Le Gentil

As you may or may not know, a Transit of Venus is one of the rarest predictable astronomical phenomena. It is when the planet Venus passes directly inline between the earth and the sun, and can be seen silhouetted against the sun as it passes in front of it. This doesn’t happen often, it happened in 2004 and will again in 2012 for the last time during our foreseeable lifetimes. Transits of Venus previous to these were in 1882 and 1874, 1769 and 1761 etc.

The transits that occurred in the 1700′s were of great scientific interest at the time, as it had been proposed that by measuring these transits from different points on the earth and throwing a bunch of trigonometry at the parallax, the distance from the earth to the sun could be calculated accurately.

Guillaume Le Gentil was a french astronomer, one of many adventurers who set off around the world to observe the transit of Venus and take the necessary measurements. He began his journey heading towards a french colony in India, but on his way war broke out between England and France, eventuating in the English occupation of the colony he was headed for and the boat he was on doing a u-turn. He was at sea when the transit occurred and the rocking of the boat made it impossible for him to take the measurements with any degree of accuracy.

So Le Gentil decided since he had already come so far (I think he was somewhere in the southwest indian ocean) he may as well stay and observe the next Transit eight years later. He kept himself busy mapping the coast of Madagascar and decided he would go to the Philippines to for the next transit. However when he got to the Philippines he had trouble with the Spanish, so decided to return to the colony he had originally planned on watching the first transit from in India, Pondicherry. Which by this time was again occupied by the french. Arriving more than a year in advance he built himself an observatory in preparation for the big day.

On the eagerly anticipated day of the second transit, the day he’d been waiting for eight years for… the sky was overcast. Le Gentil couldn’t see a thing. He had failed.

But his bad luck didn’t end there, between dysentery and his ship being driven off course in a massive storm it took him two years to get home to paris. And when he did get home after an absence of eleven years in total, it was only to discover he’d been declared LEGALLY DEAD, his estate divided between his relatives, his wife married to someone else.

It’s a sad story, a play has been written about it, and an opera. And the other day I wrote lyrics about it from the perspective of his poor wife. Can you imagine what it must have been like for her? Husband decides not to stay out a few hours after work for drinks without saying anything, but to stay out 8 or so years after work without a word! Maybe he’d tried to write, I can’t imagine it being easy to get letters across the world in those days. But a letter than doesn’t reach you is as good as no letter at all.

I will give you some news about the band soon! I do actually have news, I’m just… waiting.

Talk soon <3 K xxx