MDMD(5): Bonk's Boundary

[Michel Ryckx]

Bonk's instructions to Mason & Dixon are quite easy: they have to behave
themselves as if they were aboard a ship.  In fact, he says, one of the
clearest distinctions man makes, that between land & sea, does not exist
at the Cape:

"What seems a solid Continent [. . .] is in fact an Element with as
little Mercy as the Sea to our Backs, in which, to be immers'd is just
as surely, and swiftly, to be lost, without hope of Salvation." (59.4-7)

Imagine: he says this to surveyor, a man who makes his money out of
making Spatial Distinctions.  The very mention of the act of observing
reminds Bonk of espionage, and Boppo! (I think that a very funny word),
one becomes suspect just by being there.

Literally every word in Mason's response is the wrong one:

1. "Astronomers under the commission of our King" (59.15-16):
The Dutch settlers did not like the British; perhaps the sciences were
not at war, but long distance commerce, even then, meant danger,
possibly even war. (history proved later to be very dangerous for the
cruel settlers --whose local economy was based on slavery--, ending with
the very bloody Boer War at the turn of the 20th century.  It made Baden
Powell turn into a living legend.)

2. " [. . .] Lacaille [. . .] ", who was French and a priest.
As D. Sobel notes at p.95 of 'Longitude':

'The Paris Observatory, meanwhile, redoubled the efforts at Greenwich.
Picking up where Halley had left off years earlier, French astronomer
Nicolas Louis de Lacaille headed for the Cape of Good Hope in 1750.
There he cataloged nearly two thousand southern stars over Africa.
Lacaille left his brand on the skies of the nether hemisphere by
defining several new constellations, and naming them after the great
beasts of his own contemporary pantheon -- Telescopium, Microscopium,
Sextans (the Sextant), and Horologium (the Clock).'

Of this Abbé  Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille (1713-1762): (found this on a
site of which I lost the adress)

"From the Cape of Good Hope, he studied the southern sky (still nearly
virginal) between 1751 and 1753, he named constellations and discovered
some nebulae with his small refractor (0.5-inch). He established the
first southern star catalogue containing 9776 stars observed in less
than 11 months ("Caelum Australe Stelliferum", published partly in 1763
and completely in 1847), and a catalogue of 42 nebulae in 1755 ("Sur les
étoiles nébuleuses du ciel austral", in the "Mémoires de l'Académie
Royale des Sciences", 1755) containing 33 true deep sky objects (26 own
discoveries)."

The attitude towards catholics in some protestant countries (and vice
versa of course) was one of open hostility.  A priest, coming from
France, the country that had many Huguenots fled the country, many of
them ultimately coming to the Cape, bringing with them the Vine by the
way, must have not been very welcome.  This may have augmented Bonk's
idea about Mason and Dixon being suspect.

3. " [. . .] the Movements of Heaven, which taken together form a
Cryptick message, [. . .] we are intended one day, to solve, and read."
is the Deist perception of science.

This is from www.xreefer.com
[Deism is ]

"A form of religious belief which developed in the 17th century as an
outcome of the Reformation. Edward Herbert evolved the idea that, while
the religion revealed in the Gospels was true, it  was preceded by
`natural' religion, according to  which by his own inner light a man
could perceive all the essentials of religious truth. Herbert's deism
was further expounded in the 18th century by others (often in such a way
as to suggest that the Christian revelation as presented in the Gospels
was redundant), and it suited the 18th-century cool and rational habit
of mind which tended to see God as abstract and remote. Bishop Butler
among the theologians and Hume and Kant among the philosophers, exposed
the unsoundness of deistic arguments in the 18th century, and in the
19th century the growth of the genetic sciences demolished the basic
assumptions of deism, ie, that human nature and human reason have always
been constant, in a constant environment."

This is what I think about deism: it is a polite word for atheism.  And
the last thing Bonk wanted to hear.

Michel.