The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Richard Holmes
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and embarked on a strenuous seven-month botanical tour to the bleak shores of Labrador and Newfoundland. The Professor of Botany at Edinburgh wrote to him with some astonishment that it was ‘rumoured that you was going to the country of the Eskimaux Indians to gratify your taste for Natural Knowledge’.
Banks demonstrated his energy and commitment on this expedition, earning the approval of all the naval officers, including his friend Captain Constantine John Phipps, and a certain Lieutenant James Cook, who was in charge of chart-making. He wrote witty, faintly scurrilous letters to his sister Sophia, and also kept the first of his great journals, most notable for their racy style, appalling spelling and non-existent punctuation. On his return in November 1766, with a vast quantity of plant specimens (and some caoutchouc from Portugal), Banks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, still aged only twenty-three. He began what was to become his famous herbarium, scientific library and collection of prints and drawings. His rapidly expanding circle of scientific friends included the rakish Lord Sandwich, future head of the Admiralty, and the quiet, portly and dedicated Daniel Solander, a young Swedish botanist, trained under Linnaeus at Uppsala, who managed the Natural History section of the British Museum.
Two years later, Banks heard of the round-the-world expedition in HM Bark Endeavour. The ship was in fact a specially converted coastal ‘cat’ from Whitby, broad-beamed, shallow-draughted and immensely strong, capable of being beached for repairs, and of carrying large quantities of stores and livestock below decks (and on them). But she was little more than a hundred feet from stem to stern, and had extremely restricted quarters. She was to be commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, forty years old, lean and reserved, the tough and experienced mariner from the little port of Staithes in Yorkshire who had made his name charting the Newfoundland coast.
The expedition was organised by the Admiralty, but also partly financed by the Royal Society, which supplied £4,000 towards astronomical observations. It had four main objectives: first, the observing of the Transit of Venus on Tahiti; second, charting and exploring the Polynesian islands west of Cape Horn; third, exploring the landmasses known to lie between the 30th and 40th parallels-New Zealand (possibly the tip of a continent) and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), possibly part of Australia; and fourth, collecting botanical and zoological specimens from anywhere in the southern hemisphere. It also had a medical aim, to reduce the fatal outbreaks of shipboard scurvy by the use of sauerkraut and citrus fruits.
The Royal Society had already appointed as the expedition’s official astronomer William Green, assistant to the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Banks immediately proposed himself as its official botanist. He would finance his own eight-man natural history ‘suite’, including two artists, a scientific secretary, Herman Spöring, two black servants from the Yorkshire estate, his friend Dr Solander and-characteristically-a pair of greyhounds. For these, and a mass of equipment, Banks laid out as much as £10,000, nearly two years’ income. For him it was to be a voyage in search of pure knowledge, and he laid in specialist equipment which created a considerable stir. A colleague reported admiringly, and with perhaps a touch of envy, to Linnaeus in Uppsala: ‘No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History; nor more elegantly. They have got a fine library of Natural History; they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing; they have even a curious contrivance of a telescope by which, put into water, you can see the bottom at a great depth.’ He concluded reassuringly to Linnaeus: ‘All this is owing to you and your writings.’11
But there was, of course, an element of imperial competition. Cook had sealed Admiralty instructions to look out, after leaving Tahiti, for a possible ‘great Southern continent’ lying between latitude 30 and 40 degrees South. This was much further south than those parts of Australia’s eastern seaboard which were already known through the Dutch navigators. It was believed that New Zealand might form the northern tip to this continent, and that it might contain huge natural resources. If this continent existed, it had to be claimed and mapped (with a view to possible colonisation) before the French did so. The Admiralty seems to have been unaware of Antarctica.
The imperial instructions were not really so secret. Both Banks and Solander knew about them before departure, and even Linnaeus was informed.12 Moreover, neither Banks nor Cook really believed in the mysterious southern continent. Banks made a long, sceptical journal entry as they crossed the Pacific in March 1769, concluding: ‘It is however some pleasure to be able to disprove that which does not exist but in the opinions of Theoretical writers, of which sort most are who have wrote any thing about these seas without having themselves been in them. They have generaly supposed that every foot of sea which they beleived no ship had passed over to be land, tho they had little or nothing to support that opinion but vague reports…’ Nevertheless, he was fully aware of how little was known about the Pacific islands in general, and of the perils of circumnavigation, especially between Tahiti and Indonesia. It had nearly destroyed Bougainville’s entire crew the year before.
Among the many friends Banks was leaving behind was Solander’s colleague the botanist and horticulturalist James Lee, who took an intense professional interest in the Pacific voyage. Lee owned the remarkable Vineyard Nurseries at the village of Hammersmith on the Thames. He was the author of a best-selling plant manual, An Introduction to Botany extracted from the works of Dr Linnaeus (1760), which ran into several editions, and he advised Banks on plant-collecting. Lee also trained up young naturalists at the nurseries. Among his assistants was an eighteen-year-old Scottish Quaker, Sydney Parkinson, a quiet, observant young man, whom Banks decided to employ as his second botanical artist aboard the Endeavour. It was a good choice, but with tragic consequences.
Another young person in Lee’s charge was twenty-year-old Harriet Blosset, to whom he was legal guardian. Lee was teaching her to study plants, and she would eagerly have signed up for the expedition herself. But of course no women were officially allowed on board His Majesty’s vessels, although the French botanist Philibert Commerson had smuggled his mistress aboard Bougainville’s ship, disguised as a cabin boy. It was rumoured at the nurseries that Harriet was ‘desperately in love with Mr Banks’, and there was a good deal of gossip about them immediately before the expedition’s departure.13 A fellow botanist, Robert Thornton, extravagantly catalogued Harriet as a young lady who ‘possessed extraordinary beauty, and every accomplishment, with a fortune of ten thousand pounds. Mr Banks had often seen her, when visiting the rare plants of Lee’s, and thought her the fairest among the flowers.’14
In fact Harriet was one of three sisters who lived with their widowed mother in Holborn. Banks does seem to have been genuinely fond of her, and subsequent events suggest there was some kind of understanding between them. Her guardian James Lee looked upon it as an unofficial engagement, which would be announced if Banks should return alive from the Pacific. There was also some joke about Harriet knitting a set of ‘worked’ waistcoats for Banks while he was away, patterned with wildflowers-perhaps one for each season he was absent.15
Yet Banks was certainly cautious about marriage at this stage in his career, remarking drily to a friend that though he loved experiments, matrimony was ‘an experiment…with uncertain consequences’, and rarely brought lifelong happiness. The eve of his great voyage was certainly not the moment to try it.16 In a rare introspective entry Banks would reflect in his journal that he would probably never see Europe again, and that there were only two people in the world who would truly miss him. ‘Today for the first time we dined in Africa, and took our leave of Europe for heaven alone knows how long, perhaps for Ever; that thought demands a sigh as a tribute due to the memory of freinds left behind and they have it; but two cannot be spared, t’would give more pain to the sigher, than pleasure to those sighd for. Tis Enough that they are rememberd, they would not wish to be too much thought of by one so long to be seperated from them and left alone to the Mercy of winds and waves.’17