astronomical instruments.9
In 1907, Davidson converted to Catholicism when he married Eliza Stanford, who had been born in Hong Kong in 1874. The young couple moved to a house in Greenwich, close to the observatory. Over the years, they raised a family of four children, two sons and two daughters. Charles had been on several previous eclipse expeditions already, including his first to Portugal in 1900, with Christie, Dyson, and the amusing Atkinson who had smuggled a barrel of Portuguese wine through customs. He had gone to Tunisia in 1905. In Brazil with Eddington in 1912, he had joined the dinner with Perrine and Mulvey at the Hotel of Foreigners, before being rained out during the eclipse. In 1914, he had escaped with the other teams from Russia and the explosion of war. Now Davidson was back in Brazil, testing for light deflection seven years after Perrine had first tried. He was forty-four years old.
As Crommelin and Davidson were getting ready to chug up the Amazon River for a glimpse of crocodiles, blue morpho butterflies, and giant water lilies, Eddington and Cottingham had been confined to Funchal and its surrounding area. The hotel Bella Vista, which had English proprietors, sat ten minutes away from the downtown area. In the years before the war, more English visitors had been checking in, which meant that English would be spoken at most of the shops. The first three days, the two men experienced excessive heat, unusual for the island, so they remained mostly indoors. The problem was the leste. This dry wind from the Sahara blew seasonally over Madeira in sporadic gusts filled with fine red sand. When the leste was over, the weather was warm with scattered rain showers. Despite not being acclimatized, Eddington, not surprisingly, made himself a tourist while in Madeira. Much as he did on his outings with his friend C. J. A. Trimble, he climbed mountains and walked through steep gorges until he had learned all he could about the island’s geography.
Eddington befriended the other English guests at the hotel and put himself to the task of learning some Portuguese words that would facilitate his stay. He enjoyed the “pottering” older man’s company, even though Cottingham preferred talks with the less thrill-seeking guests and leisurely visits to the local shops over climbing mountains. “He is just 50,” Eddington wrote home, “so, of course, not fond of very much exercise.” Some days, the two had tea on the balcony of the Bella Vista, which was well named. It overlooked the town and harbor, as snow-covered mountains loomed in the distance. Below their room, the hotel gardens were filled with perfumed flowers, date palms, and cacti. When they sat out in the evenings, the town of Funchal sparkled with electric street lamps that stretched far up the mountainside. Nights at that time of year were cold by Madeira standards, yet compared with the factory smoke and grime the astronomers had left behind at Greenwich, the place must have seemed like paradise.
Eddington took a liking to the locally grown bananas, eating a dozen a day. Teatime was offered at the local casino, although he found it inferior to English tea. The casino had a lively band of local musicians performing daily, and the roulette tables were busy, even though the game was illegal in Madeira. Despite being a steadfast Quaker, Eddington tried his hand a few times at the game. No one was concerned with being arrested since the police always phoned ahead to inform the casino that there would be a raid. One afternoon, having finished his tea, Eddington found the casino door locked when he tried to return to his hotel. It was explained to him that the chief of police had come for the dancing in one of the other rooms and, therefore, did not want to know about the spinning roulette wheels. The staff had locked the door to the gaming room. Eddington slipped out a back entrance. By the end of his stay in Madeira, he was down only a pound.
Eddington and Cottingham occasionally took the funicular up the mountainside and then rode in the wicker toboggans that carried passengers back down to Funchal.10 He and Cottingham played games at the casino, including musical chairs, still a novelty then. They visited the local telegraph cable station, which Eddington thought much improved from the days he had spent at a telegraph station in Malta. With Cottingham more the “pottering-about” type, Eddington struck up a friendship with sixteen-year-old George Turner, an English boy from Mumbles who had come to Madeira after an illness and was a guest at the hotel. They shared a love for chess, butterflies, and swimming. They went together one evening to the local “picture-palace.” The headlining film was the funeral of King Edward VII, who had died nine years earlier. “It was rather curious seeing it after so many years,” Eddington wrote to his sister.
It would be an idyllic month on a peaceful island. And yet, remnants of the war were evident amid the vined pergolas, misty ravines, and snow-capped peaks. Some buildings still bore the marks of shelling. The historic Santa Clara church, dating back to the fifteenth century, had also been damaged. In the harbor waters were the visible masts of two sunken vessels. On December 3, 1916, a German U-boat with the notorious Max Valentiner as its captain had gone into the harbor at Funchal and torpedoed three ships. Each day that Eddington walked down to the dock, he saw the masts of two of those ships still protruding from the water. If he learned their names, he never mentioned them. As a matter of fact, he wrote of the torpedoed ships and bombardments in two short sentences, dropped into the middle of long and witty descriptions of the hotel guests and the local scenery. But it was time to begin healing from the war, and perhaps Eddington thought such talk would disturb his mother back in Cambridge. Although he never revealed his own feelings, one might wonder if there was any sense of guilt, given the remarks made by colleagues like H. H. Turner, who wrote about his countrymen “shrinking from the horrors of war.”11
When the Englishmen learned that the steamer they were booked on had service only to São Tomé, the sister island a hundred miles southeast of Príncipe, they booked passage on the Portugal. Eddington was having difficulty getting their passports and other papers in order. When an “unkempt” man in the street offered to help, he feared he was only “after earning a tip.” The man turned out to be a local editor who introduced the Englishmen to the governor of Príncipe, who was visiting Funchal and was booked to return on the Portugal. After being interviewed about the expeditions for the newspaper, and with their passports now in order, Eddington and Cottingham were ready to say goodbye to Madeira.12
Long before foreign interests sought out oil, which was then unmarketable, and minerals like bauxite and diamonds, it was a milky liquid called latex, extracted from rubber trees, that brought foreigners into the Amazon basin. From approximately 1850 to 1913, the only place on earth to find this “white gold” was in the forests of Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The world was experiencing an insatiable demand for rubber, which was used in thousands of machines, gadgets, and other products. The inflatable tire that was needed to satisfy the bicycle craze was followed by the introduction of the automobile and its own need for tires. This boom spurred European colonization and made the “rubber barons” rich. Missionaries arrived and built chapels. Cities grew up where there had been only jungle. Manaós, which was where Crommelin and Davidson were now headed on their Anselm cruise, was the grandest city of them all. Its exclusive English Club boasted swimming pools and tennis courts. Known as “the Paris of the Tropics,” Manaós had its own opera house that cost ten million dollars and staged some of the world’s best talent. When half the members of one visiting troupe died from yellow fever in a single season, there were more actors to fill their places.13
To satisfy this prodigious thirst for rubber, however, there arose an impossible demand for local labor and, in many cases, a dehumanizing and immoral enslavement. A great deal of latex had to be gathered, and rubber trees by nature grew some distance apart. Entire populations of indigenous people across Brazil and neighboring countries died under this brutal treatment. Horrid working and living conditions were often compounded with floggings, rape, dismemberment, and murder. Often, the workers were shackled together to prevent escape. Even under the best of circumstances, their cultures of hunting and gathering were not accustomed to the rigorous schedule under which industrialization flourished. This brutality would continue until the seventy thousand rubber tree seeds stolen in 1876 by Henry Wickham began to flourish on plantations in Asia and thus put an end to the rubber boom in South America.14
How much of this human history was known to Crommelin and Davidson is hard to tell. The rubber boom in Brazil had waned a few years before they arrived, but all its footprints were still in place. That Crommelin had read the Booth Line brochure informing passengers on what to expect during the cruise is evident. In his own written notes, he often uses the same adjectives to describe the flora and fauna, as well as the great river and its tributaries. The Booth Line catalog itself is very revealing in its colonial attitude toward the jungle and the people who lived in it. While mentioning wildlife such as the jaguar, puma, ocelot, sloth, tapir, howler monkeys, and anteaters, it also advises the passengers to keep a watch for “a caboclo family’s primitive shack.… On crude platforms outside these shacks, naked children watch the ship pass by.” The magazine goes on to inform the reader that seeing a floating brown log in the river suddenly spring to life means that the ship has “rudely interrupted the siesta of a sleepy alligator,” when, in fact, it should be crocodile. Passengers were encouraged to leave the ship at Manaós and “penetrate” the jungle.
The rubber demand would boom again, thanks to Henry Ford, who wanted to break the British monopoly on rubber. In 1928, nine years after Crommelin and Davidson cruised up the Amazon, Ford would turn a tiny hamlet called Boa Vista, one hundred miles up the Tapajós River, into what the Booth Line brochure would later describe as “a replica of an American town, with macadamized roads, concrete pavement, well-kept lawns and low-ceilinged houses. It is the capital of 5,000 square miles of territory conceded by the Brazilian government to Mr. Henry Ford, where he hopes to grow rubber to make tyres for the cars produced in his factories throughout the world.” Some reports compared the size of this territory to the state of Connecticut, others to Tennessee. It is perhaps telling that on the same catalog page describing Ford’s clearing of thousands of acres of jungle to create Fordlandia, the writer also warns visitors that the piranha can “strip the flesh from the bones in an incredibly short space of time.”15
Despite already being world travelers, their venture into the heart of the Amazon jungle was a new experience for the Englishmen. They were fascinated to see the ground “alive with troops of leaf-cutting ants” and sensitive plants that closed to the touch of a hand. But it was the floating wharves at Manaós, where the Anselm was loaded with rubber and nuts, that most captured their attention. These ingenious structures were the brainchild of Charles Booth, one of the founding shipping brothers and well known to the astronomers for his work with London’s poor. Designed to overcome seasonal fluctuations in water levels, the wharves could adapt to a sixty-foot change in the level of the river during wet and dry seasons. Booth visited Manaós for the last time in 1912, four years before his death. He had written home to his wife about seeing his wharf again: “So there is my monument.”
On their return to Pará, Crommelin and Davidson were met by a host of people, including the English and American clubs, the American consul, and the manager of the Tramway Company, which plied them with free passes to explore the city and experience the “primeval forests” around Pará. The Booth Line had thrown a festive lunch on board the ship to celebrate the reopening of its route between Europe and Amazonia now that the war was over. On April 24, the two men left for Camocim on the steamer Fortaleza, arriving five days later. Crommelin described it as a “tedious” journey. In coastal Camocim, the red carpet was again rolled out, so much so that they felt like “personally-conducted tourists.” From there, they took the train inland to Sobral, some eighty miles southeast, with the tracks skirting around several picturesque mountain ranges.16
Sobral, in the state of Ceará, was not jungle. Semiarid, it was just the opposite, hot and dry with a constant need for water since for many months there would be no rainfall. When the Englishmen got closer to their destination, the country outside their windows had turned brown and barren, the Acaraú’s riverbed riddled with deep fissures because of a severe drought. Thousands of local inhabitants were unable to feed themselves or water their animals. They became refugees in towns like Sobral, relying on government aid and daily handouts of food. Crommelin took comfort in seeing that the mountains still looked moist and green in the distance. They arrived in Sobral to find a delegation waiting in anticipation of Father Cortie, whose letter explaining why he couldn’t make the expedition had not yet reached Brazil. Crommelin sent a telegram to Dyson, informing him that they had arrived safely at the viewing site.
Leocádio Araujo, their interpreter who had studied agriculture in the United States, was also there to meet them. He would stay with them for the remainder of their time in Sobral. The district deputy, Colonel Vicente Saboya, who also owned the local cotton factory, made his spacious home available to the scientists. In front of the house was a jockey club with an enclosed racetrack. The grandstand had a canopy that would provide shelter for the instruments, a perfect place to store them. All racing would be shut down while the astronomers were in town. Arriving later would be two scientists from the Carnegie Institution of Washington: Daniel Wise, an American, and Andrew Thomson, a Canadian. Carnegie had asked Morize if he might do magnetic and electric measurements during the eclipse. When Morize said he was unable to do so, he invited the institution to send its own team. Wise and Thomson would share the comfortable Saboya residence with the Englishmen.
The Spanish flu that was still killing millions of people in its second wave had struck down the president of Brazil just two months before Crommelin and Davidson arrived in the country. Rodrigues Alves had been slated to begin his second term as president on November 15, 1918, when he became ill with influenza. He died on January 16, 1919. But the greatest worry to Colonel Saboya, the wealthy host, was yellow fever. This viral disease had come to the Americas on the slave ships from Africa during the 1600s. While it was not always fatal, it had claimed many lives down through the centuries, including that troupe of actors it had wiped out in Manaós.
Caused by the bite of a mosquito—the scientific name is Stegomyia fasciata, known today as Aedes aegypti—yellow fever was again rampant in the state of Ceará, and particularly in Sobral. While it most often affected children, Saboya was concerned about the Englishmen and Americans. As foreigners, they were much more susceptible to the virus and often succumbed to it. What if these visiting scientists became seriously ill or even died? It would not be good press for Brazil in the eyes of the scientific world. His brother, a doctor, had alerted Saboya to this possibility, and now the colonel wanted preventative measures taken beyond wire screens on all the windows. “Imagine the shame and damage to Brazil if some of these scientists die of yellow fever,” Saboya wrote. “It was to avoid this that I sought the sanitary authorities.” Safety measures would be taken so that the visiting scientists would not regret their trip to Ceará.17
Colonel Saboya contacted the sanitary authorities, who dispatched medical technicians to Sobral to be on hand. The best way to protect the visitors, it was decided, was to keep them as isolated as possible from the general population. For their entertainment, an automobile would be brought to Sobral, the first one seen on the streets there. This way, the two teams could be shown some of the local countryside, despite the devastation of the drought. More importantly, a car could carry them to the nearby mountains. If the excursion left Sobral early in the mornings, or after four in the afternoons, they would avoid the times of day when the sun is hottest and these particular mosquitoes more likely to bite. Plus, the mosquito didn’t thrive at high altitudes, making the foreign sightseers safer in the mountains. With this plan in mind, arrangements were made for Morize to bring an automobile from Rio de Janeiro on the steamer with him. Crommelin and Davidson began unpacking their equipment.
On April 9, which was Cottingham’s fiftieth birthday, he and Eddington left Madeira aboard the Portugal. The three-thousand-mile journey on to Príncipe—the word príncipe is Portuguese for “prince”—would take two weeks. Schools of porpoises followed the ship, and Cottingham saw his first flying fish. The days of calm blue sky passed with games of chess and reading, the nights with moonlit strolls on deck. Eddington slept well for the first time since leaving Cambridge. There was plenty of good food, even if the tea again fell short of his English approval. It was served with ices or, as he noted, “sorbets like we used to have on the Avon.” With no good milk on the Portugal, he began taking his tea black. He was by now reacquainted with full sugar bowls, unlimited butter, and more meat at one meal than he would have eaten in a week during rationing.
What Eddington missed most aboard this steamer was his daily workout. The Portugal didn’t even carry deck chairs to rent, so it was no surprise that it lacked the usual facilities for exercise. Unable to do his vigorous mountain climbing for two weeks and with not even deck tennis available, he and Cottingham took part in improvised games that were played by the passengers. It’s comical to imagine the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and the director of the Cambridge Observatory engaged in Boots without Shoes, Rings without Strings, egg-and-spoon races, and Threading the Needle. The ladies had potato races, and there was cockfighting for the gentlemen, a game in which men wrestled to remove each other from a drawn circle on the deck, not by fighting birds.
Eddington had cabled ahead to Príncipe that they would now arrive on the Portugal. But he had not received any news from England, or the world in general, since reading an old copy of the London Times on March 31. Not expecting to stay so long in Madeira, they had asked that no letters from England be sent there. Any correspondences would be waiting for them on the island. After the ship made two stops in the Cape Verde Islands, a heavy sea mist prevented the passengers from seeing land again until they reached their destination, even though the Portugal was sailing just forty miles off the African coast. On the morning of April 23, they spotted Príncipe in the distance. Perhaps the fact that it was also Shakespeare’s birthday was a good omen for the British. After the captain dropped anchor, the two Englishmen enjoyed a last breakfast on the ship.
If Crommelin and Davidson had gone into a world built on rubber, then Eddington and Cottingham would come ashore to one that was built on cocoa.