Lord Lindsay's expedition to Mauritius in 1874

An account is given of Lord Lindsay's lavishly equipped independent expedition to the Island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean to observe the 1874 Transit of Venus. The expedition's secondary programme, the deriving of the solar parallax from observations of the minor planet Juno, is also described. This work proved a positive outcome of a generally disappointing event and brought about an important shift in the approach to the parallax challenge. The site on Mauritius where Lord Lindsay observed the Transit in 1874, now preserved as a National Monument, was the centre of celebrations during the Transit of 2004.