'Hokuloa' well worth the effort
HOKULOA: The British 1874 Transit of Venus Expedition to Hawai'i, by Michael Chauvin; Bishop Museum Press, hardback, $26.95
By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
There is a genre of books that might be called literary science. It is especially appealing to those who, like me, have much more interest in science than aptitude for it.
Setting aside childhood fairy tales and fiction, one of the first books I acquired as a teenager, and one I still treasure, is anthropologist Loren Eiseley's classic "The Immense Journey" (1959). Since then, I have spent pleasant hours with a number of other gracefully written books of science — Jonathan Weiner's "The Beak of the Finch" (1995) comes to mind, as does practically everything written by Oliver Sacks, including the most recent for me, "Oaxaca Journal" (1992), about an excursion during which he pursued his passion for the lower forms of fern life.
And while I cannot honestly say I have understood everything I have read in these books, I certainly enjoyed them, allowing myself to be carried along, confused at times but still trusting, by the author's elegant language and skillful storytelling.
Honolulu astronomer Michael Chauvin's writing in "Hokuloa" does not quite rise to the poetic heights of Eiseley's essays, nor to the charming idiosyncrasies of Sacks' work. However, this timely publication from the Bishop Museum Press definitely belongs to that class of books written by scientists but meant to be appreciated by a broader audience. You have to be patient enough to pick your way carefully along a trail littered with unfamiliar terms, and humble enough to allow your beleaguered, math- and diagram-phobic brain to be challenged.
The story that emerges is worth the effort.
It is the story of a British expedition to Hawai'i, part of a worldwide effort to observe, chart and photograph the rare "Transit of Venus" — an astrological event that occurs more than a century apart, during which the planet Venus, called Hokuloa ("big star") in Hawaiian, passes in front of the sun and can be seen as a black dot moving steadily across the glowing surface.
The point of the expedition had little to do with Venus, however. The point was to use cross-referenced calculations made from sites around the world, including three in Hawai'i, to determine the distance from the Earth to the sun and to accurately trace the scale of the solar system. Also — not so coincidentally for the governments involved — scientists would use what was learned to more reliably compute longitude and thus become better able to survey, map and, one assumes, claim territory, a practical application that helped tip the British admiralty's hand in favor of financing the expedition in that colonial age.
The aforementioned timeliness of the book is that astronomers are looking forward to another Transit of Venus next week, the first since 1882. (The 1882 event was actually the twin of the one covered in this book, as transits occur in pairs eight years apart). In 2004, rather than watching the transit by means of arcane equipment and images projected by crude telescopes onto pieces of paper, Hawai'i folk will be able to watch a live Webcast of the event from 7 to 11 p.m. June 7 in Bishop Museum's Atherton Halau ($4 adults, $3 children, free to museum members).
Adopting here a verbose style that matches the language of the book's time period, Chauvin, who has long had a scholarly interest in the history of astronomy in Hawai'i, employs the elaborate records kept by the expedition, as well as records and artifacts here in Hawai'i, to chronicle this little-known tale.
He introduces the dramatis personae, describes in detail the mass of equipment shipped here for their six months of preparatory work and tells of both the gracious welcome they received from King David Kalakaua and the hardships they encountered (some of them self-made), then chronicles the years of work that followed in organizing and employing the data at the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
Most importantly, he makes clear the importance of this small chapter in Hawai'i's and the world's history: the basis for key understandings of our universe were laid by this extraordinary effort.
Chauvin leaves no part of the story untold, but kindly organizes the book in such a way that those with extraordinary interest can find more esoteric detail at the back of the book while those who are reading for story get a chronological telling in the book's 35 short chapters. Of 262 pages, more than 100 are taken up with appendices, detailed notes on the photographs and plates, footnotes and a bibliography.
