I must confess that I am still a skeptic as to the reality of the Einstein effect in question, but I would not be willing to undertake a technical defense of my skepticism. I am quite ready to welcome positive results, though I am looking for a negative one.
—William Wallace Campbell to Arthur Hinks, June 2, 1919
I have always been, and am yet, skeptical of any such effect, although I went into it at the Brazilian (rainy) eclipse of 1912, at the request of Freundlich, with two Vulcan cameras.… [T]he whole relativity business has seemed to me unreal and so purely philosophical that to accept it is to upset our previously carefully constructed and very material systems.
—Charles Dillon Perrine to William Campbell, January 30, 1923
BOTH WILLIAM CAMPBELL and Charles Perrine had their doubts about the predicted light deflection in Einstein’s theory. So did Sir Frank Dyson. It may seem incredulous that the first two astronomers would spend several years of their busy careers in difficult pursuit of a theory they didn’t fully endorse, and at such inconvenient times and places for traveling around the globe. Or that the third man, as astronomer royal, would put so much at stake during wartime and under restricted funding to send out two expeditions. But the essential nature of science should not be about establishing truths. Instead, science should have a commitment to removing falsehoods from our system of belief. The true work of researchers is to provide the best humanly possible explanation for what they observe in the world around them. Proving Albert Einstein right, or proving him wrong, was not the main purpose for Campbell, Perrine, or Dyson. Refuting him altogether, as many of his colleagues were doing at the time, would have put an end to those important questions he was asking about the universe. The main purpose, and these astronomers understood it well, was to advance science, to open up the cosmos a crack wider if possible.
The very nature of science is an unforgiving battleground as new paradigms based on increasingly accurate observation and measurement reveal the limits and flaws of accepted concepts. These concepts may have existed in the scientific canon for centuries, as did the Newtonian viewpoint, unshakable for two hundred years. In this way, perhaps science is unlike any other system that humanity has constructed for making sense of reality. It calls for practicing scientists to constantly question the entirety of the preexisting canon. This approach reveals the secret of science: it drives change and innovation for our species. Sometimes, however, caught in the machinery of this change and innovation are the scientists themselves, the flesh-and-blood human beings behind the calculations, theories, measurements, and observations.
A good case in point might be the work of Ludwig Boltzmann. At a time when the existence of atoms was not universally accepted by many physicists, Boltzmann had gained fame for having invented statistical mechanics by using probability to describe how the properties of atoms determine the property of matter. But his theories were under a barrage of attacks from his contemporaries. Einstein never met Boltzmann, who took his own life in the autumn of 1906. And yet two of the groundbreaking works during Einstein’s 1905 “miracle year” were greatly influenced by the Boltzmann tradition. These were his papers on the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion, the motion evidenced by the random movement of molecules. For those two works, in which Einstein recognized “the principle of Boltzmann,” he borrowed concepts from thermodynamics which showed his mastery of it, as well as his deep respect for its intellectual edifice. He would write this about Boltzmann’s theory on the dynamic properties of matter and atoms: “It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced, that within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts, will never be overthrown.” Not long after he died, Boltzmann’s viewpoint would become widely accepted, in part due to Einstein’s work on Brownian motion.1
That Campbell kept an open mind to the theory of general relativity, as did Perrine and Dyson, was a testament to their occupational ethics. Einstein himself believed that the greatest enemy of truth was a blind respect for authority. But it was now 1919, and results of the eclipse plates taken in Goldendale, Washington, the summer before had still not been measured, let alone released. Curtis had finally arrived back at the Lick Observatory in mid-April. By this time, Crommelin and Davidson were already in Brazil, and Eddington and Cottingham were on a ship sailing to Africa. But the eclipse the English hoped to observe was not coming until the end of May. Despite the unsatisfactory equipment and an interference of clouds that Campbell had had to deal with in 1918, there was still time for the Americans to make their announcement, whether supporting Einstein’s light-bending prediction or disproving it. Otherwise, the general relativity ball would be entirely in the hands of the British.
The tiny island to which Eddington had traveled to change the foundation of physics was not exactly the Eden he described in letters home. Príncipe and the neighboring island of São Tomé, now one country, were uninhabited when the first Portuguese arrived in the early 1470s. By the turn of the fifteenth century, both were slowly being settled and colonized by Portugal, which sent people to live on the islands. They were usually exiled “undesirables,” and mostly Jewish. But those first settlers realized in the rich volcanic earth the perfect soil for growing sugar cane. Since cultivating sugar requires considerable labor, Portugal began shipping enslaved workers from the African mainland to the islands. By the 1550s, Príncipe and São Tomé had become the front-runners in exporting Africa’s sugar. Over the next hundred years, with sugar being cultivated elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, production declined for the islands. The large population of laborers was also difficult to oversee, with Portugal’s efforts invested elsewhere. São Tomé then became a prime stop for ships that were trading human beings between the West and continental Africa.
By the early 1800s, two new cash crops were being grown on the islands: coffee and cocoa. Just as Wickham had brought the rubber tree seeds from Brazil to Asia, the Portuguese introduced the cacao tree to West Africa by way of Central America. But it is José Ferreira Gomes, a Brazilian-born Portuguese slaveholder, who is credited with bringing it to the island of Príncipe as an ornamental tree for his garden. That was in 1822, but the plant wouldn’t thrive in its new environment until the 1870s, just about the same time that Portugal abolished slavery, at least on paper. But thrive it did. And so did the world’s love of cocoa, and then a craving for chocolate.2
With a demand now for “brown gold,” the Portuguese companies built roças—pronounced “rossas”—or plantations, mostly run by absentee landlords. Managers were hired to do the overseeing. These rich soils and hard labor again worked well, and the roças flourished. By 1900, São Tomé was producing more cocoa than any other place in the world. The abolition of slavery meant little to the plantation managers since they worked around it. With government officials in agreement, they devised a state-supported plan for contract labor. Tribal members young enough to work for years were captured in Portuguese colonies in West Africa—they were often from Angola just to the south of the islands—and forced to walk hundreds of miles to the coast. There, a government official would ask each captive through an interpreter if they wished to have a “new master” or to go to São Tomé. Torn from their homeland, often beaten and ill, most answered São Tomé, if they answered at all. Thus, they were contracted to work on the roças for five years.
By the early 1900s, over 4,000 workers were sent to Príncipe and São Tomé annually. None of them returned home. Just a decade before Eddington and Cottingham left England for their expedition to Africa, approximately 320,000 more workers had been laboring on the 230 plantations on São Tomé, the larger of the islands. And 3,000 more were doing hard labor at the 50 plantations on Príncipe. Twenty percent of them would die each year. Workers had no choice but to spend their meager wages at plantation stores. The majority of what they earned was withheld in a repatriation fund that would pay to send them home once their contracts expired. For most plantations, these funds were nothing more than figments of greedy imaginations. In actuality, those contracts ended only with death.3
Back in England, other Quakers had been thinking of the island off the coast of West Africa much longer than Eddington had. Cadbury’s had begun in Birmingham, England, in 1824, as a tea and coffee shop that also sold drinking chocolate. By the 1860s, with chocolate becoming its best seller, the family-run company became a chocolate business. Guided by their humanitarian Quaker beliefs, the Cadburys built their own village, Bournville, on the south side of Birmingham. Unlike Ford and his later plans for Fordlandia in the Amazon jungle, Bournville was a superb model town that would greatly benefit its loyal workers and also be efficient for business. The Quaker plan was an idea quite unfamiliar to Victorian times and the novels of Charles Dickens.
With the business growing, Cadbury’s began to import cocoa beans from the roças on São Tomé. By 1900, when grandson William and his three brothers were running the business—all three British businesses that dominated the chocolate industry were Quaker-owned—Cadbury’s was importing 55 percent of its cocoa from Príncipe and São Tomé. Reports of worker abuse had been filtering into England for years, but nothing had been substantiated, especially if no one went to investigate. Then William Cadbury received an advertisement for the sale of a roça on São Tomé. Among the listed “assets” were two hundred black laborers for 3,555 pounds. The company had no interest in the plantation. But seeing this ad was confirmation that earlier reports of conditions on the roças must be true. Or it certainly should have been a fluttering red flag.
The Cadbury brothers agreed that there should be an enquiry, but they seemed to be in no hurry. They finally decided that William would travel to Lisbon, where most of the plantation owners lived, and meet with them in person. This strategy would be akin to asking the fox about conditions in the henhouse. The year was 1901, and Lisbon was almost four thousand miles from Príncipe and São Tomé. William was assured by the owners that 1903 would bring new regulations that would guarantee better conditions for their workers. William wrote to an abolitionist friend: “I should be sorry needlessly to injure a cultivation that as far as I can judge provides labor of the very best kind to be found in the tropics: at the same time we should all like to clear our hands of any responsibility for slave traffic in any form.”
On the question of slave traffic in Príncipe and São Tomé, the media got involved. In 1904 and 1905, an investigative journalist named Henry Woodd Nevinson went to Angola on behalf of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Unlike William Cadbury, he wanted to see firsthand what was happening, both in the interior of Angola, where many of the “volunteer laborers” originated, and on the cocoa plantations themselves. In his middle age, Nevinson had become a British war correspondent. He covered several wars, including World War I, during which he was wounded at Gallipoli, in the same battle that took the life of physicist Henry Moseley. As a journalist, he “brought warfare to British breakfast tables.”4
For his investigation, Nevinson journeyed 450 miles into the dense forests of central Angola, to the origin of the trading route. He then followed the trail to the sea, the same path along which men, women, and children were forced to walk. He would witness floggings, dismemberments, rape, and murder. The trail was already so littered with human skeletons that Nevinson felt outrage. Hanging from the trees were wooden neck and leg shackles, removed from the bodies for the next trader to find and put to use. “It would take an army of sextons to bury all those poor bones that consecrate that path,” he wrote.
Henry Nevinson was then forty-nine years old and gravely ill. Believing he had been poisoned by Portuguese dealers to stop his investigation, he swallowed the antidote he carried and made arrangements for his journal to be sent to England should he die. And yet he walked twenty miles a day in the unforgiving heat. The fury he felt as a firsthand witness to this inhumanity drove him onward. The beaten and starving souls who survived were “freed” by the Portuguese officials waiting for them at the end of the march. They were free, that is, to work for five years on São Tomé or Príncipe. These were the places from which no one ever returned. In their language, São Tomé had become synonymous with the word okalunga, which means “hell.” Still suffering from fever, Nevinson followed one group of captives down to the water’s edge and boarded the ship waiting to transport them to the cocoa plantations on both islands, a voyage that would take eight days. On this particular ship were 273 captives, not counting 50 babies. What Nevinson saw after he reached the plantations was just as deplorable. “As horrible as anything recorded in human history,” he wrote. His columns were printed in Harper’s over the next several months, causing a public outcry. In 1906, Nevinson’s book titled A Modern Slavery was published. 5
William Cadbury had begun an investigation of his own by enlisting a fellow Quaker and former bank employee named Joseph Burtt to investigate. What were the conditions really like on the plantations that were providing him with “brown gold?” To learn the language, Burtt first lived for several months in Portugal. He left England for Africa in 1905 and returned after two years, having spent six months on Príncipe and São Tomé, and then traveling to the interior of Angola. His account, made public to British citizens in 1908, was as shocking as Nevinson’s had been. Other Quakers were now calling for a boycott of West African cocoa. Cadbury again traveled to Lisbon and let the plantation owners know that if the company were to continue to purchase cocoa from their roças, “in the future it is to be produced by free labor.” It was almost eight years since he had seen the ad that included human beings for sale.
In the autumn of 1908, Cadbury traveled to the islands with Burtt to see for himself. He asked that a missionary named Charles Swan go to Angola, as Nevinson and Burtt had done, and conduct another investigation there. Swan also interviewed missionaries in the country who knew the situation well. These were not volunteer workers who trudged for miles to the waiting ships at the coast, past the many shackles hanging from trees. Swan counted ninety-five shackles in one day, many with skulls and bones still attached. They were captives tricked into working on the plantations, and the abuses they endured made any Nevinson had written of pale in comparison. Swan published a book that was filled with photos of many of the enslaved workers. They were now actual human beings, with names, and horrific personal stories to tell. The misery endured in Angola was even worse than what was to come on the two islands.6
Back in England in 1909, after having seen firsthand the deplorable conditions on the plantations, Cadbury began work on his own book, Labor in Portuguese West Africa. He searched for and found an alternative supply of cocoa from the Gold Coast, in what is today’s Ghana. Labor conditions were reportedly better there, and the cocoa of a higher quality. He finally announced a boycott on slave-grown cocoa from Príncipe and São Tomé. He encouraged American and British companies to join him, and they did. But the media in England had long been asking what had taken these companies so long.
Adding to an impossible life and staggering death rate for the workers on Príncipe, sleeping sickness hit the island, having already killed thousands back on the mainland. The disease was believed to have been brought aboard ships from Angola as they transported the so-called laborers. Nevinson noted in his 1906 book that scientists “are now inclined to connect it with the tsetse-fly.”7 In a decade, the sickness killed 2,525 people on an island only ten miles long and six miles wide. While São Tomé had received workers from Angola already afflicted, they were somehow spared the fly itself, and thus remained free of the disease. Local authorities initiated measures to eradicate the carrier. Because the tsetse fed on blood, all animals should be killed, except for the needed oxen and mules. And those spared beasts should be protected by mosquito screens. But the money-hungry plantation owners in Lisbon complained that they needed their servants, or serviçais, to work harvesting cocoa, not fighting a fly from Angola. Because of the high mortality rates, the landowners were in constant need of more laborers as it was. The authorities nevertheless insisted. By the following year, 1914, the flies had completely vanished.
Less than five years later, on the morning of April 23, 1919, the Portugal steamed into the bay at Santo António, the capital of Príncipe, and dropped anchor in the warm waters. On board, enjoying a breakfast of coffee and biscuits, were the Quaker Arthur Stanley Eddington and Edwin Turner Cottingham.
Eddington and Cottingham had seen no mail from England since leaving Liverpool on March 8. They still didn’t know if the peace treaty had been signed, making the end of the war official. The governor of Príncipe, whom Eddington had met briefly in Funchal, had gone ashore while the men were having breakfast. Now he came out to the ship with a launch to greet them. He had with him two plantation owners who had offered their roças to the visiting scientists. This warm welcome was recorded by Eddington: “We were met on board by the Governor, Mr. Carneiro, and Mr. Gragera, and we soon found that we were in clover.” They were escorted from the dock to Jeronimo Carneiro’s private home, which was still under construction. It was the wet season in Príncipe. Until mid-May, rain would fall each day, a heavy and steamy downpour that quickly returned to clear skies. The gravana, or dry season, would then begin, with clouds dotting the skies, cool nights, and often a light rain before sunrise. The eclipse would occur two weeks after the gravana began.
The Englishmen rested for a day before cabling Dyson of their safe arrival. On Friday, they set out in a tram car pulled over railway tracks by a pair of mules. Not counting the cultivated plantations, the island was covered in steaming lush forest and moist tropical growth. Nevinson had referred to the two islands as gigantic hothouses: “The islands possess exactly the kind of climate that kills men and makes the cocoa-tree flourish.”8 They would visit two of the plantations that the Colonial Agricultural Society had suggested, Roca Esperanca and Roca St. Joaquin. Eddington immediately noticed a striking sugarloaf mountain in the middle of the island. It rose to twenty-five hundred feet and was ringed with a thick mass of clouds. Nestled around it were numerous naked peaks wrapped in heavy mist. This was the range that Arthur Hinks had diligently inquired about in his letters two years earlier. Since Roca Esperanca was hemmed in by this mountain, Eddington passed. The last thing he wanted was permanent clouds. The second plantation they visited, Roca St. Joaquin, was a possibility. But they had yet to check the third, Roca Sundy, six miles from Santo António and owned by their host, Carneiro.
The next morning, wearing pith helmets as protection from the sun and bringing along mackintoshes for the sudden rains, they started out again, this time riding the mules. While Eddington could have easily walked the distance despite its being mostly uphill, it would have been impossible for Cottingham to do so in the sweltering climate. Over an hour later, they arrived at Roca Sundy, which was surrounded by sea and sky and was bordered by a long stretch of yellow sand and swaying palm trees. They had noticed its elegant main house as the ship neared Príncipe three days earlier. Located on the northwest end of the island, the house sat atop a plateau that rose five hundred feet above the sea. There was an enclosed piece of ground just beyond the bedroom windows that was sheltered on the east by a wall. It would provide excellent protection for the instruments. To the northwest, the enclosure opened onto the sea, sloping down in the direction of the sun’s path.
Roca Sundy functioned like a self-sufficient town, as did all the plantations on the two islands. They grew their own food and raised livestock to feed the numerous staff and laborers. Spread out beyond the main house, the buildings were laid out in good order. There was an administration office, houses for the foremen, and numerous sleeping quarters for the six-hundred-plus workers, small wooden sheds with galvanized roofs. There were kilns for roasting the cocoa seeds that, once dried, became the valuable beans. And there were warehouses to store them. The main plant, called a sede, was where the cocoa beans, coffee beans, or palm oil was processed. A four-wheel locomotive then carried this product to the coast, where it was loaded onto waiting ships. There was the plantation store, where workers spent their meager earnings, and a sawmill that provided lumber for building needs. The plantation had a small, sixteenth-century-style chapel used by the owners and overseers. The stables were designed like a medieval castle, in merlon-and-crenel fashion, and a crenulated wall surrounded the courtyard. These structures must have amused the Englishmen, as if King Arthur and his knights would gallop in from the forest.
Eddington decided on Roca Sundy. He asked that workers build a small pier on which the coelostat would stand. Arrangements were made for the baggage and crates to be brought to the plantation on Monday. He and Cottingham then returned to Santo António. Carneiro was the consummate host. Rather than sailing back to Lisbon as planned, he stayed on in Príncipe for the next month to entertain his English guests. Eddington wrote home glowingly about him: “He is rather a young man, and owns the largest private plantation. He has only been out here two years, but his family have had the plantation a long while. In Lisbon he was a well-known bull-fighter.” Explaining that in the Portuguese bullfight, unlike the Spanish tradition, the bulls and horses are not slain, he then added, “The Portuguese here are a very superior type to those we have met before—in particular, they do not spit about all the time, and suck toothpicks at meals. Mr. Carneiro is, I believe, very wealthy.” Jeronimo Carneiro certainly was wealthy. There can be no doubt that the Carneiro family’s fortune was built on the misery and deaths of thousands of indentured laborers.
The Englishmen spent the next few days at Carneiro’s house, relaxing and sightseeing. They would later visit Bom-Bom (“good-good”), the ruins of a palace once owned by Maria Correia, the most famous slave trader in the island’s history. Unknown to most tourists by 1919, it was her husband, José Ferreira Gomes, who had brought that first cocoa tree to Príncipe as an ornament for their garden. A member of Príncipe’s wealthy elite, Correia traveled throughout the world and was said to have been welcomed by the king of England and given diamonds for her hospitality to British ships passing through Príncipe. “Her palace on the beach is all in ruins but it must have been a huge place,” Eddington wrote.
One morning, Eddington and Cottingham had a breakfast picnic in the nearby harbor, courtesy of Carneiro. Afterward, they cruised around the island while a large shark followed their boat. In the afternoons, they enjoyed tennis with “the curador and the judge,” the only ones on the island who played the game. In naming the people he met as the days unfolded, often only by their occupations, Eddington might have been a contemporary British playwright describing his characters. Nevinson had described the job of a curador in his 1906 book. He was the man who asked the captives on the mainland if they chose São Tomé over a “new master,” thus forcing them into five years of servitude on the roças. And later, at the plantations, each curador stood before the lined-up workers and tricked them into another five years and, thus, eventual death on the islands. In Eddington’s letter home describing the curador at Roca Sundy, his description was noncommittal. “The Curador, who is responsible for the imported labour—quite a young man.”
There seems to be no written evidence that Eddington understood the working conditions on the roças. However, he was twenty-seven years old when Quaker-owned Cadbury finally announced its boycott of slave-labor cocoa. Quaker magazines often carried ads paid for by the big cocoa companies in England. That Eddington did not remember the sensational drama carried out in the British press is questionable. But when he unpacked his baggage at Roca Sundy in the spring of 1919, there were several hundred workers toiling in the hot sun to harvest cocoa. It’s difficult to imagine they had volunteered to come to Príncipe from the continent. What were the conditions like then? How much had they improved in a decade, with no real supervision by overseas authorities? Eddington doesn’t comment in his letters home except to write, “It is very comfortable here and we have all the assistance and facilities we need. About 600 native labourers are at work on the plantation and they have carpenters and mechanics at work so it is easy to get any small things required.”
They dined each night with Carneiro and his friends who came to meet the eminent Englishmen. Since almost no one on Príncipe could speak English except for a few words, these were probably not the liveliest of dinner conversations. They had no steady interpreter, as on other expeditions. Eddington mentioned this predicament in a letter home when recounting the people they met: “Two negro’s from Sierra Leone who are the sole staff of the cable-station here. They are British, and interpret for us. But, of course they are only with us now and then.” But Carneiro owned a player piano and a gramophone with a large supply of records, some of them grand opera. Music would make up for conversation. Before an early bedtime of nine sharp, the landowner and his guests sat on the balcony wearing cool white suits and listening to the soothing waves of the ocean. It was restful relaxation for the complicated work that lay ahead. It’s impossible to know how many bones of enslaved human beings who had worked until they died and were carried, their corpses lashed to poles, into the deep forest by loved ones had been buried on Príncipe by 1919. For an island so small, one can only speculate.
Edwin Turner Cottingham was the last man to believe he would travel halfway around the globe, sent by the astronomer royal and in the company of a prominent astronomer. His main interest lay in clocks and time mechanisms, not eclipse expeditions. He was born in 1869, in Ringstead, Northamptonshire, not far from the banks of the River Nene. His father was a cordwainer, or shoemaker, and his mother had been employed as a household helper. Edwin left school very young to be apprenticed to a tailor in the village. Later, as a teenager, he met Augustus Allen, a clockmaker and watchmaker in nearby Thrapston, and became employed by him.
At the age of twenty-five, he married Elizabeth Smith, whose family owned a local ironworks company. Three years later, their only child, a son, was born. When Allen retired, Cottingham took over the business as its owner. The name COTTINGHAM went up above the wide front window of the shop. He was now in business to build, repair, and sell clocks and watches, a worthy profession for a boy with little education. When Edwin and Elizabeth purchased a house just around the corner, he could stroll through his garden each day to arrive at work. In 1900, he built his first work of art, a Winchester chime clock for the little church in his village. He was not yet interested in the stars. His passion was clocks.
Cottingham had found his calling. He learned the trade well and took pride in his work. The necessity of clocks and watches and time balls in everyday life was valued, even admired. He later built clocks for observatories, including one for the Royal Observatory and another for Edinburgh. The latter had electrical components, demonstrating Cottingham’s added passion for the “science of electricity.” Some of his clocks saw a good deal of the world, one going all the way to the Royal Alfred Observatory on the island nation of Mauritius, and another to Hong Kong. Like many instrument makers and observatory employees, Cottingham repaired and adjusted chronometers for the Admiralty.
A master craftsman and engineer, he soon discovered astronomy. Since most clockmakers over history were also skilled in the design and construction of scientific instruments, it’s not surprising that Cottingham appreciated astronomy. It was an exciting time to be alive in science. The introduction of new and better-designed instruments was opening up the heavens in ways Galileo never dreamed of when he turned his small telescope on the Milky Way and saw a mass of undiscovered stars, not the clouds he believed them to be. The cosmos was filled with uncharted waters. In 1905, the same year that Einstein published his first groundbreaking paper, Cottingham joined the RAS. There he would meet Dyson, Eddington, Crommelin, Davidson, and other prominent astronomers. They would have a great impact on his life.
For a decade before he left England on the 1919 expedition, Cottingham had been taking care of the clocks at Cambridge by cleaning, repairing, and adapting them. Thus, he had earned the friendship and respect of Eddington, the observatory’s director. Cottingham was modest and unassuming, not one to show off his diverse skills. He was most at home in his cluttered workshop, which stood behind his store, in the garden at Thrapston. Now Cottingham was on the tropical island of Príncipe, a place Nevinson had called “a magic land, the dream of some wild painter.” All around him long, yellow pods dangled from hundreds of cocoa trees, enormous butterflies fluttered like winged rainbows, and bands of mona monkeys—they were brought from the mainland on slave ships—swooped and grunted through the moist canopies overhead. He had come a long way from the boy apprenticed to a village tailor.
Henrique Morize, the French-born director of the National Observatory at Rio de Janeiro, left that city on April 25 to sail north to Sobral. He was bringing with him his wife and many members of his staff, seventeen people in all, including Theophilus Lee, the English chemist from the Geological and Mineralogical Service of Brazil. Davidson had met Lee at Passa Quatro, when he and Eddington were there for the 1912 eclipse. They had thought the chemist unhelpful and self-serving. Now Lee was back. Also on the steamer from Rio to Camocim was the automobile for the visiting scientists to enjoy. This had been the wish of Colonel Saboya and the Ministry of Agriculture. It’s likely that Morize had rented the older-model Studebaker from the Studebaker Company in Rio. With the car came a chauffeur, since it was unlikely anyone in Sobral would know how to drive.9
Morize’s group from Rio would change steamers at Fortaleza and rendezvous there with the Carnegie Institution team. Daniel Wise and Andrew Thomson had departed from New York City on March 25 aboard the steamer Hollandia, out of Amsterdam. The North Americans landed in Recife, Brazil, nineteen days later, on April 15. After sightseeing and doing magnetic observations in and around Fortaleza, Wise and Thomson waited for Morize to arrive. Both groups then sailed on to Camocim, where a special train was waiting to take them the eighty miles inland to Sobral. When the chauffeur drove the Studebaker off the ship, the gathered onlookers cheered wildly. As Morize noted in his diary, “The car came down with a few faults but ran, to the general enthusiasm of the populace.” It was then loaded onto a railway car, and the special train pulled out, headed south for Sobral.
Known internationally for his support and hospitality to foreign expeditions, Morize had suggested Sobral to the British as an ideal viewing station two years earlier. He had assisted Davidson and Eddington during their 1912 rained-out expedition farther south at Passa Quatro. He had already traveled the two-thousand-plus miles to Sobral from Rio a month earlier to put in place the arrangements that had welcomed Crommelin and Davidson. Morize reminded all four scientists that expenses were courtesy of the Brazilian government: their room and board and any labor or constructions they might need. While most of Sobral’s residents carried their water daily from holes they had dug into the nearby Acaraú’s cracked riverbed, the English astronomers were grateful to find that their comfortable house had water pumped to it from the well of the owner’s cotton factory, a mile distant. The daily temperatures averaged a peak of ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit at three in the afternoon, and a low of seventy-five degrees at five in the morning. They would need plenty of water cooled in earthenware pots when it came time to develop the photographic plates. When Morize and his large entourage arrived in Sobral, they were put up at a house without running water or mosquito nets.
This great generosity shown to the foreigners, these estrangeiros, did not go unnoticed by at least one member of Brazil’s intelligentsia. The severe drought, the devastation of which Crommelin and Davidson had seen from their train window, had begun in 1915 and had taken the lives of almost three hundred thousand people in the state of Ceará alone.10 Many survivors who could do so had left the state to trek south to the Amazon area. One of the most admired men of letters during this period was Paulino de Almeida Brito, who had abandoned a law degree to become a fiction writer, a journalist, and an editor. Well known to Brazilians, he had in the past taken a strong stand against black slavery in Brazil. Brito had read in the local newspaper a two-page article Crommelin and Davidson had written while on their Amazon tour. The piece had been translated into Portuguese by their interpreter, Leocádio Araujo. They explained as best they could to a lay audience this new theory “by a physicist named Einstein.”11 They were in Brazil to photograph stars during the eclipse to test for this theory if they were “favoured with clear skies.” Not impressed, Brito published his own thoughts on the subject:
However, since all that is human of human weakness resents, Astronomy, in the midst of such majesty, does not cease to have its small and even puerile sides… [W]hy do not we even say comical? When they arrive, for example, in Sobral, Drs. Crommelin and Davidson will be surrounded by desolate scenes, in the theater of the ravages produced by the drought. And for those poor people who starve to death, it would certainly be more important for the two illustrious scientists to discover the means of dropping an ounce of water on the scorched earth, than to remove it once and for all if the solar attraction curves or do not bend the rays of light from the stars… What is the use of knowing the weight of the planet Mars and the distance that separates it from Saturn, if we do not know enough of our terrestrial habitation to remedy or even prevent the bewilderments that endanger our existence?12
On April 28, Eddington and Cottingham left Santo António and again rode on mules until they were met by a carriage that took them the rest of the way to the plantation. They were welcomed by the manager, Mr. Atalia, and made comfortable in the main house, which was quite elaborate in furnishings. Its second floor veranda had windows that opened onto the sea. While mosquitoes were not bothersome, their beds were nonetheless hung with curtains. And the astronomers were advised to take three grains of quinine daily, the local practice for guarding against malaria. Their baggage and equipment was delivered by porters later in the afternoon, again on the mule-drawn tram except for the last half mile, when it was carried through woods. Eddington’s plan was to spend a week at the plantation, erecting the huts and getting the apparatus ready. He and Cottingham would then enjoy another week of sightseeing with Carneiro before returning to Roca Sundy, where they would stay for the duration of their time on Príncipe.
Although Santo António was nothing more than a tiny village with muddy streets in the wet season, it was still a world apart from country life at Roca Sundy, where even bedtime was a half hour earlier. Virgin jungle wrapped itself around the plantation, a home to parrots, bats, snakes, feral pigs, and rats. A volcanic island in its infancy, Príncipe had few animals before it was inhabited by humans. Over the centuries, it had to depend on the transport of animals to its shores from the mainland, often aboard slave ships. Birds and butterflies, however, were abundant and brilliantly colored. Along with the numerous cocoa trees, there were also banana, breadfruit, and coffee trees. Eddington noted that the cocoa trees were covered with yellow pods. “It was a very fine sight to see the large golden pods in such numbers—almost as though the forest had been hung with Chinese lanterns.” His observation meant the trees were past the flowering season, when tiny orchid-like blossoms, pink and white, grow directly from the trunk amid bright green leaves. Thus, the cocoa harvest wouldn’t begin until after the Englishmen had left the island.13
There were obviously house servants at Roca Sundy to do the cooking, cleaning, and laying in of supplies. But again, at least in the letters that survive, Eddington never comments on them, although we know the name of the waiter in Funchal who carried his baggage down to the ship. He was pleased, however, that a meat or egg dish was served for breakfast since it was closer to what he was used to back in England. The rest of the time, the foods and rituals were typically “foreign,” except that the Englishmen were served tea in the afternoon, a compliment of their host since it was not a practice for the Portuguese. There were plenty of fresh fruits. Pineapples and bananas grew wild on the island, as did African custard apples, the latter of which the Englishmen did not find flavorsome. Eddington got back into a routine of eating a dozen bananas each day, large red ones. He was right. He and Cottingham had found themselves in “clover,” every need met quickly and hospitably. The path of totality for this eclipse had been most generous to fall across that small tropical island. Yet England was often on their minds as the days passed. In a letter home, Eddington sent birthday wishes to Punch, his terrier, and wondered how the garden was doing.
Eddington and Cottingham enjoyed chats with the plantation manager, Mr. Atalia. A former soldier born and raised in Portugal, he had been at Roca Sundy for four years. Atalia and Eddington were able to communicate in a very basic French and had long talks over dinner. Eddington sensed that the manager was lonely there on the island and happy to have guests. Darkness fell on Príncipe by six o’clock, so in the cool evenings, the three men sat outside before bedtime. “After dinner we used to sit out in front of the house and there was generally a succession of natives came up to interview him on all sorts of matters. They evidently have great respect and confidence in him.” It’s possible that Eddington witnessed hard work, but not abuse while at the plantation. In his book, Henry Nevinson wrote of a roça he had visited on São Tomé, one considered a “model,” or, as the writer put it, “a show-place for the intelligent foreigner or for the Portuguese shareholder who feels qualms as he banks his dividends.” Had Roca Sundy been put in shipshape condition before the Englishmen arrived? Regardless, what could Eddington, a scientist, have done to change things when he was two years invested in an eclipse?
They finished the task at hand by first erecting the two huts. Eddington did not want to unpack the mirror just yet for fear it would tarnish in the damp climate. The stone pier he had asked for, on which he would mount the coelostat, had already been built by the workers at Sundy. On April 30, with the huts just up, a heavy downpour of rain commenced. It was good timing to test how waterproof the huts would be. Eddington was satisfied that they “stood the deluge splendidly.” On May 1, he began setting up the apparatus, but was still not ready to unpack the mirror. Then he and Cottingham went back to Carneiro’s house for more relaxation and sightseeing. When they returned to Roca Sundy a week later, they would remain there until after the eclipse, and then board their steamer back to England.
Meanwhile, in Sobral, Crommelin and Davidson had unpacked their instruments in the welcome shade of the racecourse’s covered grandstand. The soil of the track itself was firmer, Crommelin noticed, with coarse shrubs holding it in place and resulting in less dust. It would work much better than the sandier soil around the house and grounds, an area known for unexpected winds. Daniel Wise, from the Carnegie Institution, set up his instruments in the basement of the house, where the day-to-night temperature change was minimal and where he would remain during the eclipse itself. Andrew Thomson would make visual observations on the racetrack, not far from where the English astronomers would be set up. Sharing the same residence as they were, and with Wise’s equipment in the basement, the Englishmen took an interest in the observations that the Carnegie team was doing. A scientific camaraderie quickly developed. “Incidentally, Mr. Wise redetermined our latitude,” Crommelin wrote, “his value, −3° 41′ .5, being 0′ .2 north of the value given by Dr. Morize. As the region had not been systematically surveyed, we found satisfaction in this close accordance.”
Bricklayers were brought in to build piers that would hold the coelostats and carpenters for the sixteen-inch astrographic tube. A square wooden tube, nineteen feet long, had been shipped from England for the smaller telescope. Leocádio Araujo was present to interpret for Crommelin and Davidson as they gave instructions to the workers. The carpenters erected the hut, but did not secure its sections. They planned to finish the job after lunch. While they were eating, a sudden whirlwind blew in across the racetrack. When the astronomers returned, the hut was overturned and many of its beams broken. The workers managed to repair the damage using beams that had been brought from Greenwich for the construction of a darkroom, now no longer needed in Saboya’s accommodating house.
Finally, Crommelin lay down their meridian line, using the pointer stars in Ursa Major, which was so low on the horizon that Polaris, the North Star in Ursa Minor, was not visible. When taking some early experimental photographs, he noticed a problem with the coelostat’s mirror for the sixteen-inch telescope. The smaller eight-inch mirror had been silvered at Greenwich, but the two larger mirrors had been sent away to be silvered.14 Now it was apparent that the sixteen-inch had an astigmatism. To avoid distortion on the photographic plates, the men decided on an eight-inch stop. They then found that the drive for this same coelostat didn’t run evenly, which meant blurred images during the eclipse. They decided that brief five- and ten-second exposures would be necessary to correct the uneven motion. To obtain a few preliminary check plates, they focused the telescope on the star Arcturus and photographed the field around it. With nothing to do now but wait for the eclipse, the scientists were ready for some sightseeing.
Vicente Saboya and the Ministry of Agriculture, in wanting to protect the foreigners from yellow fever, arranged for the car to fetch them early one morning, when the offending mosquitoes were not likely to bite. Plus, the Brazilians had a new road to show off. A previous drought had put in place a relief work project that employed laborers in building a road that corkscrewed to the top of Serra da Meruoca, six miles to the northwest of Sobral. The road had been completed the year before at a cost of two hundred dollars, but an automobile had yet to climb it. The chauffeur, after cleaning the car and taking it on a trial run, had informed Morize that “pieces were missing.” Still, he drove it up in front of Saboya’s house to collect the visitors. This initial outing began poorly. First off, they were to leave Sobral at 6:00 a.m. “We were picked up at 7:15,” Wise wrote in his diary, “and before we were out of town the chauffer began to show just how smart he was by driving very carelessly and recklessly. We had to warn him to drive with a little more consideration for those in the rear seat.” The appearance of a headless horse, especially outside town limits as the Studebaker rumbled toward the mountain, four estrangeiros bouncing around inside, sent locals fleeing in alarm.
Wise referred to the car as an “old Studebaker.” Even if it were a brand-new 1919 model, the vehicle would still give a bumpy and crowded ride. But the car had other problems. As it climbed the steep and zigzagging road to carry the guests twenty-seven hundred feet to the top, the engine overheated several times. Each time, the men climbed out and “prospected the mountain” as they waited for the engine to cool down. Seeing the mists and clouds, Crommelin knew immediately that the mountaintop would not have been a good eclipse station, as had been considered earlier. The Studebaker finally fought its way almost to the top before it had its first flat tire, the left rear. As they now waited for the driver to change it, the scientists walked on ahead to “prospect” some more. They saw occasional farms that were barely surviving, even in that cooler climate, given the drought below. They ate delicious mangoes and guarana seeds, the latter of which held twice the caffeine of coffee beans. At a farina mill, the men watched as workers pressed the wet manioc roots to prepare them for drying. The astronomers nibbled on cashews, which are native to northeastern Brazil.15
When they arrived back at the Studebaker, the driver told them that his air pump wasn’t working well enough to pump up the spare tire, which was low. They had to forfeit the summit and head back to Sobral at once. The car had driven a short distance when the tire blew out. With the pump not working, they continued down the mountain on a flat, until the wheel came off. Having consumed those guarana seeds probably didn’t help on such a downhill ride. “In one of our repairing spells,” Wise wrote, “Crommelin and Thomson gave up and started back on foot.” The wheel put back on, and the car still running on the flat tire, they picked up the two hikers farther down the mountain. When the wheel came off again, the four men decided that walking was less stressful. They may not have known that this hottest time of day was biting time for the yellow fever mosquito. Or that this first outing in the car would seem pleasant compared with the hair-raising rides still ahead.
Walking the four miles back to Sobral, the men didn’t arrive until late afternoon. “We were all very hungry, and done up from the heat, not to mention being very thirsty,” wrote Wise. A fine lunch at their interpreter’s house put them back in good spirits. Theophilus Lee nonetheless tattled to Morize that night that the city chauffeur was not just rough on the automobile, he was “driving at unbridled speeds” and “running down animals.” The chauffeur denied everything. The troubles with the Studebaker continued. The headlights didn’t work, and when the radiator burst, the driver repaired it with a bicycle tube. On another trip to Serra da Meruoca with the visiting scientists, he purposely backed the car into a ravine to keep it from careening out of control down the mountainside. This incident, however, was not his fault, for it was discovered that if the Studebaker went faster than five miles per hour, especially going uphill, it stalled and the brakes wouldn’t work.
After that death-defying ride, Davidson and Crommelin sent their interpreter to inform Morize they would no longer ride in the car with that same driver. Morize wrote in his diary, “I think the English are right when they say they do not want to go to the mountains anymore.” Thus went Colonel Saboya’s and the Ministry of Agriculture’s plans to keep their famous guests safe from yellow fever.16
Arthur Eddington and Edwin Cottingham were done sightseeing on Príncipe. The last heavy rain had fallen on May 9, or so they thought. By the time they returned to Roca Sundy a few days later, the gravana, the dry season, had already set in with its scattered clouds during the daytime. Eddington almost preferred the rainy season for wiping out the clouds. But there were a few clear afternoons as the eclipse day approached, so he was optimistic. In mid-May, with the installations and adjustments complete, he took check plates on three nights. Although they had also been done at Oxford earlier that year, it was best to do a second set, given the different conditions of observation between England and Príncipe. Plus, Eddington worried that a systematic error might occur if any changes had been done to the lens during transportation. With the house’s water temperature reaching seventy-eight degrees during the daytime, the water was too warm to develop them then. The plates had to be done after midnight, between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m. Thanks to a supply of ice, courtesy of Mr. Gragera, the manager of the Colonial Agricultural Society, the developing was completed. It was a tedious job that kept both Eddington and Cottingham up until the wee hours. During the day, Eddington measured. The check plates were ready. He and Cottingham unpacked the mirror. Now, it was just a matter of waiting for the eclipse.17
How to imagine the tension that any of these men felt the night before an eclipse, especially if his observation might lead to an important announcement or discovery? Resting on the whims of nature were years of planning and funding, separation from family and friends, and the perils and strain of long-distance travel. For some, as with Charles Perrine, success or failure could determine the funding for a future expedition. On that eclipse eve, as Eddington settled into bed behind the mosquito curtains, he could have no way of knowing that William Campbell and H. D. Curtis were frantically working to obtain results from their Goldendale observation. The outer world had almost ceased to exist on the moist tropical island, that “magic land, the dream of some wild painter.” His thoughts were on the weather the next day. Would it be friend or enemy? Would the gravana carry him through to a cloudless sky?
Along with the image of a four-year-old boy counting stars in the dark skies of England in 1886, another sadly prophetic sign is the poem that appeared on the same British Friend page that mentioned the death of the astronomer’s father, Arthur Henry Eddington:
When clouds are gray and gather low
T’will never do to sorrow,
Above the chilling doom there’s light,
All will be bright tomorrow.
Yet mid the darkness there is hope,
All will be bright tomorrow.
On the morrow—the glad tomorrow
The skies will be forever fair.
Trust in the Love that, changing never,
Lifts the clouds of doubt and spare.