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along the coast, but his work was becoming increasingly difficult due to the progres-
sive unrest. In Valencia he witnessed the outcome of a trial by the Inquisition accusing
a woman as a witch. The sentence was that she should be stripped to the waist, covered
with honey and feathers, and paraded through the city on the back of an ass, her face
turned towards the tail. She was then struck several times on the back with a shovel.
Arago was outraged by the superstitious spectacle taking place in what was one of the
principal cities of Spain and the home of a long-established university.
In November 1807, Biot rejoined Arago at Valencia. They traveled back to
Formentera in the Balearic Islands and spent the last weeks of the year making obser-
vations to determine the latitude of this, the most southerly point of the Paris Meridian
to be surveyed. They also determined the length of a seconds pendulum (one that
beats seconds) at this location. Biot left Arago in January 1808 and Arago embarked
for Majorca and the mountain of Campvey, where he established a station on the Clop
de Galazo. He succeeded in joining Majorca to Formentera, to Mongo and to Desierto
de las Palmas in a large surveying grid, measuring the latitude at each place and thus
determining the scale of a degree and a half of latitude in one survey.
BUT HIS STAY IN THE Balearic Islands was soon to come to an end. As Arago
finished his scientific work on Majorca, the political and civil unrest in Spain was devel-
oping into a full-scale uprising, aided by Britain and Portugal, known as the Peninsular
War (1808-1814) in which France lost 300,000 soldiers. Arago had to make his way
home as tension in Napoleon's Empire was increasing, eventually leading to a terrible
miscalculation when Napoleon invaded Russia in wintertime in 1812, losing some
400,000 soldiers in the invasion and the subsequent retreat from Moscow.
Attempting in 1807 to put down the Spanish insurrection, French armies had
invaded Spain while Arago was working on the Clop de Galazo on Majorca. While
Arago was making his observations early in 1808, Napoleon's generals conquered
San Sebastian, Pamplona, Figueras, and Barcelona, as well as brutally suppressing
an uprising in Madrid. King Charles IV of Spain abdicated in favor of his son
Ferdinand, and Napoleon moved his brother Joseph from his position as King of
Naples to become King of Spain. This attempt to crack down on the growing rebel-
lion misfired and Spain burst into open revolution.
Arago's observing station on Majorca overlooked a strategic port and his activity
making astronomical observations at night was taken by the local Spanish popula-
tion to be signal making by a French spy to the French invading army. The local
population began an uprising when M. Berthémie, a French Napoleonic officer,
came to Majorca on a mission from Napoleon to conscript the Spanish islanders to
go to Toulon to join with a French force. Berthémie was threatened with death at the
hands of the mob, which he evaded by offering himself up for imprisonment by the
Spanish authorities on the island. The mob then remembered Arago on his mountain
and decided to settle with him instead. Arago gathered up the sheets of his observa-
tions and left his mountain base as the mob approached. As they crossed paths he
shared friendly words with them in the local Majorcan dialect, Mallorquí, which is
a dialect of Catalan, Arago's birth language, and they did not suspect that the man
that they had encountered was the French official whom they were seeking.
