Abstract
Janssen must have felt terribly impatient during the long voyage to India, landing at Alexandria and then traveling overland to Suez to embark on another ship there. On the way to Suez, he must have witnessed the preparations for the opening of a new canal that would connect the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. He was traveling just a year before the Suez Canal was opened. In fact, a French liner, just like the one Janssen was traveling aboard, called Péluse, would inaugurate the Suez Canal in November 1869. He was traveling with the French team going to Malacca for the eclipse, having embarked at Marseilles on June 19. They parted ways in Sri Lanka, when his ship turned northwards towards Indian shores.
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Notes
- 1.
The company was founded in 1851, under the name ‘Messageries Nationales’ in 1851 by a ship owner from Marseille named M. Rostand and Ernest Simons, the director of a mail-coach service company ‘Company des Messageries Nationales’. It was renamed ‘Compagnie des Messageries Impériales’ in 1853, and again to ‘Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes’ in 1871. This shipping company was instrumental in French colonial expansion all over the world.
- 2.
Francis Napier was Scottish and was born in 1819. He was sent to Madras as governor in 1866 after serving in the United States (as Envoy Extraordinaire and Minister Plenipotentiary), the Netherlands, then as ambassador to Russia and Prussia.
- 3.
It is called a ‘choultry’ in the local language. Interestingly, it was built by a British, John Whish, who apparently had a good relation with local prominent men.
- 4.
Letter to Henrietta Janssen, sent on 4.8.1868, received in Paris on 2.9.1868.
- 5.
J. F. Tennant, “Report on the total eclipse of the sun, August 17–18, 1868,” Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 37 (1869), 16.
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Nath, B.B. (2013). Guntur, the Small Town at the Center of Attention. In: The Story of Helium and the Birth of Astrophysics. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5363-5_8
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