When Halley’s Paramore set sail, turn-of-the-century London was prospering amid an incredible bloom of ambition and intellect. In fashionably seedy parts of the city, coffeehouses buzzed with contentious questions of the day. Famous wits and poets like John Dryden mingled with scientific elite of the Royal Society, politicos, dilettantes, and others searching for inspiration or just the latest news and gossip. They frequented such haunts as the Prince of Orange, Muss’s, and Garraway’s Coffeehouse near the Royal Exchange. Most popular with Royal Society regulars like Halley was Jonathan’s, according to the diary of leading experimenter Robert Hooke, off Cornhill and Lombard streets. Imbibing Turkish coffees and blowing whiffs off long clay pipes, the regulars talked about more than just the affairs of the Crown or the colonies. Arguably the greatest book since the Bible had recently been published by Halley’s temperamental friend, Isaac Newton. It audaciously embraced much of the scope of Genesis. In his Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica (or Principia for short), Newton claimed to

disclose the underlying order of the universe—from the fall of an apple to the surges of tides, from the orbit of Jupiter to the blazing ominous trails of comets.

“No longer does error oppress doubtful mankind,” said Halley, who had shepherded the work. “Things which so often tormented the minds of ancient Sages, we perceive.” It was almost like he sounded a trumpet to herald a new age.

London had recovered from its Great Fire of 1666, but several planned ornaments, such as Sir Christopher Wren’s domed St. Paul’s Cathedral, had yet to dominate the skyline. King William III of Orange and Queen Mary II comfortably shared the power of the Crown. Their unusual double coronation coincided with the publication of John Locke’s two treatises on government. That 1689 changeover in power altered thinking about individual liberties and politics and soon came to be called the Glorious Revolution and produced a bill of rights and law common to all. Despite all this—or maybe because of it—London society roiled with contradictions.

Social leaders espoused the values of virtue, public spirit, and liberty, but public corruption and private vice were rampant. As political pamphleteer Edward Stephens described it in a pamphlet circulated that year, William had freed England from the “abomination of popery,” but “debauchery and impiety remained.” William and Mary took his commentary seriously enough to officially respond to it in writing in 1690. They handed down proclamations against vice, immorality, and corruption. Societies soon formed to stifle bawdy houses and the like in the Tower Hamlets, a borough near the Tower of London. The Society for the Reformation of Manners, for one, paid informers to rein in private vice. Such societies themselves were conflicted: Their members valued prosperity and pleasure for themselves while relegating other humans idle and useless.

Soon after the Paramore’s send-off, postings from the East Indies in late November relayed that a London privateer known as Captain Kidd, once supported by King William, had gone pirate and captured

a rich Arabian ship and Portuguese and Dutch ones as well. “But ’tis hope this advice is not proved true in all circumstances,” one article concluded.

The most eagerly followed news announced the arrivals and departures of ships in London. Published no more than three times a week and mainly circulated in coffeehouses, newspapers also carried accounts of mutiny and piracy at sea with a frequency that made such treachery seem commonplace. People were not afraid to show their displeasure—and newspapers wrote about it.

Sir Francis Child was sworn in as lord mayor of the City of London in early November 1698 before the Barons of the Exchequer. Child went by water to Westminster (then outside London’s walls) and returned to the Guildhall, the seat of government of the City of London, with the usual ceremonies. The civic rite didn’t go as seamlessly as William and Mary’s coronation. “There was no squibs thrown but the mob was very rude and threw dirt upon the balconies,” according to the Post Man, a London two-page tabloid.

Details from the lives of Europe’s sundry royalty also garnered top billing in the London rags, which besides the Post Man included the London Gazette, Post Boy, and the Flying Post. Reports from Paris, Lisbon, and Europe’s other great cities were prominently featured. The papers also gave considerable ink to newly published books, revealing London society’s respect for literature of any caliber. Given that most issues ran merely two pages, even a brief mention was significant. The first daily paper, the Daily Courant, wouldn’t be launched for another four years.

Advertisements that trailed the news accounts provide a random cross section of London at the time Halley set sail. A promotion for a looking glass to detect kidnappers hyped the said device as “an infallible method to prevent the notorious villains in the future.” It could reveal “their hellish and odious intrigues, monstrous designs, and notorious villainies in their base, though cunning wheedles and cursed inventions to entrap, decoy, and delude men, women, and children to fell them and be made slaves or into strange countries for

base gain and lucre fate.” There was a pitch for insurance for widows from the Office of the Society of Assurance for Widows. Other ads touted such health remedies as Tinctura Caelestis, “the celebrated medicine of the age,” for gout, apoplexy, and rheumatism, and as Capital Salt, “an admiral remedy for diseases of the head such as vertigo or migraine, headache, hypochondriac passions, and vapors.”

The Royal Society also shamelessly plugged offerings from its flagship journal. For example, around the time of Halley’s departure on the Thames, the society ran an ad touting its exploits in an October issue of the Post Man. It began: “Philosophical Transactions giving some account of the present undertakings, studies and labors of the ingenuous in many parts of the world, continued by Dr. Hans Sloane, Secretary to the Royal Society …” and touted letters concerning Roman antiquities found in Yorkshire and another on the characteristics of some Indian plants. (Sloane was already a noted physician and naturalist.)

WITH ITS INTERNATIONAL DISPATCHES and sea trade, its mix with the Dutch, French, Spanish, Americans, and Germans, the West and East Indies, London was a flagship city of the world. Halley was born and bred in that metropolis of opportunity, a city where ties with London global trading companies could make a career. For Halley, his connections with the Levant Company in particular, which helped him secure voyage in 1676 to St. Helena, were forged through his marriage and other acquaintances about Winchester Street, a neighborhood an easy walk from the Tower of London.

Halley spent his boyhood in this core ward of the city where London’s most successful merchants lived. His father was a soap boiler who set up shop and kept at least one family home in this prime neighborhood and owned a substantial number of other city properties. He was a well-to-do freeman of the Salter’s Company, which was one of the most politically powerful London companies at the time.

Halley was a very sociable personality, scholars believe, forming associations with prominent Londoners from many different reli-

gious and political persuasions, including nonbelievers and the pious, Whigs and Tories alike. Members of the Levant Company, on the one hand, were mainly Whigs, affiliated with the more liberal political party that strongly supported the installment of William and Mary as rulers. Many of his other associates were reputed Tories or generally conservatives, some of whom also supported the removal of James II in the so-called Bloodless Revolution in 1689. In the confused December days in 1688 before the convention voted to grant Prince William of Orange the English throne, Halley had socialized with reputed Tories Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren at their favorite coffeehouses. His eclectic mix of patronage and connections likely helped him secure means for his major scientific endeavors, including his journey aboard the Paramore.

And it was there in London where he first glimpsed the ominous comet of 1680 that would inspire both Halley and Newton to achieve greatness. Many viewed this bright comet, visible to the naked eye, as an unmistakable warning flare from God. Divine portent or not, it was awesome by all accounts. The fiery comet seemed to appear from nowhere and then fade just as quickly over a period of weeks. Not only its path but also its very physical nature was a mystery. Halley witnessed the quirky orbiting object in November just before he went on a tour of France and Italy (a rite of passage for young gentlemen as part of their education). He traveled with another Royal Society fellow named Robert Nelson, a colleague from his childhood neighborhood who became a religious writer and philanthropist and friend for life.

En route to Paris, the duo saw the mysterious comet again. On reaching the city of lights, Halley immediately tracked down the French-born, Italian-educated Giovanni Domenico Cassini. The revered astronomer was made director of the Paris Observatory in 1669 and would remain so for life. After reading an elaborate letter of introduction from England’s Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed, Cassini welcomed Halley, and they recorded a series of observations on the comet tracking its path as best they could through the stars. To

Halley, Cassini’s instruments and facility, which was completed in 1672 at the behest of King Louis XIV, paled in comparison to those at the disposal of Flamsteed at the Greenwich Observatory, finished three years later in 1675. (Sited on a picturesque knoll then several miles outside London and founded “for perfecting the art of navigation,” the stargazing station was England’s first official science building. The incarnation of the rival observatories ushered in a new era in astronomy. Before these observatories were built, observers had to build, equip, and fund their own facilities. Both institutions would prove instrumental to Halley’s calling.)

Despite his partiality to Greenwich, Halley valued his stay with Cassini, meeting French savants like Henri Justel, then secretary to the Sun King, Louis the XIV. Halley noted in a letter to Robert Hooke that at the time “the general talk of the virtuosi here is about the Comet.” Justel would soon emigrate to England, seeking religious freedom. There he was tapped by William’s predecessor to be Charles II’s librarian.

At the time of Halley’s tour, Louis XIV was in the process of moving his court wholesale to Versailles. Abandoning the centrally situated Louvre palace by the Seine, he sought to be as separate as possible from the Parisian masses. At Versailles he would impose a rigid court etiquette that virtually reduced the nobility to mere courtiers. To further protect his power base, he elevated more easily manipulated commoners to posts as ministers and regional governors. Amid the extreme opulence of the gilded palace and its expansive gardens, more than 500 cooks prepared his meals and 4,000 servants catered to the French king’s every whim. Meanwhile, his dragoons were busy harassing French Protestants.

Halley took up the mystery of the 1680 comet again just before his Paramore voyage. This time around, some 15 years after his first observation, he could try to apply some of Newton’s theories to the problem. But when the Paramore was finally ready to sail, Halley put all else aside. The completion of his work on the orbits of comets would have to wait.

IF THE CUSP OF THE 18TH CENTURY entailed an ascendancy of science, a time when natural history began to fully challenge sacred history, then contemporary thought finally was rivaling, if not surpassing, the best of ancient Greeks and Romans. And Halley was determined to enlarge his role in this transformation. His drive to take science from the mere theoretical realm was intense enough for him to endanger his life at sea, a risk completely unnecessary for the financial success of a man of his class and stature. Yet the nonmonetary rewards seemed worthwhile. Halley sensed that many of the ideas that were around during this time would build the framework for modern thought. The roots of such future disciplines as archaeology, natural history, geology, and paleontology and workable systems of classification and taxonomy were emerging to guide the way knowledge is organized and used for centuries to come.

Not surprisingly, in this transitional time, which would be defined almost a century later as the early Enlightenment, London’s public opinion was volatile and very much up for grabs. The papers of Royal Society thinkers were often so radical they prompted at once popular interest and criticism. In this tumultuous social clime, a series of disputes over the very essence of knowledge erupted. Chief among them, the so-called Battle of the Books busied London’s printing presses. Simply put, the battle among English gentlemen pitted old against new, ancients versus moderns. The struggle would determine whether the ways of the past or those of the present should exert more influence on the future.

On the side of modernity were the Royal Society intellects of Halley, Newton, Wren, Hooke, and more. Such titans of science were beginning to establish a foothold in London culture. A group of 12 men had officially founded the Royal Society, London’s eminent scientific group, in November 1660 after a lecture by polymath Wren at Gresham College. Wren, a mathematician, astronomer, and architect, is often credited with designing, among other things, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, but it was actually the work of Hooke. Wren, however, picked its hilltop site. Twenty years earlier at Oxford, Wren

had forged advances in the telescope, such as improvements to micrometers invented by William Gascoigne, that transformed the telescope’s use from a tool for making qualitative observations to one capable of astronomical measurements. The movable wire scales in the eyepiece, for example, enabled a viewer to measure angles necessary to discern planetary positions from nearby stars. The Royal Society met weekly to witness scientific experiments and to discuss the new philosophy and assorted science topics. Charles II issued the first charter for the society in 1662. Unlike the Academie des Sciences de Paris, established in 1666 by King Louis XIV chiefly to improve maps and charts, Royal Society members neither received salaries from the king nor were they directed to solve specific problems. They were free to pursue individual interests and passions. For a time after the London fire of 1666, the society met at Arundel House, the London home of the Duke of Norfolk.

Since its beginnings, criteria for being nominated for election to the all-London club were rather vague. Reinforcing a system of patronage of the sciences for the first two centuries of its existence, wealthy amateurs and important men from church and state would fill the ranks along with meritorious scientists. (Members of the aristocracy were essentially automatically accepted.) Francis Bacon and his experimental natural philosophy, the “new philosophy” or system based on empirical and inductive principles and the active development of new arts and inventions, greatly influenced the original fellows—dilettantes and savants alike. Experimental philosophers strove to use science to produce practical knowledge as a means for bettering humankind, goals to which Halley aspired.

Early in his career in 1678, the Royal Society honored Halley as a fellow. He joined the likes of founders Robert Boyle, his one-time sponsor; Robert Hooke, the society’s first curator of experiments; and Locke, a scientist in his own right. Boyle was known for experiments in which he used an air pump to unravel the laws of mechanics, heat, and air pressure. He sought evidence of God’s will in the intricate workings of nature, which he dubbed “argument by design.” Besides

presenting experiments at society meetings, Hooke made significant contributions to microscopic observation, among other things. In 1665 he published his key work, Micrographia, which laid out the philosophy of “mechanism,” whereby the world was assembled like a pocketwatch by none other than God, “the Great Mechanic.” To Hooke the quest for natural knowledge entailed the discovery of new instruments to precisely probe naturally occurring phenomena. Many also knew Hooke for his discovery that the cork plant has a honeycomb structure of little chambers, which he dubbed cells.

The opposing faction of literati raging against the modernity machine included the formidable pen of Jonathan Swift. The clan of wits would later be joined by Alexander Pope, the mostly home-schooled London poet and satirist who came to epitomize English neoclassicism. Raised in Dublin, Swift first came to London in 1688, when the anti-Catholic revolt roiled Ireland, to live with Sir William Temple, a relative of his mother. Swift, somewhat begrudgingly, would serve on and off for the next decade, between jaunts back to Ireland, as secretary to the diplomat who had negotiated the marriage of then Prince William of Orange with the English Princess Mary.

In England the battle of intellects began in 1690—two years after a similar controversy ignited in France. Temple, then in his 60s and an established confidant to several English kings, published Of Ancient and Modern Learning, an essay that promoted classical methods over modern. It touted older works like Aesop’s Fables and the Epistles of Phalaris as among the best literature available and disparaged modern arts and sciences.

Temple contended that “printing has increased copies rather than the quality or number of great books; that the earliest philosophers were the best; and despite the claims of Descartes and Hobbes no modern ones have excelled [surpassed] Plato and Aristotle.” Temple’s criticisms of modern thought extended to these vain scientists as “busying a man’s brains to no purpose.” In fact, modern “science had produced nothing to vie with the ancients, unless it be Copernicus’s Theory [that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not the other

way round], or [the anatomist William] Harvey’s [discovery of the] circulation of the blood. But since these hypotheses have not changed [the broader practices] of Astronomy or Medicine, they are of little use. Moreover, the earlier age was superior in music, rhyming, magic, and architecture. In fact the only great discovery of modern times is the loadstone, whence has come [modern] navigation and [greater] geographical knowledge [such as the discovery of America, a continent wholly unknown to the Ancients]. But even here we have fallen short. Exploration has become tainted with commerce and has lost sight of the improvement of man.”

Temple’s essay prompted a flurry of scrutiny by emerging intellects mostly in their late 20s to mid-30s. The wunderkid William Wotton quickly rebuked his claims in an essay published in 1694, and a young Richard Bentley further refuted them in a 1697 dissertation.

Swift, roughly 30 and by then ordained as an Anglican priest, and Charles Boyle, still an undergraduate, rushed to Temple’s defense. In rebuttles released before Halley set sail, they took Bentley on directly. Swift’s Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday, Between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James Library, completed in 1697, wouldn’t be published until 1704, after Temple’s death. A second collaborative work with Boyle would appear in print in 1698. The London satirist Alexander Pope, who was often derided by his critics as a “hunchbacked toad,” would continue the defense of literary classicism, in his An Essay on Criticism, which included the infamous line “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” It derived standards of taste from the natural order and was published in 1711, when Pope was 23.

Soon after the Battle of the Books erupted, a related conflict between science and religion surged. This time the skirmish was fought over Earth’s history. Natural forces like gravity and laws of motion—now explained by Newton—could be applied to creation, the deluge, and the pending apocalypse or consumption of Earth by fire that was believed to await humankind. Thomas Burnet, master of the charterhouse, published the work that provoked this parallel contro-

versy in the late 1680s. It was probably the boldest endeavor to reconcile the competing accounts of religion and science. In the work, titled Telluris Theoria Sacra, Burnet denounced the notion of divine intervention. He posited that, instead, Noah’s flood was transpired by a series of inevitable physical phenomena.

Halley became associated with this school of thought, though perhaps unjustly, thanks to his discussions on the deluge which he would publish many years later. The Royal Society types denounced Burnet’s take on science but sanctioned his ideas about natural law’s role in the machinations of divine will. By their logic, God was more likely to function through immutable physical laws than like a fastidious watchman. Burnet would also go on to reexamine creationism through the lens of such philosophy. Despite these distinctions, the association would prove costly for Halley.

Swift, that feisty figure in the battle, would exercise his satire on Halley and his colleagues even before he skewered science and politics in his well-known Gulliver’s Travels. (On Gulliver’s third voyage, science is portrayed as futile unless used for human betterment.) Referring to Halley in a similar spirit, Swift wrote: “To him, we owe all the observations on the Parallax of the Pole-star, and all the new Theories of the Deluge … Tide-Tables, for a Comet, that is to approximate towards the Earth.” His satire purports that the general public was not interested in Halley’s masterful application of theories of comets or the specific intricacies in his tables. Taking on the whole Royal Society, Swift said: “If Scepsis Scientifica comes to me, I will burn it for a fustian piece of abominable curious virtuoso stuff.”

Scepsis Scientifica, probably the best-known work of Joseph Glanvill, defended the new “experimental philosophy,” the promotion of which had been the focus of the Royal Society since 1660. The work was subtitled Confest Ignorance: The Way for Science. Glanvill argued that, without the Royal Society’s pursuit of natural history, “our hypotheses are but dreams and romances, and our science mere conjecture and opinion.” Even if this new science failed to explain

phenomena, he reckoned, it could advance agriculture, mining, and more. It is pleasant “to behold shifts, windings, and unexpected Caprichios of the distressed Nature, when pursued by a close and well-managed experiment,” he wrote. Halley, in the thick of the battle, glibly countered Swift’s attack. To him it was clear that moderns already exceeded the ancients. And astronomy was so much improved that “I had almost said Perfected.”

In light of the difficult transition English society faced at the time, such a war of words full of satire smacks of folly. It seemed a superfluous waste of time when graver matters were at stake. Indeed, some scholars have argued that the war was actually more about the status of scholarship in society than about the clash between ancient and modern literature—the elitist scholar versus the layperson. No matter how complex its underlying nature, the controversy touched a public nerve. To be sure, the notion of a meshing of popularized science and religion was, at minimum, intriguing.

PERHAPS DUE IN PART TO HIS FAR-RANGING interests, Halley at age 29 was elected to serve the Royal Society’s two honorary secretaries as clerk in 1685, more than a decade before his voyage. In this role, which required knowledge of Latin and at least a reading knowledge of French, he facilitated correspondence among the age’s leading thinkers and was able to further explore questions that intrigued him. Besides corresponding with the world’s elite on familiar topics of astronomy and mathematics, he discussed observation techniques with the Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and conversed with many other science greats about such nascent fields as geology, geography, physics, and engineering.

During much of this time, Halley also edited the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the society’s banner publication first printed in 1665 and regularly since 1690 (making it today the oldest scientific journal in continuous publication). The scientific journal was in essence invented by the German-born Henry Oldenburg, one

of the first two secretaries of the Royal Society. Data, experimental findings, and related theories now were widely circulated in a more timely fashion instead of being relegated to archives for compilation and study. Academies on the continent, such as the French Academie Royale, would also begin publishing similar periodicals.

At the time of Halley’s voyage, however, the Royal Society was floundering. By 1698 the royally sanctioned coterie of intellectuals and dabblers had fallen on rough times despite its showing during the Battle of the Books. Its rolls had been plummeting for the past two decades. Although most of its illustrious members like Newton, Hooke, Wren, and Sloane remained, several of its founders, including Robert Boyle, had died. In the past three years the society had lost 60 members, shrinking to just over 110, less than half the number in 1670. Of these, roughly a third could be considered men of science. For the most part the ruling class gave it little financial support. For the past decade, nine different men had been elected to and held the office of president, only one of whose background could classify him as a scientist. That president was Sir Christopher Wren. And only about 10 (or 8.4 percent) of the fellows were members of the nobility and wealthy classes, down from 11 percent since the association’s founding.

Halley had proved adept at keeping the society afloat during these lean years. At a minimum, he helped keep the society’s key journal in print during this time. But he also skillfully moderated disputes that arose. With so many key questions unanswered in the world and institutions, personal beliefs, and priority claims under assault, it’s not surprising that competing theories sparked bitter rivalries. Many such feuds were aired in the pages of Philosophical Transactions. The society called on Halley to intervene in the bitter skirmish between Danzig’s doyen of astronomy Johannes Hevelius and the relentless Robert Hooke over telescopic sighting technology. Halley also tried his best to quell the almost calamitous bout between Newton and Hooke over who had first come up with one of the core ideas published in Principia. (Both battles will be detailed in later chapters.)

But Halley was not above throwing his own intellectual barbs either. He would eventually alienate his former teacher, England’s first Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed. But despite all this inner strife, many saw new hope for the Royal Society with the ascendancy of King William and Queen Mary in 1688.

IRONICALLY, HALLEY MIGHT NOT HAVE taken his adventurous sea voyage at all if not for troubles with that bastion of conservatism, the Church of England. Many thought he deserved the prestigious astronomy chair of his former professor, Edward Bernard, when the latter retired in 1691 as Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. Sir Henry Savile endowed the geometry and astronomy chairs at Oxford in 1619 to further mathematical and scientific thought. Even before his voyage, Halley, prominent from his work and association with Newton, seemed a natural choice. Both his alma mater, Queen’s College, and the Royal Society submitted letters of praise. But there was a catch: The Church of England had to sanction his appointment as even Savile desired those holding the position to be “elected from among men of good character and reputable lives, out of any Christendom” as long as they had “in the first instance drawn the purer philosophy from the fountains of Aristole and Plato.”

Religion dominated English life. And the church expected the staff of English universities, which were founded first and foremost to train the clergy, to practice religious orthodoxy. That had been the policy since passage of the Act of Uniformity in 1662, which mandated observance of the Articles of Religion of 1562 and added the requirement to the Book of Common Prayer. The teaching staff or fellows were mainly young men seeking eventual careers in the church, which forbade them to marry.

The church’s dominance over the universities also hindered Newton’s advancement at Cambridge. Despite his established piety, it is well documented that early on in his career Newton had trouble accepting the Holy Trinity as doctrine. Newton and Halley’s religious stances, not helped by the largely “godless” first edition of the

Principia, are still fodder for academic debate. Newton added an argument to later editions that the physical world was created by an “Imperator,” or otherworldy “Pancreator,” but those editions didn’t appear until the early 1700s, and rumors abounded that Newton was not a true Anglican, perhaps even a heretic.

Halley’s problems were equally serious. Some powerful church men had branded him a skeptic, perhaps even an atheist. Specifically, they accused him of harboring unorthodox views based on some of his writings, including his introductory ode to Newton’s Principia. Once their charges were levied, no matter their basis, Halley was responsible for proving himself innocent, which in the prevailing climate presented a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

Opposition from the Church of England also likely stemmed from Halley’s public discussions in 1687 of one of the Old Testament’s most dramatic stories: the biblical deluge. He irked the clergy by applying the latest science in gravity and magnetism to explain such sacred biblical dramas. Halley weighed in on an idea, originally proposed by Hooke, that rapid reversals of the north to south geomagnetic poles may have caused the epic flood that gave rise to Noah’s Ark. Hooke suggested that such an event would cause the oceans to swell at the equator and flood the lands, as described in the Bible.

Halley expanded on the premise and got deeper into trouble. On the basis of observations made regarding minuscule shifts in measurements of latitude in Nuremberg over the course of the past few centuries, Halley argued that the shifts in the Earth’s poles were extremely gradual. He contended that if Hooke’s hypothesis were true, the flood must have occurred long before the time the religious experts estimated the world was created. He made the following introductory remarks to his paper, which he presented to the Royal Society:

His words abraded many devout nerve endings. Yet even Halley knew better than to challenge biblical chronology too directly, so he proposed that something else—likely an external phenomenon like the impact of a comet or other astronomical body—must have triggered the flood. Or perhaps even the gravitational effects of a near collision sent Noah to his ark. This would also have helped explain the suddenness of such an event. Halley’s crashing comet idea proved inaccurate, but his application of historical data to a scientific query proved a powerful contrivance.

In Halley’s opinion, charges of heresy were levied against him only because the ideas in his paper were misconstrued. He had, in fact, credited comets with playing a dominant role in the divine plan in the paper he presented to the Royal Society in 1694. While he did also offer a theory on the deluge, it was hardly as radical as that of William Whiston, a mathematician, who would succeed Newton as Lucasion Professor at Cambridge. Whiston offered a detailed theory on a link between comets and creationism, the deluge, and even the apocalyptic millennium. So now comets, once thought to be harbingers of great catastrophes, had a new role as predetermined devices of the final judgment, in Whiston’s view. The church also caught up with Whiston. Though a clergyman, he was eventually expelled from his professorship in 1710 for denying the doctrine of the Trinity—a change of belief influenced by Newton. For the most part, however, Newton took the secret of his own anti-Trinitarian views to the grave.

Halley himself thought that the account in Genesis omitted the collision’s details not because of any oversight but merely because of the poor scientific comprehension of the day. So at the core, his views still conformed with the teachings of the church. In his view, as in Newton’s, science could be the companion of religion.

Halley’s critics, like Newton’s, failed to appreciate such nuances. To them, his defense of his work was an affront to, not a validation of, the great Christian tradition of humankind’s history and nature.

Due to the closed-door process of the screenings, Halley didn’t know that the charges extended beyond his deluge theory. A powerful bishop named Edward Stillingfleet opposed his candidacy on the grounds that Halley was a “skeptic and banterer of religion.” Halley met face to face with Stillingfleet, or at least his intermediary, Richard Bentley, in an effort to sway the bishop. According to one third-hand account, Halley told Stillingfleet that he “believed a God and that is all.” Given his skills in diplomacy, it’s unlikely Halley would make such an overtly contentious statement. No matter: Stillingfleet was unmoved by Halley’s arguments. He believed the alleged skeptic was hiding his true sentiments. Others questioned Halley as well and were unsatisfied with his responses.

Historians find scant evidence supporting the allegations that Halley was an infidel. He was certainly a Christian, though an unorthodox one, it is agreed. Two letters penned in 1686 during his first year as clerk of the Royal Society, one in English and one in Latin, seem to back up the assertion. In the letters he details a “calico shirt brought from India woven without a seam, all in one piece” and writes that the shirt explains the scriptural mention “of our Savior’s coat which was without seam.”

Evidently the letters were fulfilling one of Halley’s responsibilities as clerk: reporting on odd phenomena. (He also filed correspondence on such topics as a child with six fingers and six toes and a 37-year-old “little Man” in France who stood 16 inches tall and was practically dwarfed by his beard.)

Halley couldn’t foresee that another observation made during his

college years would later be used to slander him. Apparently while charting stars on the remote Atlantic island of St. Helena, Halley made the acquaintance of a couple who were expecting a child. Curiously, to Halley, the expectant mother was 52, the father 55. He reported the odd pregnancy to the society. According to Royal Society fellow John Aubrey, an older contemporary of Halley, “There went over with him (amongst others) a woman and her husband who had no child in several years, before he came from the Island and the woman was brought to bed of a child.”

Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed spread rumors not only that Halley fathered the child of the 52-year-old woman on St. Helena but also that he seduced Hevelius’s wife, Elizabeth, on a visit there in 1679. Some scholars suggest that Flamsteed, 10 years Halley’s senior, who had once helped advance Halley’s career, became threatened by his achievements and may have been the one pulling the strings behind the scenes to thwart Halley’s candidacy.

In a letter to Newton at the time about Halley’s candidacy for the Savilian professorship, Flamsteed wrote that Halley would “corrupt the youth of the University with his lewd discourse.” In another letter to Newton several months later, Flamsteed continued his rant against his former protégé:

“But I hate his ill manners, not the man,” Flamsteed conceded. “Were he either honest or but civil there is none in whose company I could rather desire to be.” Even Flamsteed wouldn’t have stooped so low as to brand Halley himself an infidel, as one scholar points out. Newton never would have maintained a relationship with Halley if that charge were the least bit true. In the end, however, the Oxford chair was awarded to a less controversial Scotsman, David Gregory. Unlike Halley, Gregory was a true disciple of Newton, beholden to his patronage; Halley was more his peer than his protégé in the complex hierarchy of London society.

In time the writings of Halley, Burnet, Hooke, and others on the great deluge led to a new approach to evaluate biblical evidence using rational analysis. But Halley wouldn’t freely discuss such views publicly for several decades. He wouldn’t actually feel at liberty to publish “Some Considerations About the Cause of the Universal Deluge” until the controversy with the Church of England was long over. The issue of Halley’s religious convictions remains unresolved.

Unfazed by the seemingly egregious slight, Halley was content to move ahead. He had won enough influence in and about London to realize an ambitious mission that on its face seemed next to impossible. He hoped to make an irrefutable intellectual contribution by service at sea. In many ways the long voyage would sate his adventurous appetite for knowledge better than any cozy university perch, and the isolation of a ship might offer some welcome tranquility. Whether findings from his Paramore voyage would tilt any key arguments of the day remained an open question as his sails finally caught a breeze out of London.

Halley sailed with the controversy sparked by the Battle of the Books still resonating in his mind. As the king’s confidant, Temple had said:

So Halley’s quest had become something more than an inaugural science voyage. It was also part of the struggle to boost humankind’s faith in itself. If Halley hoped his wanderings aboard the Paramore might produce tangible benefits for mariners, he also perhaps hoped it would help sway public sentiment in the never-ending War of Words.