Back in London, gossip buzzed that Halley’s crew had almost turned pirate on the mission. The speculation was fueled by the growing legend of Captain Kidd. The notorious one-time London privateer had became the “Scourge of the Indies” after his crew pillaged and plundered across the Indian Ocean. He was arrested in New York in June, a month before Halley’s return. Kidd would soon be extradited to Europe’s busiest city to stand trial by the Thames.

In Lieutenant Harrison’s case, the rumors of pirating schemes aboard the Paramore seem to have been just that. But other allegations against him were serious enough that Halley would get his day in court. In response to a letter outlining Halley’s charges, the Admiralty ordered a trial of Lieutenant Harrison.

The proceedings began July 3 aboard the Swiftsure, a frigate at port in the Downs. These calmer waters leading to the English Channel were sheltered by a series of sandbanks known as Goodwin Sands from the roiling waters of the North Sea. According to Pepys’s diary,

merchants seeking convoy to the Baltic would often congregate in the Downs.

It was an imposing sight. Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell presided. The Swiftsure was his ship. Nearly 50, Shovell was probably the most battle-savvy admiral of Halley’s day. After serving as second in command during numerous successful attacks from Dunkirk to Calais, he was promoted to be Admiral of the Blue in October 1696. Out of three classes of flagship officer, the distinguished admiral, flying under a blue flag, held the rear of an engagement. Shovell returned from sea to serve in Parliament in 1698, the year of Halley’s launch. He convoyed the king home from Holland in late October. In keeping with his prominent position, he sported a large emerald ring on his hand.

Three other admirals and eight captains comprised the formal court-martial panel. In addition to weighing Halley’s claims against Harrison, they probed the warrant officers’ actions, even though the Admiralty did not order it.

“I am sure that never any man was so used by a lieutenant as I have been, during the whole term of the voyage,” Halley contended, apologizing for any offense to their lordships.

True mutiny was uncommon but still occurred in Halley’s day. Sometimes it entailed bloodshed and takeover of a ship; other times it consisted of only passive defiance. Even in its tentative forms, mutiny was not taken lightly by the Royal Navy.

For his part, Lieutenant Harrison was probably lucky Halley hadn’t found a flag officer in the West Indies. Men were hanged at sea for offenses far milder than Harrison’s transgressions, but with no replacement at hand, Halley sought justice on shore. Away from land, admirals, in fact, had the power to have mutineers hanged on the spot—and they did. Death sentences could also be doled out for murder, desertion, striking an officer, cowardice, and aiding an enemy, that is, provided the fleet or a squadron’s commander in chief concurred with the guilty finding of a court-martial by a minimum of five captains.

One curiosity in the annals of mutiny at sea, popularly known as the “round robin,” emerged the year the Paramore set sail: It consisted of a piece of paper with two concentric circles scrawled on it. In the inner circle a group of sailors would “write what they have a mind to have done.” Then they’d all sign their names outside the inner circle but within the outer circle. In this way all were equally guilty of the act, with no leaders and no followers but an “orbicular” chain of command. A “mutinous and seditious paper” was first passed the very year Halley sailed, according to a deposition, aboard a merchant ship, the Fleet Frigott, when her captain denied his crew permission to take shore leave on Tenerife. Soon enough, savvy captains sometimes averted mutinies by intercepting such a paper in circulation on their ship. Given its novelty, though, it is unlikely that such a device was passed around by Halley’s crew.

LONDONERS AT LARGE ADORED a good hanging. And back in port mutineers were fair game—regardless of whether any semblance of justice was actually being served by the contemporary legal system. In the city, hanging “matches” were regularly held eight times a year—often enough to make the populace think twice before choosing crime as an avocation. These periodic civic holidays of sorts—albeit unofficial ones—could be considered the government-sanctioned blood sport of the age. By 1700, hundreds of crimes were in fact punishable by death—and the noose was the method du jour. Thousands of robbers, highwaymen, counterfeiters, and murderers swelled the rolls of the city’s 150 prisons; the overload contributed to the evolution of a thriving underworld within the penal system. Fortunately for the condemned the system couldn’t keep up with the rate of convictions; executions were implemented largely as deterrents to crime. Given the number of doomed inmates, excessive hangings would have sparked rebellion. Many felons managed to escape with their lives through bribes or sometimes by agreeing to be transported to the North American colonies or West Indies in exchange for pardons.

With deliberate pomp and splendor, London society glamorized

the dread execution. The condemned were garbed in bright colors and fanciful garments perhaps more fitting for a church ritual. Ordered according to the severity of their crimes, they paraded their fleeting notoriety along the procession route from their prison cells at Newgate or elsewhere to the gallows at Tyburn, where the first permanent scaffolding of punishment was established for felons and spectators in 1571. It was named for the nearby brook, which emptied into the Thames.

Meanwhile, traitors of the state were executed at the more salient Tower of London. For high treason the sentence became more elaborate. After hanging by the neck to reach an appropriate shade of blue, the prisoner was cut down and disemboweled while still breathing. The executioners then hacked the body into four parts. Its disposal was left to the monarchy. Conventional wisdom held that the cadavers of the damned harbored mystical healing properties. After an execution, physicians and body snatchers alike competed for such spoils once darkness fell.

Pirates, mutineers, and other nautical criminals like Captain Kidd were hung at low tide at Execution Dock in Wapping on the banks of the Thames. Masses watched from floating barges. The procession was typically led, from the Southwark prison called Marshalsea to the shore via London Bridge, by an Admiralty marshal on horseback brandishing a silver oar. The prisoner followed atop a cart flanked by a prison chaplain. Along the journey, the ill fated were permitted to stop at taverns and imbibe to the point of inebriation—though the practice was usually not to the chaplain’s liking. On reaching the Thames, as part of such rituals, the condemned were entitled to give a last speech. After the cart was pushed away, leaving the damned to dangle from the so-called fatal tree and the hangman’s noose to brusquely tighten, tradition called for three tides to engulf the body of the executed before it was extricated from the gallows. The bodies of infamous pirates like Kidd were then tarred and hung in irons along the Thames as a warning to other would-be mutineers and pirates.

When it came to Lieutenant Harrison’s fate, blood-thirsty Londoners would have to wait for another day. The court in fact found no evidence of mutiny aboard the Paramore:

Indeed Lieutenant Harrison would not be coming even remotely close to a painful gallows death, or Tyburn’s Tippet as it was called. Other factors probably weighed more heavily on ship. To begin with, it was unlikely that an officer like Admiral Shovell would rule against one of his own—a blueblood tarpaulin—in favor of a gentleman scientist.

Halley, believing he had overwhelmed the scales of evidence, was dumbfounded by the verdict. “Yesterday at the Court Martials I fully proved all that I had complained of against my Lieutenant and Officers,” he asserted. “But the court insisting upon my proof of actual disobedience to command, which I had not charged them with, but only with abusive language and disrespect. They were pleased only to reprimand them, and in their report have tenderly styled the abuses I suffered from them to have been only some grumblings such as usually happen on board small ships.”

In his mind Halley had skillfully and unequivocally revealed Harrison’s motives. “My Lieutenant has now declared that I had signally disobliged him, in the character I gave their Lordships of his book, about 4 years since, which therefore, I know to be the cause of his spite and malice to me, and it was my very hard fortune to have him joined with me, with this prejudice against me.” But such an impetus, Halley’s cerebral critique of the lieutenant’s longitude treatise, proved of little consequence to these practical men. Halley had

failed to win the loyalty that tarpaulin captains often enjoyed. Seamen would often fight to their deaths for a leader they deemed worthy. Although Harrison essentially got off with a slap on the wrist and could have continued his career in the Royal Navy, he opted to rejoin the merchant navy soon afterward.

At least Halley escaped the fate of a like-minded intellectual explorer given a similar mission aboard the HMS Roebuck soon after Halley’s voyage. When another naval outsider, William Dampier, was handed an expedition a year later to also explore for gold on Terra Australis, which he claimed to have sighted aboard a pirate ship, the Cygnet, in 1688 when it landed in New Holland. (New Holland and Terra Australis would prove one and the same and he would later be counted among the first British citizens to touch its mainland.) But trouble erupted as his ship reached Brazil. His lieutenant, George Fisher, also a tarpaulin, attempted to undermine his captain. Dampier clamped the mutinous lieutenant in irons and transferred him to a Portuguese prison, essentially leaving him to rot indefinitely until his transport could be arranged by the local governor.

Like Halley, Dampier would pursue a court-martial on his return to England in 1701. When an English convoy brought him and his crew back to London, Dampier was in for a surprise. After spending several weeks in the dingy Portuguese cell, Fisher had been released and launched a campaign against Dampier in London. This second civilian captain to sail for science and exploration under royal sanction would be sandbagged by the naval justice system just months after Halley had finished his second voyage. This time the Admiralty instead pursued three counts against the civilian captain and former buccaneer: the first for his treatment of Fisher; the second for allegedly contributing to the death of another crew member by “barbarous and inhuman usage”; and the third for losing his ailing ship, the Roebuck, though no men off Ascension Island. Perhaps biased by Dampier’s pirate past, the Admiralty dismissed the mutiny charge against Fisher. They also ruled that the second charge was frivolous—a bogus claim by the grief-stricken wife of Dampier’s boatswain who

later died on another naval mission. But the Admiralty found him guilty of “cruel usage” of Fisher and insulted Dampier with a hefty fine: the sum was equal to three years’ wages. The court found Dampier was “not a fit person to be employed as commander of any of Her Majesty’s Ships.”

Perhaps an even greater irony occurred later with the presiding officer of Halley’s trial, Admiral Shovell. On a subsequent journey, Shovell hanged a sailor almost instantaneously for questioning his longitude calculations. But Shovell in fact was in error. On a fog-shrouded evening in October 1707, his fleet of 2,000 would ground off the Scilly Isles that extend from England’s most southwestern shores. Although Shovell was one of two survivors to make it to the shore, a woman posing as a rescuer—a wrecker as such rather opportunistic beachcombers came to be called—suffocated him for that prized emerald adorning his finger.

BACK IN THE FAMILIAR RHYTHM of the London summer, Halley inevitably found himself among familiar haunts and friends. He set about sharing some early findings of his mission with the Royal Society. He made assorted presentations to his peers at the society’s regular meetings. The elite club still had high hopes for the continuation of his expedition that fall.

Halley had already exceeded all expectations of the council of the Royal Society as clerk. Nearly 25 years had passed since Halley first met the illustrious city designers Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke when they went to Greenwich to survey the site for the Royal Observatory. And it had been 15 years since they had raised the question of how the planets orbit the Sun at a Royal Society meeting.

The trio’s conversation had turned to the astronomical question on a January evening in 1684. At that time Halley was looking for a way to explain Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, which involved not simple circular but elliptical orbits of the planets around the Sun. These elliptical orbits stipulated a mathematical ratio between a planet’s time to complete one circuit and its average distance from

the Sun. Kepler determined that ratio to be 2:3. But even he could not offer a physical explanation for it. One of Kepler’s laws also stated that planets move faster as they approach the Sun on their elliptical orbits than when they move away from it and that these velocity changes are quantifiable.

Halley, like a handful of his colleagues, surmised that the force with which the Sun attracts a planet is dependent on the inverse square of the distance from the Sun to the planet, but he needed help devising the geometric proof. This equation is of no small importance because it hints at gravitational forces in the universe.

Meanwhile, Hooke had been thinking along similar lines and claimed to have solved the problem of the inverse square law. Wren was dubious. So he offered a prize to whoever could produce a proof in the next two months. The prize was a book worth 40 shillings.

When the deadline expired, no one, including Hooke, had demonstrated a satisfactory proof. “Hooke said he had it, but he would conceal it for some time that others trying and failing might know how to value it when he should make it public,” Halley recalled in a June 1696 letter to Newton. “However, I remember Sir Christopher [Wren] was little satisfied that he could do it; and though Mr. Hooke then promised to show it to him, I do not find that in particular he has been as good as his word.”

Halley would have to leave the question unanswered for a while. Before Halley could do much more to pursue it, he received some horrific news.

“A POOR BOY WALKING by the water-side upon some occasion spied the body of a man dead and stripped, with only his shoes and stockings on,” according to a headline in an early March 1684 issue of the London Gazette. The details were more gruesome. His face and body parts were disfigured, one eye in particular. Identification had to be made from his footwear. The morning five days before the man disappeared he had cut out the linings of his shoes to make them fit more comfortably.

Little did Halley know the incident’s profound ramifications. Although the cause of the man’s death would never be truly known, Halley himself and his stepmother would never be entirely above suspicion. The naked corpse was that of Halley’s father, Edmond Halley, Senior.

The verdict at the official inquest was murder. But nary a suspect was formally called. Some believed he was killed in conjunction with his role as a yeoman warder, or Beefeater. In addition to running his businesses, the senior Halley served as one of the uniformed guards who watched the prisoners and attended the gates of the Tower of London (a role he, as a prosperous merchant, fulfilled to exempt him from providing other services for the parish which he’d typically be obliged to pay at his own expense). The most important fortress in England, the tower then housed the Royal Mint and the Ordnance Office with its store of guns and military supplies. Still others suspected suicide. The fact that four socks were found on one foot and three on the other suggested “mental aberration,” according to one account. Some supposed that Halley Senior had been distressed over the recent death in October 1672 of his youngest son, Humphrey, or possibly over financial worries, as significant rental properties had been destroyed in London’s Great Fire in 1666. But money was probably not the source of his problems because even with the resulting temporary dip in rental income, he was by all measures a prosperous man.

In the grandest theory, the senior Halley’s demise was linked to a Protestant conspiracy to assassinate Charles II and James Duke of York in April 1683 as they returned to London from Newmarket. The scheme, which became known as the Rye House Plot, was foiled, and two of the three chief conspirators were beheaded. But the third man, the Earl of Essex, was found dead in his jail cell at the Tower of London before he could stand trial. Whether the conspirator committed suicide or was himself murdered remains an open question. John Locke numbered among those who suspected murder. Some, believed to be connected with the original Rye House Plot, raised accusations.

In turn, they were tried and fined. But two other men were thought to know something about the death of the Earl of Essex. One was named Thomas Hawley and was a yeoman warder. Whether Halley’s father was killed by accident because of mistaken identity or as the yeoman of the tower alleged to know how the Earl may have been murdered remains a mystery.

Halley was mum publicly about the matter. While his reaction to the news of the tragedy at times seems odd given his growing clout with the island nation’s patrons and other elite, it’s likely that Halley was merely treading dicey political waters. James II, a Roman Catholic convert, would assume the throne in 1685, the year after the tragedy.

In the decades to come, rumors would surface now and again that it might have been Halley himself who had a hand in his father’s death. The sordid urban legend held that his “father went in fear of his life from Halley.” Halley’s father was worth roughly 4,000 pounds at the time of his death, which would be more than $4 million in U.S. currency today, but he left no will. Halley would end up battling his father’s second wife, Joane, in court for control of the estate. (Halley’s mother, Anne Robinson, had died when he was in his midteens.)

Despite his personal troubles, Halley would not let the inverse square question of elliptical orbits go unanswered. The query would propel him on a shorter but equally important journey to that of his Paramore—to visit Isaac Newton for the first time late that summer.

TRAVELING THE 60 MILES northeast from London to Cambridge’s Trinity College was not easy before the metalled highways of today traversed the countryside, but noblemen did it all the time in order to conduct their affairs. What might have been running through Halley’s mind as he watched the terrain roll by from his carriage is pure conjecture. Surely a part of him was still reeling from his father’s death. The seemingly indefatigable Halley, then 28, was flush with ideas.

Fourteen years older than Halley, Newton shared his boundless curiosity and special interests in mathematics, comets, optics, and

more. Among other things, the shy, skittish Newton by then had invented a new type of compact telescope, which used concave mirrors instead of lenses. The first in England, it earned him Royal Society fellowship. Although not the world’s first, the Newtonian reflecting telescope offered several improvements over the period’s refracting telescopes, which relied on a lens to focus starlight into an image magnified by the eyepiece. Not only did refracting scopes need to be very long in order to achieve high magnification, they also produced significant chromatic aberrations, bending different wavelengths of light differently like a prism. Newton’s reflecting telescope used curved mirrors to focus the light by reflection, eliminating the chromatic irregularities, and didn’t require as long of a focal length for comparable magnification.

Newton’s related work also made him the focus of controversy. To merit his admission as a fellow, Newton had prepared a paper about light and colors. His earlier experiments had led him to theorize that white light was actually a rainbow mixture of all colors. The resulting hullabaloo over his controversial paper only increased his desire to be left alone. After his own public feud over optics in 1672, he resigned his Royal Society membership for a time and even ceased all correspondence. By the time of Halley’s visit, Newton, in his 40s and his reputation established, had become a reclusive eccentric, engrossing himself in alchemy research after his mother died.

When Halley reached Cambridge University’s enchanting medieval gates and massive elms, to his surprise, Newton told him that he had already solved the problem of planetary orbits, spurred in fact by communications with Hooke some six years earlier. As recounted by his close friend Abraham De Moivre, a French mathematician, “Sir Isaac replied immediately that [the shape of the orbital curve] would be an Ellipsis, the Doctor struck with joy & amazement asked him how he knew it, why saith he, I have calculated it.” He saw it apparently as his own private puzzle, not bothering to publish this important mathematical proof. Although the temperamental thinker couldn’t produce the proof right there and then for Halley (his pa-

pers were a mess), he promised to redo the proof of the inverse square law of planetary motion if he couldn’t find the papers.

Soon enough, Newton redid the proof and sent nine pages titled De Motu to Halley in London. Impressed with the sophistication of Newton’s reasoning, Halley visited him again at Trinity College inside his second-floor chamber that overlooked a tennis court. It was just off the Great Court, which was replete with a library, stables, fountains, and manicured lawns. He knew Newton was on to something big. The proof of Kepler’s 2:3 ratio of elliptical orbits turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg, part of a broader revolution of the whole universe within Newton’s head. But Newton again seemed indifferent and even more disinclined to publish his work, desiring to avoid the sniping feuds it would likely produce. “Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady,” he said.

Ever congenial, Halley persisted. He coaxed Newton to elaborate his grand vision that might unify forces acting on Earth and in heaven in a book. Newton finally agreed to do so and immediately set to the writing. The work, in three parts, took him only 18 months, and it was his sole focus during this time. Halley would have to prod him along the way, pushing the asocial genius to finish the third book.

When a quarrel erupted with Hooke over his contribution to the work, Halley would intervene. Hooke had angered Newton when he publicly staked a claim to the “invention,” saying Newton “had the notion from him” and deserved mention in the preface.

“I am heartily sorry that in this matter wherein all mankind ought to acknowledge their obligations to you,” Halley scribed in a letter dated June 29, 1686, to Newton, that “you should meet with anything that should give you disquiet or that any disgust should make you think of desisting in your pretensions to a Lady whose favours you have so much reason to boast of. Tis not she but your rivals, envying your happiness that endeavor to disturb your quiet enjoyment. Which when you consider I hope you will see cause to alter your resolution of supporting your third book, there being nothing which you can have compiled therein which the learned world

will not be concerned to have concealed. Those gentlemen at the society to whom I have communicated are very much troubled at it.”

Halley not only had an intimate hand in crafting and publishing Newton’s Principia, he personally financed its publication after the Royal Society rashly spent all its publishing budget on a history of fish. He took on the responsibility of shepherding the Principia through the press. He even forewent his salary as clerk—about 50 pounds a year—to help see this watershed science book through to publication. Halley had only been elected to the position in 1686, a year earlier. Back then a lower-middle-class family could live well on 50 pounds a year, which is the equivalent of $50,000 today. (Meanwhile, wealthy sea merchants grossed in the neighborhood of 300 pounds a year, sometimes amassing fortunes in the 10,000 to 15,000 pound range, or $10 million to $15 million today.)

In lieu of his salary, Halley was given 20 copies of the book, started by Francis Willoughby and finished by noted taxonomist John Ray, which had blown the Royal Society’s budget, Historia piscium (or The History of Fishes). Each volume was worth roughly a pound. (Booksellers soon learned that scientific monographs were typically not best-sellers even in Halley’s day.) Money, however, was never much of an issue for Halley. His father had left him with substantial passive income. He collected about 200 pounds a year in rent from the family’s houses on Winchester Street alone. And there were other properties in the estate, despite the extensive loss of rental properties from the Great Fire in 1666.

Halley also ran interference between Hooke and Newton in their squabbles over the proof of the inverse square law. Initially, Newton considered acknowledging Hooke in the manuscript, but when news reached him about Hooke’s credit-mongering behavior at a Royal Society meeting, Newton changed his mind, forever branding Hooke publicly, however unfairly, as “a man of strange unsociable temper.” At one point Hooke so offended Newton that he might have stopped writing the work, suppressing the third book entirely, if not for Halley’s aplomb and tact.

Many claim that but for Halley the Principia would not have existed. In later years Newton rather magnanimously referred to the Principia as “Halley’s book.” The volume spurred a revolution in thinking, disclosing for the first time basic laws of physics, “the unchanging order of things,” that govern the universe.

According to Halley in his introduction to Principia, life simply would never be the same after this book. Newton’s achievement, he said, surpassed the creation of cities, of laws that “curb Murder, Theft, and Adultery,” of the making of bread or the intoxicating effects of wine or music. So many mysteries were now solved. Because of Newton, no longer would comets evoke imminent supernatural danger, at least not in the minds of educated people. The cycles of tides, the orbit of stars, the motions of objects, from a falling apple to the Earth’s moon, were now explained, beautifully, simply, mathematically.

“Behold set out for you the pattern of the Heavens,” said Halley, introducing Newton’s work in 1687. “Laws which the all-producing Creator, when he was fashioning the first-beginnings of things, wished not to violate….” Halley waxed as poetic as he could in these extracts (of a literal translation from the Latin) of his summary of Book Three of the Principia:

“Now we are truly admitted as table-guests of the Gods,” Halley continued. “We are allowed to examine the Laws of the high heavens; and now are exposed [to] the hidden strongholds of the secret Earth, and the unchanging order of things, and matters which have been concealed from the generations of past mankind.” In short, there was no doubt in Halley’s jubilant mind that this achievement exceeded all glories of past thought.

The collaboration culminated with the presentation of a 500-plus-page work called in full Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica to King James II. Halley considered the work earth-shaking enough to present it to the king in person. And it was he and not Pepys, then a secretary of the Royal Society, who was afforded the honor.

Not many people, including the king, could understand it. The work was even over the head of most members of the Royal Society, including, by his own admission, Pepys. Supposedly, a student was overheard remarking to another after passing Newton on a Cambridge Street soon after Principia’s publication: “There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor any body else understands.”

In time the Principia would prove key to Halley’s work in astronomy. Being so intimate with Newton’s masterpiece could well have inspired the younger Halley to undertake his risky career-changing endeavor: the great magnetic survey aboard the Paramore. And it is likely that had Principia not created such an uplifted faith in scientific progress, Halley’s expensive wayfaring mission to collect numbers around the globe might never have launched. Queen Mary approved Halley’s mission about six years after the publication of Principia.

DESPITE THE NEGATIVE OUTCOME of the court-martial, Halley was granted his request to sail again. He would be the only civilian ever again entrusted to command a royal ship after the debacle with Dampier and his crew came to a head in 1702.

On giving Halley approval in late July 1699 to take to the seas again, the Admiralty directed the Navy Board to examine the pink and either improve it or give Halley another ship. But Halley’s favors with his patrons seemed to run out there. The board opted to fix his pink, not assign him a better vessel as he’d desired. Halley had vetted his new officers but had to reconcile himself again to the quirks of the Paramore.

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