When I first thought of writing this book, I had in my mind an image of Joseph Banks that I had pieced together from the various biographies that had been written about him in the twentieth century and supplemented by other accounts in which he appeared as a major character. The image I formed was of a man who was an autocratic administrator; a man of great personal wealth who manipulated his powerful connections at the highest level in order to make Britain the greatest nation on earth and its empire second to none; a man who used science for these ends; a man who could be seen and caricatured as a powerful spider at the centre of an enormous web.

This was the image I brought to my research, but as I began reading through Banks’s voluminous extant correspondence – letters to and from him – and the endless amount of scribbled-on paper, in the form of notes, lists, draft reports and memoranda – the image of the powerful spider at the centre of the web began to dissolve, to be replaced by a radically different impression, that of someone who was less authoritarian, less one-dimensional and less in control; who was more responsive and less manipulative; someone whose relationships were more personal and informal; and who was more appealing, in short, more human. Ultimately, Banks was a figure who represented the culmination of an era that was on the wane, an era when an individual could still, by amassing a great library and mastering its contents, provide critical aid and information to a great variety of projects in the wider world.

This book is not a biography although I do provide a biographical sketch in the introduction. I am focusing on just one of Banks’s many interests, albeit the central and most fervently held, his love for plants. This passion combined the scientific study of plants and his personal dedication to supplying King George III’s garden in Kew with the finest examples of the world’s botanical bounty.

As a young man, Banks had gone as a naturalist on three important scientific voyages, one of which was an unprecedented circumnavigation of the globe lasting almost three years. Yet, after he was thirty, he never went to sea again; it is tempting to see his enthusiasm for sending other men to collect and move plants across the seas on his behalf as a vicarious reliving of his earlier experiences.

Many of these collectors were gardeners who had worked at Kew, but others, mostly from Scotland and the European continent, were trained botanists; a few were ship’s surgeons and government officials, and others who having no specifically relevant occupation had become fascinated by natural history. Banks chose some of these men to travel and collect on his behalf; but many others contacted him to volunteer their services.

The twenty-two chapters in this book, based primarily on Banks’s correspondence and jottings, tell the stories of these collectors: the different ways in which they entered Banks’s life, their practices and problems across the world – how they interacted with their shipboard companions, especially the ship’s captain; how they decided which plants to gather; how they found them and how they tried to move them by ship across the oceans. Banks referred to these activities as his favourite project and to himself as a projector: his role, he once explained, was no more than to facilitate their execution. Though the projects did not always begin with botany in mind, nor for that matter were they necessarily even initiated by Banks, once he became involved, either by being invited or by just joining in, he gave them a botanical twist.

Building chronologically and across the world, layer by layer, each chapter reveals how and when Banks became involved; what he did to give the projects a botanical direction, and with what consequences. At the same time, it recounts, where possible in their own words, how collectors pursued their instructions, how they conducted themselves far away from home, how they interacted with their environment, local materials and particularly local people. The results were not always satisfactory: collectors, like their plants, often did not survive the ordeals that beset them.

Banks, like his contemporaries, took it for granted that plants were there for the taking. They did not concern themselves with questions of ownership; at the same time, they were also generally unaware of the consequences of transplantation and the introduction of foreign species into new habitats. They assumed it was beneficial.

Banks was immensely curious, and it is his desire for knowledge that drives the narrative of the book. People and plants were the motivating force for his actions and sent his mind and his collectors exploring the world and its oceans.

Introduction

Joseph Banks and Kew

‘If I am to do all to write all to direct all & to pay for all & no human being feel inclined to thank me I shall I fear in due time feel as sulky as an old sow who has lost her scrubbing Post . ’ [1]

Who was Joseph Banks?[2] He was born on 13 February 1743 in London to William and Sarah Banks, the couple’s first and only son.[3] William entered Middle Temple, London, but is not known to have pursued any legal career. Though he and his wife, who was from Derbyshire, spent some of their time in the St James’s area of London at their Argyll Street home, most of their life was lived at their country estate at Revesby Abbey, Lincolnshire. Here, William, now also a Member of Parliament for a Cornwall constituency, devoted himself to the Lincolnshire estates which he had inherited from his father in 1741.

Joseph’s formal education began at the age of nine at Harrow School but four years later he was transferred to Eton, where he followed a curriculum primarily in Latin, Greek and English literature, which he studied dutifully but without much enthusiasm or success. Towards the end of his stay, he was also instructed in algebra, geography and French.

Next was Christ Church, Oxford, which he entered as a gentleman-commoner on 16 December 1760, aged seventeen. During his first year at the university, Joseph’s father William died aged forty-one. When he came of age in 1764, Banks inherited his father’s Lincolnshire estates and thus became an extremely wealthy young man.

Banks continued to attend university and during his time there he became intensely interested in natural history. As a boy, he had collected plants and insects like many others of his age and class but now he wanted to study botany seriously. To get some kind of formal instruction in botany – the subject was not on the curriculum at Oxford – Banks, who now had money, and with the support of Humphrey Sibthorp, the Sherardian Professor of Botany (who did not teach the subject), paid to be present at a set of lectures delivered during the summer of 1764 to a group of sixty enthusiastic students by Israel Lyons, a Cambridge botanist and astronomer.[4]

Lyons was one of the earliest exponents of the new Linnaean system in Britain and shared his understanding of and passion for it with Banks. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus, who was born in southern Sweden in 1707, published a new, simple and radical classification system based on the sexual characteristics of plants (the number of stamens and pistils).[5] The nomenclature he devised consisted of a binomial description of genus followed by species. At Uppsala University, where he taught medicine and botany, Linnaeus educated a large number of devoted students, many of whom travelled abroad searching for plants and spreading knowledge of his botanical system.[6] Although Banks wanted to meet Linnaeus, he never did (Linnaeus died in 1778) but his close associates, Daniel Solander and Jonas Dryander, were both educated by Linnaeus, as was one of his collectors and many others in his circle.

Lyons and Banks became close friends and their association worked to both men’s benefit over the coming years until 1775, when Lyons died at the age of thirty-six.

Banks left Oxford without a degree shortly after Lyons’s lectures. He could have done anything he liked – gone into the law, Church, or the City – or simply enjoyed himself as a wealthy young man about town, but his great enthusiasm was for plants. As soon as he could he moved to Bloomsbury close by the newly opened British Museum, to which he obtained a reader’s ticket on 3 August 1764, and there threw himself into the study of botany, helped by its world-famous herbaria, illustrations and texts.

At that time, the British Museum was the only public space in London where natural history could be studied. While he was there, Banks became acquainted with others like himself, and through his new contacts and friendships, he was elected in his absence at age twenty-three a Fellow of the Royal Society on 1 May 1766.

Like every enthusiastic naturalist, Banks went out and about botanising, observing and collecting living specimens in their habitat. A rare chance to botanise beyond Europe came Banks’s way in April 1766, when an old school friend, now Lieutenant Constantine Phipps, invited him to join HMS Niger bound for Newfoundland and Labrador, on fisheries protection duty.[7] Banks eagerly accepted the opportunity.

The Niger, with Banks aboard, was away from England for nine months, from 22 April 1766. Six of those months were spent in and around Newfoundland and Labrador. Coming home by way of Lisbon on 26 January 1767, Banks landed with a substantial haul of new natural specimens – plants, birds, insects and fishes – all of which needed to be classified and some of which were illustrated as well, for which task he principally employed the great and highly established Linnaean artist, Georg Ehret, and the young Scottish artist, Sydney Parkinson, to whom Banks had just been introduced by James Lee, the part owner of the famous Vineyard Nursery in Hammersmith.[8]

Exciting as this adventure was, it paled into insignificance when compared to the next one. Not only was it a longer expedition and to a part of the world that only a few Europeans had ever been to, but it would be partly sponsored by the Royal Society, of which he would become one of its most famous Fellows. This epic voyage to the South Pacific would become a defining moment in Banks’s life and interests.

There are many beginnings to the voyage of HMS Endeavour but a significant one took place on 15 February 1768 when King George III received a ‘Memorial for Improving Natural Knowledge’ from the Royal Society.[9] The Society was appealing to the King for his financial support to send two men to the South Pacific somewhere in a rectangle bounded by a latitude ‘not exceeding 30 degrees [south] and between the 140th and 180th degrees of longitude west’, as defined by Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, to observe the transit of Venus, predicted to be visible there on 3 June 1769 – an event that would not occur again until 1874.[10] The Royal Society had been discussing since at least June 1766 how they would contribute to observing and recording this rare but crucially important astronomical occasion, from which it was hoped they could calculate the size of the solar system. On 19 November 1767, the Society’s newly constituted Committee for the Transit had agreed the general plan of sending observers on a ship to the Pacific that would need to be rounding Cape Horn no later than January 1769.[11] Time was running out for adequate preparations to be made. ‘The Royal Society’, the memorial pleaded, ‘was in no condition to defray this Expence [which they had estimated at £4000, not including the cost of the ship], their Annual Income being scarcely sufficient to carry on the necessary business of the Society.’ Time was of the essence. Several other European powers (the memorial pointed to France, Spain, Denmark and Russia) were already making their own preparations for the event and Britain, in the forefront of astronomical science, simply could not afford to be a bystander. The memorial was signed by James Douglas, Earl of Morton, the Society’s president, and fourteen Fellows including Benjamin Franklin and Nevil Maskelyne.[12]

By late February 1768, the King had consented to defray the costs of sending observers to the southern hemisphere and, at the same time, he ordered the Admiralty to provide a suitable ship to take them to their destination.[13] By the end of March, the Admiralty had agreed which ship to purchase. It was called the Earl of Pembroke. It had been built in Whitby a little more than three years earlier and was currently lying unused in the Thames to the east of the present location of Tower Bridge. Just over a week later, on 5 April, the Admiralty informed the Navy Board, who were responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Royal Navy, that the ship, now renamed HMS Endeavour, and at the relatively small size of 32 metres long and 9 metres wide, should be prepared and armed as necessary for ‘conveying to the southward such persons as shall be thought proper for making observations on the passage of the planet Venus over the sun’s disc’.[14]

For the time being, the ship had no commander and, more importantly, no specific destination in the southern hemisphere for observing the astronomical event. In the discussions leading to the drafting of the memorial, however, suggestions were made that one of the Marquesas Islands, which had been sighted by Álvaro Mendaña in 1595, or one of two islands in Tonga (then named Rotterdam and Amsterdam Islands and last seen by Abel Tasman in 1643), might be suitable, but no one was certain precisely where in the ocean these likely candidates were.[15]

While the issue of the ship’s destination remained unresolved, that of the Endeavour’s commander was moving swiftly along. Sometime during the week after the order to get the ship ready for sea, that is before mid April 1768, the Admiralty found in James Cook the man that they wanted to appoint to command. Cook was not a young man and, as far as the Royal Navy was concerned, fairly inexperienced, but he certainly had talent.[16] He was born in Yorkshire and first went to sea when he was eighteen years old working for a Whitby company involved in carrying coal from the northeast of England to London. Once Cook’s apprenticeship was over he sailed on ships throughout the North Sea, from Holland in the south to Norway in the north. He did well, and he was promoted, but then, and for no reason that has come down to us, he volunteered, in 1755, to join the Royal Navy in Wapping, East London. Two years later he became a master, qualified, therefore, to sail naval ships. By then, however, war had erupted between Britain and France and their respective allies, and Cook was sent on a naval squadron to North America where he participated in several battles in and around the St Lawrence River. When, in 1763, peace came to bring an end to what was then referred to as the Seven Years War, Cook, who had by now distinguished himself in surveying and cartography, in addition to navigation, was appointed to be the surveyor on a naval expedition to Newfoundland over which Britain had been given sovereignty under the terms of the peace treaty. There he remained, apart from short spells back in London, until the early part of November 1767, when he returned bearing a cache of elegantly produced maps and hydrographic surveys of the coasts of this geographically complicated island.[17]

Cook intended to return to Newfoundland in the spring of 1768, once he was satisfied that the engravers were competently handling his manuscript maps, but this didn’t happen. His requisitions to the Admiralty to prepare his surveying ship for the next season coincided precisely with their search for someone to command HMS Endeavour. Cook never crossed the North Atlantic again. Instead, from now until his murder in Hawaii in February 1779, his life was bound up wholly with the Pacific.

It was now May 1768. The Endeavour was being prepared but where was it heading? Cook, and Charles Green, whom the Royal Society had already appointed as the expedition’s astronomer, were the designated observers. They needed an island on which they could erect their observatory. Would Cook be able to find the Marquesas or Amsterdam and Rotterdam island? And if he could, would the ship be welcomed or attacked?

While these questions were being discussed in the Admiralty and the Royal Society, something wholly unexpected happened.[18] On 20 May 1768, Samuel Wallis, a naval commander, arrived in London with incredible news. In August 1766, Wallis had been given command of HMS Dolphin whose objective was to sail into the Pacific in search of Terra Australis Incognita, the substantial land mass that was supposed to exist in southern latitudes – Alexander Dalrymple, the noted hydrographer and cartographer, preferred to use the term ‘Southern Continent’ and many followed his example.[19] Wallis reported that high land had been seen in the distance during the voyage but what caught his and everyone else’s imagination was his discovery of an extraordinary island and civilisation, which he named, in honour of his sovereign, ‘King George the Third’s Island’.[20] Wallis was an excellent navigator and equipped with the latest instruments to calculate that most elusive of navigational parameters – longitude. He reported that this island, which had abundant food and water, a healthy climate, a good anchorage and welcoming people, and which we now know as Tahiti, lay at 17 degrees 30 minutes latitude and 150 degrees longitude, west of London, precisely within Maskelyne’s oceanic rectangle.

Wallis knew nothing about the Royal Society’s interest in tracking Venus and the Admiralty had not expected him to arrive back in London for at least a year, that is sometime in 1769. As it happened, because of widespread illness among his crew, his own weakness and serious doubts that his ship could stand any more wear and tear, Wallis had decided to abandon a part of his surveying objectives and hurry home by way of the Cape of Good Hope (in spite of his instructions to return by way of Cape Horn).[21] History would have been very different had he carried out his instructions to the letter.

Wallis’s discovery of the island and of an excellent anchorage in the very north of the island, at a place he named Port Royal, or Matavai Bay in Tahitian, where he had anchored on 23 June 1767, could not have been better news for the Royal Society. The vague destination of the Marquesas and Tonga was now replaced by a firm, precise and, therefore, perfectly findable location. The predicted date of the transit was almost the same as the date of Wallis’s anchorage so that what he described then, especially the weather, would equally apply to the Endeavour’s stay. On 9 June 1768, a fortnight after Cook had officially taken charge of the Endeavour, the Council of the Royal Society endorsed the choice of the island discovered by Wallis as the expedition’s destination.[22] In the following month, the Admiralty reaffirmed the Society’s decision of where to observe the track of Venus when they presented their instructions to James Cook, who had, in the meantime, been promoted to the rank of lieutenant.[23] To guide him to Tahiti, the Admiralty presented Cook with copies of ‘such Surveys, plans and Views of the Island and Harbour as were taken by Capt Wallis, and the Officers of the Dolphin when she was there’.[24]

The Royal Society Council meeting minute of 9 June 1768 recorded the important decisions that had been taken since the ‘Memorial’ of mid February: the observers, Cook and Green, had been chosen and their salaries agreed; the ship and its commander had been commissioned; and the location pinpointed in Maskelyne’s rectangle of southern sea.

At this point, the scientific aspects of Cook’s expedition to the Pacific were astronomical and geographic. The minute of the Royal Society’s Council meeting, which recorded Cook and Green’s appointment, also had a small note to the effect that the Society’s secretary would be asking the Admiralty that ‘Joseph Banks … being desirous of undertaking the same voyage … for the Advancement of useful knowledge … He … together with his Suite … be received on board of the Ship, under the Command of Captain Cook.’[25]

Banks attended his first meeting at the Royal Society on 12 February 1767 shortly after his return from Newfoundland and Labrador.[26] Though he was not in London when, in November 1767, the Committee of the Transit recorded its decisions about how the Society wished to have Venus’s track observed, it is very possible that he knew about it shortly afterwards, and certainly by the time of the ‘Memorial’ to the King on 15 February 1768, Banks had made up his mind to try and join the expedition.[27] Over the next few months, by dint of careful negotiations and relationships, especially with Philip Stephens, the First Secretary of the Admiralty, whom he had met at the British Museum, Banks convinced those in authority that he should go to the Pacific.[28] The Royal Society Council minute of 7 June 1768, requested the Admiralty to accept Banks, accompanied by seven others, including two artists (Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan), a secretary (Herman Spöring) and four assistants and servants (James Roberts, Peter Briscoe, Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton), all paid for by him, to join the ship.[29]

More than a month later, on 22 July, the Admiralty informed Cook that the Royal Society’s request had been accepted. Instead of seven in Banks’s accompanying suite, they now stipulated that eight, in addition to Banks, would be going.[30] The eighth person was Daniel Solander, probably the most important person in Banks’s intellectual life since Israel Lyons.

Solander was Linnaeus’s best and most favourite student, and had been invited to England from Sweden, especially by the botanist John Ellis, to expound his teacher’s new system of classification. Since 1763 he had been busily working on cataloguing the Museum’s natural-history collections, primarily those that Hans Sloane had bequeathed. In the following year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.[31]

Solander, ten years Banks’s senior, probably met Banks when he first used the British Museum’s Reading Room, and soon after this meeting he took over Banks’s botanical education where Lyons had left off. He had prepared Banks for his Newfoundland voyage and, on his return, helped him catalogue the plants that had been collected.[32] It is not surprising then that Banks confided in Solander that he was planning to join the Endeavour. Solander was ‘very excited by my plans, and immediately offered to furnish me with information on every part of natural history which might be encountered on such an ambitious and unparalleled mission’. Banks later explained that several days later, when they were dining at the home of a mutual friend, the topic of the Endeavour came up. Solander jumped to his feet and asked Banks if he wanted a companion to join him. Banks replied, ‘Someone like you would be a constant benefit and pleasure to me!’ Solander did not hesitate. ‘I want to go with you,’ he exclaimed.[33]

On 24 June 1768 Solander wrote to the Trustees of the British Museum to tell them about Banks’s offer, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had the power to grant leaves of absence, had agreed he should go. Solander added that this unique opportunity would allow him to collect for the museum.[34] Banks may have been well known in the Royal Society, especially its exclusive dining club, which he frequented increasingly after the ‘Memorial’ had been sent to the King, and in the British Museum’s Reading Room, but in the world of botany, it was Solander who was the more famous. He was a great addition to the voyage.

This was now quite a different expedition from what had been planned by the Royal Society when they petitioned the King for financial help. It wasn’t just advances in astronomy and geography that they hoped would gain from the expedition. Now natural history, and botany in particular, had a leading role. There were also two Fellows of the Royal Society on board.

John Ellis, who had known Banks since 1764, wrote to Linnaeus excitedly, telling him about the forthcoming voyage.[35] Ellis’s main news for Linnaeus was that his student, Daniel Solander, was accompanying Joseph Banks, whom he described as a ‘very wealthy man’, to the Pacific. Ellis added that they were very well-equipped, with a fine library and all of the tools necessary to collect and preserve natural history specimens; or, in Ellis’s own words: ‘No people ever went to Sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly.’ What Ellis did not mention was the huge quantity of cases and book shelving that Banks was taking on board – ‘such a Collection … as almost frighten me’, Banks remarked.[36]

Banks and his suite were given rooms next to Cook’s. The ‘scientific gentlemen’ would be sharing his great cabin: specimens in bottles and in presses, nets and hooks, and sheets of drawing paper were jammed up next to maps and mathematical instruments.[37] Deferentially, Ellis concluded his letter to Linnaeus by saying that ‘All this is owing to you and your writings’.

On 30 July 1768, Cook received his instructions. He was to take the ship to Port Royal Harbour by way of Cape Horn. On the way, the Lords of the Admiralty remarked, ‘You are at Liberty to touch upon the Coast of Brazil, or at Port Egmont in Falkland Isles, or at both in your way thither.’ The first stop though was Madeira, where Cook was ordered to ‘take on board such a Quantity of Wine as you can Conveniently stow for the use of the [Ship’s] company’.[38]

So, on 25 August, the Endeavour, with almost one hundred men on board, ten of whom had already been to the Pacific on the two previous voyages of HMS Dolphin, left Plymouth for the Pacific Ocean.

Following his instructions, Cook took the Endeavour to Madeira where he stocked up with 14,000 litres of wine. Banks and Solander had been collecting specimens from the sea as the Endeavour made its way south, but Madeira now gave them the first opportunity to try out their methods for collecting on land and for recording and drawing botanical specimens, in the ship’s great cabin.[39] With the generous assistance of the English Consul and the resident English physician (himself a naturalist) and despite it not being the best time of the year for botanising, by the end of their five days’ stay, over three hundred species of plants had been collected – Solander reported to Linnaeus that of these fifty or sixty were new species.[40]

On 18 September, Cook set sail for Rio de Janeiro on the other side of the Atlantic. The stay in the city, from 14 November until 7 December, was generally a frustrating time for Banks and his entourage. Their welcome from the authorities was frosty, and they were not given permission to land. It was a bitter disappointment, especially when compared to their warm reception in Madeira. Surreptitiously evading the restrictions, Banks and Solander managed a few precious hours on shore and, in the end, either by their own means or by bribing locals to bring plants to the ship, they managed to collect about three hundred specimens: Parkinson drew about 10 per cent of them. The ship’s company hurriedly wrote letters home as they did not know when they would get another chance to send them. Soon they would be entering a part of the Pacific where there would be no passing European ships to which they could entrust their letters. They did not even know at this stage by what route they would be returning home, or when.

For about five weeks, the Endeavour made its way south through the Atlantic until 14 January 1769, when the ship anchored in a sheltered bay near the tip of Tierra del Fuego. Solander and Banks rushed to collect as much as they could. Banks was anxious to go into the interior. The local people seemed friendly and the naturalists’ activities were not made difficult as in Rio de Janeiro. But it was here that the first tragedy of the voyage struck.

When they were climbing a part of the interior that resembled the Alps, the weather suddenly turned cold, with snow and icy winds. They were too far from the ship to make it back before nightfall and two of Banks’s black servants, George Dorlton and Thomas Richmond, having drunk too much, literally froze to death.

Banks continued to collect but stayed closer to the ship. On 21 January, the Endeavour left its anchorage and headed for Cape Horn where the ship left the Atlantic and entered the Pacific Ocean. The botanic haul was small but with about a hundred specimens, it was respectable nevertheless.

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