terror,paranoia,hilarity and calculated madness on the way to the transit of Venus- tone in chapters 456

[Monte Davis]

Davy and several other examples in this review of de Beer, p. 885:

https://books.google.com/books?id=eghQvDvfsuAC&lpg=PA885&ots=Uhw2LA9eGa&dq=de%20beer%20the%20sciences%20were%20never%20at%20war&pg=PA884#v=onepage&q=de%20beer%20the%20sciences%20were%20never%20at%20war

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 3:22 PM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> A bell rang when I read this Pynchon passage in 1997: I was sure I'd read
> somewhere, long before, about Napoleon himself using the French captain's
> words, or very similar phrasing, w/r/t letting some expedition pass,
> returning some naturalist's specimen collection that had been captured, or
> the like. But I've never tracked it down, nor did it turn up in the 1997 or
> 2001 group readings here. (Nor do I know of any answer to your question
> about how the French captain would have known of M&D's presence, other than
> Pynchonian conspiracism about the the higher levels of Them, e.g. IG
> Farben,  Shell, GE et al. carrying on despite the distraction of WWII.)
>
> FWIW: In 1813, when Great Britain was at war with Napoleon's France,
> English scientist Humphry Davy traveled freely on the Continent and in
> Paris collected a prize and medal funded by Napoleon for the best work on
> galvanism. (While not common, such interactions were not unknown in other
> fields of scholarship as well as science.) Davy remarked to an associate:
> "But if the two countries or governments are at war, the men of science are
> not. That would, indeed be a civil war of the worst description: we should
> rather, through the instrumentality of the men of science soften the
> asperities of national hostility." Quoted in Gavin de Beer, The Sciences
> Were Never at War (1960).
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 11:10 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> Which brings up the question of why the l'Grand turned away. Was it
>> really, as Smith (filtered through Cherrycoke) reported, "France is not at
>> war with the sciences?" If so, how did they eventually figure out,
>> mid-attack, that this was a scientific expedition? Was Smith able to get
>> the letters of passage over to the other captain? Kind of seems there
>> should have been some identifying marker - a sail with a sun and two
>> crossed telescopes instead of the skull and bones? - to prevent attacks
>> before they started.
>>
>>
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