Jean Cap

Biography

Born from a noble family, he embraced the ecclesiastical state, and delivered to the study astronomy. In 1760, it was chosen by the Academy of Science, of which he was member, to go to Tobolsk to observe the famous passage of Venus under the disc of the sun, fixed at the June 6th of the year He went by ground to Saint-Pétersbourg, and left for the Siberia, where it arrived only after having tested all the evils inseparable from a voyage made in such a climate, in the middle of the most rigorous season. Arrived in the last days of April 1761, it observed the 5 an eclipse of the sun which gave him the difference of the meridian line of Tobolsk to that of Paris; this difference was Chappe 4:25 had made build a small observatory, and makes all the preparations necessary. One approached the June 6th, day so desired, and all seemed to predict the most favorable time. The astronomer tells itself concerns, alarms which it then tested with the aspect of the least cloud which appeared in the sky; however one arrived at June 6th. The sky was pure and serene; the Chappe abbot could see Venus entering under the sun, and make the observations which were the goal and the price this length and painful voyage. They were consigned in a Mémoire of the Venus passage on the sun, with observations on the astronomy and the variation of the compass made in Tobolsk, in Siberia , in 1761, St-Pétersbourg, in-4°.

It returned in France two years after in being party, and published: Voyage in Siberia makes in 1761 (with the description of the Karntschatka, transl. of Russian of Khracheninnikow) , Paris, 1768, volumes in 5 large vol. in-4° and atlas in folio; where, according to Hoefer, “ it is often restricted to copy its precursors: he speaks about things which he did not see and those which he observed were it with much lightness ”, the edition of Amsterdam, 1769 - 1770, 4 vol. in-12, fig., is only one summary of that of Paris. To illustrate its work, it is surrounded by Jean-Michel Moreau, Caresme de Fécamp and especially of Jean-Baptiste the Prince who, him also, had gone to Russia and Siberia.

This relation, full with facts and curious details, but in which the author had made some observations unfavorable to the Russia, was very accommodated in France, and obtained the honor to be refuted or criticized by the empress Catherine II of Russia itself, in a booklet entitled Antidote or Refutation of the bad superbly printed book entitled: Travel to Siberia, etc, made in 1761, by the abbot Chappe , Amsterdam, Rey, in-12, and following the edition of the work of Cap given by the same bookseller, ibid, and even year, vol. in-12. This work is written and published anonymously by Catherine II of Russia and the Count Chouvaloff, the young empress answering so that she regarded as an attack of her country by taking again chapter by chapter the book of the abbot to refute it. This attribution was fought by Anguis which “ gives for collaborator to the Comtesse Daschkof the sculptor Falconet ”

Another criticism appeared under this title: Letter of a frank and honest style, with the author of the encyclopedic Newspaper , in-12. The relation of the Chappe abbot contains many meticulous facts which are foreign with the goal of its voyage, much of details that it borrowed from other travellers, and much of things slightly observed, which gave to its enemies the pretext of revoke in doubt the authenticity of its astronomical observations; one could not however doubt his zeal for progress of astronomy.

The same phenomenon which had made him face snows and the ices of North engaged it, six years after, in another voyage where it had to support the heats of an extreme climate. The California, uncultivated and little inhabited peninsula, having been judged one of the places of the ground most suitable for the observation of the Venus passage of the year 1769, the Academy of Science obtained from the king the permission to send one of its members to it. Cap was selected for this mission, and it went to California, accompanied Misters Dol and Médina, naval officers and astronomers of king d' Espagne and the draftsman Alexandre Jean Christmas. Some time after its arrival in California, he attacked lute of a contagious disease, and died the August 1st 1769, satisfied, while expiring, to have fulfilled the mission for which he had left his fatherland. Its zeal for science was so large, that it cost him the life. When his cure was hoped for, the efforts which it made to observe a moon eclipse increased its evil and led it to the tomb. Its observations were published in Paris in 1772, by C. - F. Cassini, under the title of Voyage in California, for the observation of the Venus passage on the disc of the sun , the June 5th 1769, containing the observations of this phenomenon, and the historical description of the road of the author through Mexico, Paris, 1772, in-4°. There is still of the Chappe abbot of Auteroche several Astronomical observations in the collection of the Academy of Science , of 1760 with 1770. Its praise was pronounced in this same academy, by Grandjean de Fouchy, the November 14th 1770.

Random links: