The Great Travelers: Part Two- Guillaume Le Gentil

"The one real interest in life is the flies… No mosquitoes… but flies by day and flies by night… flies in the water… flies in the food"

Harry Moseley

Moseley wrote these words to his mother… when he was fighting for British forces in Gallipoli… against the mighty Turks… in the First World War. He died at the hands of the Turks… he was a promising scientist, who fell… not for science… but for stupid political ideologies.

The story is not about him… these are the words, which Moseley wrote to his mother while on the battle front. These words capture the emotions of a man, who had been plucked out of his natural surrounding and thrown into an alien atmosphere… where everything is different… and strange. And many of us do it almost willingly… and these words would always remain a tribute to those daring few.

It's about another scientist… who traveled distant lands in search of science…and by a quirk of fate, today; he is not so very known for his scientific works but for the travels. He represents both the scientific quest and the thirst to travel… and therefore he is the second traveler… I am going to write about.

He had a rather long name… Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière… for us he is just Guillaume Le Gentil… and he is best known for his travelogue " Voyage dans les mers de l'Inde, fait par ordre du Roi, à l'occasion du passage de Vénus, sur le disque du Soleil"- literally that means "Travel in the seas of India, made by order of King, during the passage of Venus on the disc of the Sun"

I was first introduced to the name of this man, by an elderly Bengali gentleman… in Kolkata. I remember the date… it was 8th June 2004… there was something very special about the day. It was a 'Transit of Venus'. I didn’t know this… in the morning I woke up… decided to go to Kumartuli… a Kolkata suburb famous for its huge workshops that makes clay images of Durga… and every other conceivable personalities on earth… Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly and Saddam Hussein. While walking down from the by-lanes of Kumartuli towards the metro station… I met a bunch of excited people… who were glued to some astronomical gadgets… I asked what it was…

"Why young men… don’t you know its Transit of Venus"… the elderly gentleman then told me about the importance of the event and how the next such event would happen only in 2012 and then never in our lifetimes. It was a big event. I saw the Transit of Venus. Later that gentleman invited me to his house that was nearby… the name plate in his old Kolkata home read N.C. Bandopadhyay (I didn’t dare to ask him his name, he was authoritative to say the least)… his house was in a dilapidated state… as more or less every other house in this Kolkata suburb was. He offered me some plain water, 'sandesh' and some words about the importance of this event… and how it had helped us in understanding the universe. It helped us in calculating the distance between Sun and Earth… by simple trigonometry.

It is nothing but when Venus comes in between Sun and Earth… thus causing a small eclipse… it's like a black dot traveling across the sun… the event happens in pairs… like 2004 and 2012…

Earlier, it happened on 1874 and 1882… and even earlier on 1761 and 1769… the story of Le Gentil happened then.

The methodology to measure Distance between Sun and Earth (known then as astronomical unit) was developed by Kepler and subsequent Kepler followers. The idea was to see the transit from different points and calculate the total time of transit from there and use parallax method and simple trigonometry to calculate the distance. This method was first tested in 1761, when hundreds of scientists from Europe traveled far and wide to Africa, South America, North America, Siberia, Asia… to find suitable points to observe the Transit…. One such man, Le Gentil mounted an expedition to India… Pondicherry, to be precise. Before this, he was a not-so-great astronomer… having discovered a few heavenly bodies… but after this trip… he became famous for something he never thought… his travelogue.

He set out for India in 1760… via Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius… the same route, as was taken by Vasco Da Gama. The journey was going along nicely… and he arrived in Mauritius, ahead of schedule… what else he could have asked for… he took a ship to Pondicherry, when the misfortune struck.

In 1758, almost taking a cue from the 7-year war between the French plus Austrian forces and British plus Prussian forces in Europe… the two forces also clashed in India… popularly known as the Third and the decisive Carnatic War. The French side, which had seen great victories in the First and Second Carnatic war under the leadership of great Dupleix, lost this war badly… and that was the end of great French dream to win India…. By 1761, Pondicherry had fallen to the British… and it was end of Le Gentil's dream to observe the Transit of Venus. He could have taken the observation from the high-seas… but even that was not allowed by the British Naval forces, which forced him to return to Mauritius.

Heartbroken… Le Gentil made up his mind to wait for 8 more years to observe the Transit… but the question he faced was what to do for these 8 years… he set up an observatory in Mauritius… went to Madagascar… discovered hitherto unknown places over there… and waited. Then he went to Philippines… and made up his mind to observe it in Manila… but then fate was never with him…. In 1768-69, France and Spain clashed over the some territories in the North America… (This event in history is known as Rebellion of 1768)… and then the tensions between the two rose… Philippines, at that time, was a Spanish colony… and they forced Le Gentil to leave Manila…

Le Gentil came back to Pondicherry… by then it was firmly under the control of French. He set up an observatory and waited for the fateful day… but the day turned out to be cloudy… he couldn’t observe the Transit. He couldn’t observe it ever… and to think of it, Le Gentil's entire career was about trying to see it.

Le Gentil left India… but his misfortune didn’t leave him… he fell for a mysterious illness… and was forced to disembark the ship at Reunion Island….. He stayed there, almost anonymously, till he was rescued by a Spanish ship (yeah a Spanish ship!!! Aren't the ways of life amazing)…

When he returned back… he found that he had been declared dead, his wife had remarried, his wealth had been plundered…. And he was a pauper… he rebuilt his life from scratch and wrote a book on his experience… "Travel in the seas of India, made by order of King, during the passage of Venus on the disc of the Sun"… it became a huge commercial success and he lived happily ever after.

Amazing isn’t it. His travels are a tribute to many scientists and discoverers who set out to change the world… some of them… and very few of them found their place under the sun… most of them perished unknown… unsung… his story is a tribute to them all…

And what is more interesting… is that his story is linked with the history of India… Carnatic War… was an event that changed the course of history in India… and then it is related to one of my wanderings near Kolkata…

As French saying goes…

"One often meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it"… Le Gentil accidentally met his destiny… Some day I will also meet my destiny in some corner of this mother earth.