Halley’s log April 29: Seven months into the voyage, the Paramore reached the Brazilian city of Pernambuco (modern-day Recife). Palm trees rustled along the coastal port’s white sand beaches.

The Portuguese governor, Fernao Martins Mascarenhas de Lencastre, welcomed the ship’s company to the provincial capital. He happily informed the visitors that Europe was still at peace. To Halley the assurance was “most desirous” news. They wasted no time procuring wine and other staples.

Pernambuco was protected by a natural reef and distinguished by versatile inland waterways inspired by those of Venice. The city was in the process of becoming the busiest port in Brazil after the Dutch departed in 1654, sparking an era of strong nativism.

The next day, when they tried to load the supplies aboard the Paramore, they were stopped by a certain man named Mr. Hardwick. Claiming to be the English consul, he accused the visiting sailors of piracy. The ungainly rigging of Halley’s pink had once again raised suspicions. Hardwick had two of Halley’s crew frisked, and he re-

quested Halley’s commission and royal instructions. Those documents seemed to satisfy him; he let the interlopers continue packing the commodities. He showed an interest in Halley’s unusual mission or at least feigned one and invited the captain to call on him at his house the following afternoon.

When Halley reached his door, Hardwick’s men surprised him and arrested him. Hardwick still suspected Halley was a pirate. But after searching the Paramore stem to stern and finding nothing even vaguely resembling pirate loot or the weaponry of buccaneers, he released Halley and apologized. Hardwick claimed to be acting on behalf of the Portuguese. It was a charge the governor later denied despite the fact that he had furnished the guard during Halley’s brief captivity.

From Fernao Martins, the governor, Halley soon learned that Hardwick was only posing. He was no consul and had no authority to jail Halley. It turned out Hardwick was actually a frustrated Royal African Company agent, whose own ship, Hannibal, had recently been hijacked by pirates in the vicinity.

To be sure, virtual lawlessness didn’t exist only at sea. A 1665 account of law and order on Barbados, which was Halley’s next port, is telling. The powers that be accused a successful but supposedly unbalanced planter named John Allin of blasphemy, which earned him a stern reprimand from the newly appointed governor, Lord Francis Willoughby of Parham. Taking offense, Allin swung at the governor with his sword, slicing off two fingers and gashing his forehead. Allin then committed suicide before reaching prison. To send a message, Willoughby had him drawn and quartered. His remains were “dry-barbecued, or dry-roasted, after the Indian manner, his head to be stuck on a pole at Parham, and his quarters to be put up at the most eminent place of the colony.”

HALLEY’S INTERESTS WERE broad, even among 17th-century thinkers. No subject seemed too foreign for his scrutiny. In 1691, he published a paper on the place and date of Julius Caesar’s first invasion of En-

gland on the basis of evidence of a lunar eclipse: From Caesar’s description of a full Moon and the winds and tides on a particular night, Halley determined that the landing occurred on August 26, 55 B.C., at Deal. A 1695 paper touched on Palmyra, an ancient city in Syria. He posited that the inscriptions on an old Roman altar found there indicated that during periods in the past the Moon’s motion had accelerated.

And the list goes on and on. In 1686 he published a paper on trade winds and monsoons in which he identified a key factor in their origin: solar heating. Though he acknowledged his explanation was incomplete, the paper would prove to be the first significant one in a new field, a field he would forever be credited with founding: geophysics. A map, which he added to the paper two years later, represented the first meteorological chart and headed a new direction in map making: concentration on a specific physical topic.

A few years later, in June 1690, Halley spoke before the Royal Society on the phenomenon of hurricanes. Such mundane events as thunder and lightning would not be explained for nearly a century. Besides observing that hurricanes occur in the latitude of the Caribbean Islands as well as other places like the China Sea and the Bay of Bengal, he may have been the first to point out the existence of a hurricane season. In another effort to link terrestrial events to astronomical conditions, he noted that hurricanes occur when the Sun returns “over the zenith of these places” in August or September.

Halley’s curiosity about the heavens was rivaled only by his inquisitiveness about more earthly matters. His whole magnetic quest was just one dimension of his inquiries. Halley questioned all things related to the seas. Often it was experience that informed or at least augmented his mental musings.

In April 1691, Halley was called in to help salvage a frigate owned by the Royal African Company. Called the Guynie, she was fresh from the Gold Coast, carrying “184 elephants’ teeth”—most likely ivory tusks—according to a bill of lading, and a large amount of gold. Valuable cargo at any rate. She had gone down near Pagham off the seem-

ingly calm Sussex coast. By chance, Halley happened to be in the area experimenting for the Royal Navy on, of all things, diving bells.

Halley first wrote about diving bells in a March 1689 paper he presented to the Royal Society. He knew of West Indian pearl divers who could plunge to great depths to recover treasures by holding their breath for seemingly impossible periods. He saw great possibilities for salvage work if a better method might be devised “to walk on the bottom at a considerable depth of water and to be there at liberty to act or manage one’s self to the best advantage as if one trod upon the dry ground.” And he set about to invent one: “Whereby a man might have his bell as a house over his head, and stand on the bottom almost dry.” To test his ideas he borrowed a frigate from the Admiralty. Halley made his first dive in the bell off a tiny seaport on the south coast near Sussex.

The hollow wood and copper cone required nearly two tons of counterweight to submerge it. Once again Halley took great personal risk for science. “When we let down the engine into the sea, we all of us found at first a forcible and painful pressure on our ears which grew worse and worse till something in the ear gave way to the air to enter, which gave present ease,” Halley wrote of his plunge. A 40-gallon cask was lowered from the frigate to replenish air in the bell every 15 feet of the descent. The diving bell could be lowered to 10 fathoms and enabled the divers to work comfortably inside at that depth for up to two hours.

Halley formed a company to develop his invention, according to a newspaper account that mentioned the promise of a diving stock: “If Mr. Halley should succeed, of which (were the wars at an end and the seas secure) he seems very sure … it would be very considerable.”

Halley kept working on the Guynie salvage project until 1696, when he was called away by Newton to work at the mint. Halley was to help him correct a lingering problem with the nation’s currency. A common practice had evolved to clip the edges off silver coins and melt down the shavings. The agreed-upon remedy was to replace the old coins with newer ones with milled edges to prevent the clipping

and pilfering of silver. Halley spent three years in Chester as deputy controller. There he continued his scientific writing and observations, patiently waiting to embark on his debut journey aboard the Paramore.

During this interlude, likely much to his chagrin, King William had assigned Halley’s new vessel to a visiting Russian czar named Peter, who was interested in learning about the latest in shipbuilding and mingling with great British minds of the day. Although the Paramore was built and designated for Halley’s voyages, the Admiralty approved its use “as the Tsar should desire.”

The emperor of Russia would later be known as Peter the Great. His seamanship, however, proved far from great. His so-called sailing experiments took their toll on the Paramore. Whether Halley actually sailed with the czar remains an open question.

But Halley apparently made the best of the needed refitting, conversing with Peter at length about developments of the day. He even accepted Peter’s invitation to dine at his table and sample a fine brandy or two and did so again later, according to some versions of the story. Martin Folkes, a personal acquaintance of Halley and future president of the Royal Society, gave this account of the czar’s visit: “Halley … possessed all the qualifications necessary to please princes who were desirous of instruction, great extent of knowledge, and a constant presence of mind; his answers were ready, and at the same time pertinent, judicious, polite and sincere.”

On visiting England, the emperor of Russia, according to Folkes,

Halley’s choices in experimentation also revealed that he was as much a practical man as an intellectual. In particular, his dalliance with all things nautical or related to navigation is illustrative and helped build his sea credentials with institutions such as the Royal Navy as well.

In tandem with the diving bell, he designed a diving suit fitted with pipes to inhale and exhale air and a lantern that could be attached to the bell. He also concocted a primitive depth gauge and tested ways to protect the eardrum when descending and ascending to different pressures.

Halley had claimed priority for his invention:

Always a profound thinker, Halley also experimented during this period with how sound and light behaved underwater. Newton used Halley’s observations in writing his Opticks, which he published in 1704, only after his favorite nemesis, Hooke, had died:

THE PARAMORE REACHED the British colony of Barbados on May 20, 1700, at about 5 o’clock in the afternoon. Here Halley found his Majesty’s ship the Speedwell heading to sea for England. At full sail the 94-foot-long “fireship,” which carried explosives and an armament of about eight small guns, must have been a familiar and somewhat soothing sight. In battle such a vessel was sailed as close as possible or even attached to a much larger and more heavily armed enemy ship and then ignited by a slow match and a train of powder. The captain and crew would then escape as fast as humanly possible in a smaller boat towed alongside the craft or astern.

The governor of Barbados, the Honourable Ralph Grey, Esquire, received Halley but advised him to leave immediately. The island was experiencing its most severe typhoid outbreak of record. Halley only permitted the number of men ashore required to replenish the water cask. On many port calls earlier in the voyage, Halley had successfully kept the crew aboard the ship to minimize the risk of his people contracting tropical or exotic diseases, which were often fatal.

But the governor’s warning came too late. Halley and many crew members were stricken by the sickness. Its cause was then unknown, but in fact it was a bacterial infection caused by consuming contaminated food or water. “I found myself seized with the Barbados disease, which in a little time made me so weak, I was forced to take [to] my cabin,” Halley managed to report in his journal.

From his ample berth, Halley ordered his first mate to set a course for St. Christopher’s (modern St. Kitts), a four-day, 400-mile jaunt from Barbados. They got under sail in such a rush that they left the stream anchor behind in Barbados. It was used to secure the stern when the Paramore didn’t have enough room to swing from the bower, or bow anchor.

In a later letter to Secretary of the Admiralty Burchett, Halley described the Barbados plague as “a severe pestilential disease, which scarce spares anyone and had it been as mortal as common would in a great measure have depeopled the island.”

Disease actually was a greater peril at sea than wrecking or work-related accidents. Each year for every thousand English sailors who shipped out, roughly 5 would suffer an accidental death, and 10 would drown in shipwrecks. But more than 45 would succumb to disease.

The leading killers were dysentery and malaria, but there were a multitude of other deadly diseases out there, which varied from region to region. In the Caribbean alone the list included yellow fever, dropsy, leprosy, yaws, and hookworm.

Halley was aware that the crew’s health was everything. Given the fiscal realities of the Royal Navy, Halley must have pulled some strings to get a surgeon aboard his undersized Paramore. He likely knew about the most pressing health threats, from books like William Cockburn’s 1696 Account of the Nature, Causes, Symptoms … Distempers … Incident to Seafaring People. Perhaps due to his influences, Halley’s surviving son, also named Edmond, who was born while he was captaining the Paramore, grew up to become a Royal Navy surgeon.

Of course, sea surgeons of the day could do little more than sea captains in the face of most diseases. Though they had some success treating ailments like syphilis with mercury, healing wounds and injuries was their forte. Bloodletting was much the era’s rage in medicine, even though it usually made the sick sicker. And sailors—even the most educated of captains—would often treat themselves. As William Dampier, the adventurer and scientific observer, who sailed at

the time of Halley’s mission, recalled in his journal, “I found my fever to increase, and my head so distempered that I could scarcely stand. I whetted and sharpened my penknife in order to let my self blood; but I could not, for my knife was too blunt.”

Unknown to Halley, his contemporary Dampier had succeeded in finding a large landmass in the South Seas, reaching Australia one year before Halley’s first mission (and some 70 years before Captain Cook). He sailed aboard the pirate ship Cygnet. He would return two years later in 1699 aboard HMS Roebuck, reaching Dirk Hartog Island in western Australia. The Roebuck would wreck on its return voyage to England, however, sinking off Ascension Island in 1701. Although Dampier’s relationship with the Admiralty would be marred, he and his specimens would survive.

Dampier and Halley had many similar interests and were likely acquainted through their connections with Samuel Pepys. Though more of a self-schooled maverick, Dampier was fascinated with nature, navigation, and magnetism. On his subsequent Admiralty-backed voyage to explore the Australian and New Guinea coasts, he also compiled observations of magnetic declination in some areas not mapped by Halley. He published his readings in A Voyage to New Holland.

In this period, progress in medical science greatly lagged that in physics or astronomy. People of all classes and educational backgrounds adhered to superstitions, magic, spiritual rituals, and the like. Even someone as erudite as Pepys believed in amulets, which some people still use today to ward off disease. He credited his “fresh hare’s foot” worn around his neck with dispensing a spate of good health.

Sailors often were versed in sundry remedies learned on their travels. For example, Jesuit’s bark, or cinchona, was known to help thwart malaria. Later researchers would learn it was a source of quinine. Cannabis and opium were easily purchased over the counter in London or at port. Opium was touted as a “panacea.” Marijuana, however, came with a recommendation: “The seed, which heats and dries, and by much using abates seed in man, cures coughs, asthma, jaun-

dice and other like diseases,” according to a popular medical book available to commoners.

Little was known of personal hygiene and sanitation. Food and water were readily contaminated by a host of bacteria. The transmission mechanism of most diseases remained a mystery. Since fleas and lice happily inhabited the wardrobes and wigs of London’s wealthiest denizens, it’s a given that they plagued sailors, too, as flea-infested rats scurried aboard a great many ships.

The cure for scurvy was not known at the time of Halley’s mission, though fortunately none of Halley’s crew was reported to have contracted it. However, they typically were at sea no longer than six weeks, the amount of time required for its onset. For less fortunate sailors, after about three months of subsisting on standard Navy rations, they would develop full-blown symptoms, including fatigue, depression, bleeding gums, reopening of wounds, and painful, incapacitating swelling of the joints.

Available statistics reveal that mortality at about the time of Halley’s voyages was in general significantly higher on Dutch ships than on English ones. Edward Barlow, a sea captain who traveled most sea routes between 1659 and 1703 and even had a run-in with Captain Kidd and his Adventure Galley in May 1697, speculated that this was because “English ships commonly make shorter passages and are better provided with provisions.” Ironically, this was the only instance in his Journal that he had anything remotely positive to say about the food served on English ships.

Ordinary rations included salted beef and pork, dried cod, cheese, butter, and dried peas. Aboard the Paramore, the ship’s cook made biscuits from flour or bought bread at port. Watery beer was the everyday beverage, but they bought wine and rum at assorted depots along the way when possible. Many sailors also had their own stash of brandy tucked away in their sea chest. They supplemented their diet with fresh fish, fowl, and other wildlife caught or hunted off the ship or purchased ashore, including turtles and perhaps an occasional monkey.

Halley was probably more aware of proper dietary needs than the run-of-the-mill captain and most likely acquired fresh fruits and vegetables at port as well. It is not known whether he was aware of the emerging wisdom that lemon, lime, or other citrus juice seemed to ward off scurvy. Lemons were packed aboard many Royal Navy ships at this time, logs reveal, and English sailors were eventually dubbed “limeys.”

PERHAPS HIS WILLINGNESS to tempt death inspired Halley to develop the first mortality tables in 1692, though he had dabbled now and again in population problems. Or perhaps it was the high number of children he and his wife, Mary Tooke, lost in infancy. Halley had “changed his condition,” on returning to London after spending the whole of 1681 in Italy. He and Mary are said to have lived together “very happily and in great contentment” despite such losses, which were almost expected given the staggering infant mortality rate in the late 17th century.

Whatever his inspiration, when the Royal Society received the bills of mortality for Breslau, Germany, from Henri Justel, whom he had first met in 1681 in Paris, Halley took an interest. (Breslau was then the capital of the province of Silesia.) These bills listed the age and sex of all Breslau citizens who died between 1687 and 1691. For example, of the 6,193 infants born, about 1,740 died before age 1 and 3,460 survived to age 6. Although similar data were available for London and Dublin, Halley believed they were skewed by fluxes in immigration that interfered with recordkeeping and increased adult mortality rates as evidenced by “the great excess of the funerals above the births.”

Halley devised a table giving values of annuities for up to age 70 for the presumably more stable Breslau population. He used five-year intervals (which are still used by contemporary insurance companies). He thought the time period adequate, “leaving it to the ordinary arithmetician to complete the calculation, whenever bills of mortality should be given for a suitable large number of years.” He

assumed the sample was representative of the larger population, a premise that is key not only for producing actuarial tables but for other population studies too.

Halley’s interest was deeper than mere mathematics, nonetheless. He was captivated by human eventuality. In commentary accompanying the table, he wrote: “How unjustly we repine at the shortness of our lives, and think ourselves wronged if we attain not old age. Whereas it appears hereby, that the one-half of those that are born, are dead in seventeen years time. So that instead of murmuring at what we call untimely death, we ought with patience and unconcern to submit to that dissolution, which is the necessary condition of our perishable materials, and of our nice and frail structure and composition: and to account it a blessing, that we have survived perhaps many years that period of life, where at the one-half of the race of mankind does not arrive.”

He also noted that if more women were married, the population could grow more quickly; for example, four out of every six women could have a child each instead of one of every six:

His observations are somewhat telling. Along with showing his awareness of history, intrigue with the study of social relationships, and flair for analysis, they reveal how some elements of his class limited his views. Though broad-minded as a scientist, he apparently viewed poverty as a societal burden more than a social injustice.

Halley’s ideas about estimating life span for annuities and other purposes—thus placing a value on an individual life—were generally met with contempt, regardless of their political interpretation in terms of population management and unemployment. The first complete work on annuities, by a French mathematician who lived in England for most of his life, Abraham De Moivre, wouldn’t be published for almost 50 years. Halley was recognized posthumously for the priority of his contribution when the Amicable Society’s charters were published in 1790, some 85 years after its founding. In fact, for the most part, all future actuaries adopted Halley’s general formula for computing annuities and use of tables to display the results of calculations.

WHILE DEATH REMAINED a mysterious phenomenon in Halley’s lifetime, marriage was a straightforward proposition: It was more about transferring property than romance. The more prosperous a family, the more money mattered in the transaction, which may explain why it wasn’t difficult for him to spend months away at sea from his family to pursue his ambitions, at great personal danger. No letters from Halley to his wife during his voyages survive, but she was likely on his mind from time to time. During dinner and what is called “Saturday night at sea,” in the vernacular, British naval officers toasted their “Sweethearts and Wives.” In July 1675, Henry Teonge wrote of the tradition in a Saturday entry of his experiences aboard the HMS Assistance: “We end the day and week with drinking to our wives in punch bowls.”

Whether Halley married purely for love is doubtful. It appears that he returned to London from his tour of Italy at age 25 for the nuptials, which likely were arranged by his and the Tooke families and their lawyers, which was customary among the upper classes at the time. Wooing was minimal in such arranged marriages.

Although Halley had already achieved status for his celestial charts and came from a prominent family, in social terms he may have bettered himself. The Tookes were at least the Halleys’ social

equals if not their slight superiors. On his death in 1663, Mary’s father, Christopher, willed her and her sisters money and lands, as did her Uncle Edward Tooke, who passed on in 1668. Her grandfather James was auditor of the Court of Ward and Liveries. Her father, uncles, and grandfather were all Inner Temple lawyers, members of a high-powered society of barristers headquartered in the heart of London, which made for a very litigious family.

Halley married his bride in the church of St. James at Duke Place in 1682. Prominent citizens were married there in private ceremonies under a special license granted by the government. St. James was one of three churches that claimed exemption from the jurisdiction of the Church of England, as a so-called peculiar. Every day up to 12 such private marriages were performed at St. James. Halley received 200 pounds, her share of her family legacy, for marrying Mary.

Under the canons of 1604, most marriages were conducted in public at one of the party’s parish churches. Banns, giving notice of pending vows, were read on three consecutive Sundays. More common couples were married in their parish churches, usually the bride’s. Of course, some of the well-to-do relished the spectacle of a showy public wedding.

But increasingly, rich and poor alike resented the invasion of privacy afforded by the banns. In general, the wealthy preferred to keep themselves above public comment, given the financial terms of their contracts. And for the lower classes, often the bride or groom’s youthful indiscretions were public knowledge, and the couple was subjected to raucous laughter from the congregation. In those days premarital sex or “bundling,” that is, heavy petting, was commonplace and part of many courtships.

Clandestine marriages, replete with sketchy paperwork, were also available to the lower classes, however, in dozens of small marriage houses off the maze of alleys at the base of Ludgate Hill near Fleet Bridge. The cost was equivalent to a week’s wages for the average working man. The backdrop for these seedy wedding chapels was fittingly the Fleet Prison and the Fleet Ditch, a mucky channel brim-

ming with rotting sewage and fish parts that fed into the Thames. The area came to be called the Rules of the Fleet.

The practice became increasingly popular among Londoners at the time of Halley’s voyage despite a law that was passed in 1696 that fined clergy 100 pounds for marrying a couple illegally without proper banns or licenses. At the turn of the century, roughly a third of all marriages were performed near the Fleet. The ceremonies were valid in the eyes of the church provided some conditions were met. The practice, however, fostered abuse, enabling close relatives to marry and almost encouraging heiresses to be abducted and forcibly wed and raped.

Daniel Defoe castigated “the arts and tricks made use of to trepan and as it were kidnap young women away into the hands of brutes and sharpers [which are very scandalous], and it become almost dangerous for any one to leave a fortune to the disposal of the person that was to enjoy it and when it was so left, the young lady went always in danger of her life.” The practice wouldn’t be outlawed until 1753 by the Marriage Act, more than a decade after Halley’s death.

Halley probably thought of his family often during his bedridden days battling typhoid. But the often-fatal infection did not win. After a week’s respite on St. Christopher’s in the Caribbean, good fortune found Halley once again. All members of his crew seemingly miraculously recovered “by the extraordinary cure of my doctor,” Halley wrote. Although Halley survived, the illness, which sometimes causes a rosy-spotted rash on the chest and abdomen, blemished his fair skin. “Though it used me gently, and I was soon up again … it cost me my skin.”

AND THE MISSION pressed on. From St. Christopher’s, it was Anguilla and then back to Bermuda. The contagion past, Halley ordered the Paramore refitted for the return voyage. “Our decks and upperworks being leaking by being so long in the heats, I hired three caulkers to assist my carpenter, who in six days had finished their work, and I gave a new coat of paint to our carved work, which was very bare and

parched.” After the overhaul, Halley acquired a new mate named George Tucker. His original right-hand man, Edward Sinclair, had jumped ship so to speak, taking a better position with a commercial captain.

Nothing could keep Halley from his observations. Not gales, personnel matters, icebergs, or stray gunfire. Almost every day he observed latitude and variation, noting his course and the winds. Longitude he necessarily calculated more infrequently.

Halley now guided his Paramore to the coast of North America. He charted a direct course from Bermuda to New England, specifically, the great hook of Cape Cod. After reaching the island of Nantucket, conditions were such that Halley opted to make for Newfoundland.

The passage took 10 days, and they arrived through heavy fog. “Had we not fell in with some French fisherman, we might have been on shore,” Halley remarked in his journal.

But danger still lurked. Up the Newfoundland coast, the Paramore made the Isle of Sphere (modern Cape Spear), which Halley’s men dubbed the “Isle of Despair.” Approaching nearby Toad’s Cove, they encountered a small armada of English fishermen. At first sight of the Paramore, the fleet headed downwind—a common evasive maneuver. As Halley pointed his ship into the harbor, a series of shots flew across the bow, grazing some of the shrouds and ratlines but failing to damage the masts or sails.

Once again the odd rigging of Halley’s pink had been taken by jittery sailors to be that of a pirate vessel. His men apprehended the gunman, a fisherman named Humphry Bryant from Bideford, Devon, who reported a pirate vessel had recently plundered one of his fleet. Forgivingly, Halley let Bryant go.

The Paramore would soon be homeward bound. Halley and his crew could afford to be magnanimous.