Planting the World

For the next two months and more, Cook took a northwest course, making straight for Tahiti and for the Endeavour’s planned anchorage in Matavai Bay, which they reached on 13 April, well in time for the rendezvous with Venus’s track across the sun, and strictly within the instructions laid down by the Admiralty.

How much anyone on the ship knew about Tahiti is unclear. Not long after Wallis’s arrival in London from the Pacific, some London newspapers carried reports of the discovery of a ‘large, fertile, and extremely populous’ island. Descriptions of the people were included such as the following: ‘The first day they came along-side with a number of canoes … there were too [sic] divisions, one filled with men, and the other with women; these last endeavoured to engage the attention of our sailors, by exposing their beauties to their view.’[41]

The Endeavour’s men, including Banks, were mostly young and hungry for experiences, and they were very impressed by the beauties on view. They soon discovered how different Tahitian society was from what they were accustomed to at home. Banks spent as much time learning Tahitian ways, particularly their uninhibited sexual practices – what he called ‘enjoying free liberty in love’ – as he did botanising.[42]

However, shortly after their arrival, Banks suffered yet another tragedy. Alexander Buchan, the landscape artist, died suddenly on 17 April. Banks was devastated in more ways than one as he explained: ‘I sincerely regret him as an ingenious and good young man, but his Loss to me is irretrievable, my airy dreams of entertaining my friends in England with the scenes I am about to see here are vanished. No account of the figures and dresses of men can be satisfactory unless illustrated with figures: had providence spard him a month longer what an advantage would it have been to my undertaking but I must submit.’[43]

The transit observations were made as planned. Banks continued to explore the island accompanied, at various times, by Cook, by John Gore, the third lieutenant, and by William Monkhouse, the ship’s surgeon, who had been with Banks on HMS Niger in Newfoundland and Labrador. On 4 July Banks did something he had never done before but which would become part of his botanical practices: in and around the encampment of what was called Point Venus, Banks planted seeds of watermelons, oranges, lemons, limes and other varieties he had brought with him from Rio de Janeiro and distributed large quantities of the same to the local people.[44]

Banks and Solander crisscrossed the island but on many days they collected little if anything. The botanical haul, at just over three hundred plants, was on the small side and about the same as they had collected in Madeira in a much shorter period of time and at a less opportune time of the year. On the other hand, Banks was particularly impressed by the Tahitian agricultural accomplishments, especially their cultivation of the breadfruit tree, which provided the population with its main source of nourishment.

On 13 July 1769, three months after arriving, Cook and the ship’s company bade farewell to Tahiti. Cook had carried out all but one of his instructions and now he turned to this final one. ‘When this Service is perform’d’, the Admiralty had written, ‘you are to put to Sea without Loss of Time, and carry into execution the Additional Instructions contained in the inclosed Sealed Packet.’[45]

These additional instructions told Cook that he was now to look for Terra Australis Incognita, the southern land mass that Wallis and some of his men thought they had seen in the distance when they were in the area.[46] The Admiralty told Cook that he should first look for land by sailing south to latitude 40 degrees; if nothing was found, then he should turn westward and search again in between latitudes 40 and 35 degrees until he met the eastern side of New Zealand.

Cook did what he was told and found no land mass in the great ocean, until 6 October 1769, after being at sea for almost three months, land was spotted at last. Was this the edge of the sought-after ‘Southern Continent’? Cook decided that the only way to know for certain was to follow the coast and see where it went. He did just that. For almost six months, the Endeavour sailed in and around the coast until, at the end of March, Cook confidently concluded that New Zealand was, in fact, made up of two major islands and, therefore, unrelated to Terra Australis Incognita. There was certainly no southern land mass in this part of the ocean and with that recognition, as Banks put it, came ‘the total demolition of our aerial fabric called continent’.

Banks and Solander botanised whenever they could though the circumstances were not as pleasant as they had been on Tahiti. The Maori people, who had not seen any Europeans since Abel Tasman’s minimal contact with them on South Island in 1642, were variously curious, friendly and outright hostile and warlike. But the plant collection, consisting entirely of plants new to European science, was significant and outnumbered those from the places that the ship had already visited.

Together with his officers, Cook now decided to sail back to England by way of the East Indies and the Cape of Good Hope, because it was too risky at this time of year to go back by Cape Horn.[47] This meant that Cook was hoping to meet the land which Abel Tasman had discovered in 1642, to which he gave the name Van Diemen’s Land, and to follow its coast northward until reaching its northern extremity.[48] Van Diemen’s Land was shown on one of the maps Cook had with him, which had been drawn by Alexander Dalrymple, and which he had initially given to Banks.[49] So, on 1 April 1770, the Endeavour sailed westward towards the eastern coast of New Holland.

A little over a fortnight later, at a place Cook called Point Hicks (near the present border of Victoria and New South Wales), land was spotted extending to the northeast and to the west but nothing was seen to the south where Van Diemen’s Land was supposed to be. Cook continued on the course he had decided upon when he was about to leave New Zealand. He turned the Endeavour to face north and began sailing along the coast of New Holland.

On 27 April, Cook, Solander and Banks, with four rowers, attempted to land but the surf beat them back. The next day, 28 April, Cook took the ship a little further up the coast, where there appeared to be an opening like a harbour, in which he anchored the ship. It had initially been called Stingray Bay but a little over a week later, Cook, in recognition of Banks and Solander, renamed it Botany Bay.

The first encounter with the local people was tense. They carried spears and the British fired a few shots into the air. Fortunately, no one was hurt. After that, the locals were wary of contact. Banks and Solander saw no one when they were ashore collecting although they suspected there were people about. After a few days they had collected so much Banks was afraid their haul would spoil before they had time to dry and press it in their collection books.

Banks and Solander already had enough natural history specimens, not just plants, but birds and insects as well, to keep them busy for a very long time. Cook had no reason to remain longer than it took to replenish the ship’s water supplies. On 6 May 1770, the Endeavour left its anchorage and began its voyage northward in the Tasman Sea.

Cook sailed close by the coast, close enough for Banks to see the land with the help of his telescope, and even make out the kind of trees that grew and the birds that populated the shore. Though he saw fires, he didn’t see any people. On 23 May, Banks got his first opportunity since leaving Botany Bay to collect. While he was away, those still on board spotted nearly twenty local people gathering on the beach though they soon retreated into the surrounding forest.

For the next few weeks the ship made its way up the coast, stopping infrequently and giving little time for Banks and Solander to collect much. Nothing remarkable was noted but then, ‘scarce were we warm in our beds when we were calld up with the alarming news of the ship being fast ashore upon a rock’.[50] The ship, now inside the Great Barrier Reef, to the northeast of a point of land Cook named Cape Tribulation, had ‘struck and stuck fast’, and was being cut into by coral.[51]

The pumps were worked to their limits and everything was done, including throwing overboard much of the ballast and all the guns on the deck, to float the ship. Banks confessed that he was on the point of packing everything up he could save and ‘prepared myself for the worst’.[52] By a combination of luck and skill, the ship, still leaking, was made to sail and Cook, carefully avoiding shoals and shallow water, began looking for somewhere on the shore where he could repair it. On 17 June, Cook, having spotted a likely place, was finally able to moor the ship in the mouth of a river.

It took seven weeks for the repairs to be made in the inlet of what Cook came to call Endeavour River (present-day Cooktown, Queensland). Banks and Solander did very well, even better than at Botany Bay: altogether they described almost 1000 species.[53] Cook had his mind on other matters. The ship was almost repaired and it was time to leave. On 4 August, Cook moved the ship from its mooring. For almost three weeks, he gingerly steered it northward, mostly between the coast and the Great Barrier Reef, avoiding shoals and visible coral formations until, on 20 August, the Endeavour reached the northernmost point of land, which Cook named York Cape (now Cape York).

Cook was close to waters that had been well charted by earlier European explorers. One important question remained unresolved, however: was the northern part of New Holland, where the ship now stood, attached to the southern coast of New Guinea as shown on several contemporary maps; or were these two land masses separated by a channel or a strait, supposedly discovered by the Spanish explorer Luis Vaez de Torres in 1606, the track of which was shown on Dalrymple’s map and which Cook believed existed?[54] As he sailed around the Cape, clinging to the coast, there was always water to starboard: the only land he saw was the coast on his port side. Cook concluded that he was in a strait, to which he gave the name Endeavour and which formed a part of the track Torres had taken more than one hundred and fifty years earlier. As he kept sailing in a westerly direction, the strait widened and led directly into the Arafura Sea and eventually to the heavily populated island of Java.

Batavia (present-day Jakarta), where the Endeavour anchored on 9 October 1770, had been the centre of the Dutch East India Company’s Asian trade network since the early seventeenth century, its harbour frequently teeming with European ships on their way to and from the East Indies.[55] Here, Cook could ensure that the ship would be expertly repaired in order for it to make it back safely to England. He could send his first despatches and a copy of his journal to the Admiralty, and the ship’s company could, for the first time since they were in Rio de Janeiro almost two years earlier, write precious letters home with some certainty that they would get to their destinations – it was from letters written here that Londoners, reading reports in the newspapers, first learned of the Endeavour’s safe arrival in Batavia.[56] Unfortunately, for the ship’s company, they were now exposed to a range of tropical diseases against which they had no protection. Many became ill, including Banks and Solander. The surgeon, William Monkhouse, was one of the first to die, followed quickly by his mate; then Charles Green’s servant and three more men.

On 25 December 1770, the Endeavour was ready to resume its voyage home. ‘There was not I believe a man in the ship but gave his utmost aid to getting up the Anchor, so completely tird was every one of the unwholesome air of this place’, wrote Banks.[57]

The worst fatalities, however, happened when the ship was back at sea heading for the Cape of Good Hope. On 24 January 1771 Herman Spöring died, who had acted as Banks’s secretary and also produced some fine drawings; two days later, Sydney Parkinson died and two days after that it was Charles Green’s turn. Banks’s accompanying suite, which had already been reduced by the earlier deaths of Richmond, Dorlton and Buchan, was reduced to three. Solander, Briscoe and Roberts were all that remained of the original eight. There were also deaths among the ship’s company and these continued as the ship made its way through the Atlantic.

On 14 March the ship anchored in the harbour of Cape Town. A month later they were on their way again and after a short stay at the British East India Company’s island of St Helena, Cook set a course for the English coast which he hoped to reach without stopping en route. The survivors were desperate to get home.

At three o’clock on 12 July 1771, a little short of three years on its circumnavigation, the Endeavour, the first British scientific voyage of its kind, landed on the coast of southern England at Deal.

Cook’s achievements were many. He was both a skilled navigator and a superb surveyor and cartographer. He not only discovered that New Zealand was formed of two islands and that the east coast of New Holland, from Point Hicks in the south to Cape York in the north, was continuous, but he surveyed the coasts and produced the first charts of both places. During the voyage of the Endeavour, besides producing these entirely new charts, he improved upon and corrected those already existing of Tahiti and the area around Cape York.[58]

But it was not Cook who was fêted on the Endeavour’s return.

Banks, cutting a more dashing figure, and Solander, depicted as fatherly and studious, were immediately taken into the nation’s heart as heroes. They were the talk of the town and their company was much sought after.

The most eminent person eager to meet Banks was King George III. The meeting happened on Friday, 2 August 1771, at St James’s. Francis Seymour Conway, Lord Beauchamp, who knew Banks from Eton and Oxford, and whose father was the Lord Chamberlain, performed the introduction (Banks and Beauchamp would meet again many years later under very different circumstances).[59] The newspaper articles described nothing of what happened that day between the King and Banks apart from commenting that ‘[Banks] was received very graciously.’

The son of Frederick, the Prince of Wales, who had died in 1751, George ascended the throne in October 1760, on the death of his grandfather George II. George III was five years older than Banks and he had taken a keen interest in the voyage of HMS Endeavour, supporting it ardently and committing £4000 of his own money to it.[60] So he had a stake in knowing what had been collected. London’s botanic community was certainly aware that the King was anxious to see Banks and Solander, even before they arrived.[61] Less than a fortnight after their first meeting, the King requested that both Banks and Solander, accompanied by Sir John Pringle – who at the time was Queen Charlotte’s personal physician, a leading member of the Council of the Royal Society and a friend of Banks and Solander’s – should meet him at his summer home in Richmond on Saturday for ‘a private conference … on the discoveries they made on their last voyage’.[62] As a member of the Council of the Royal Society, Pringle was very interested in the voyage of the Endeavour and would have been involved in aspects of the planning for the observation of the transit of Venus.[63] After the ship returned, Pringle met Banks and Solander, both separately and together, sometimes at his home and other times at Banks’s home in New Burlington Street, and on many other occasions, finding out about those aspects of the voyage that interested him most.[64]

At their meeting with the King, Solander and Banks no doubt brought examples of the plants they had collected.[65] Newspaper articles at the time report that Solander had already been to the royal gardens at Kew and had planted some samples from the voyage – ‘they have been set in the Royal Gardens … and thrive as well as in their natural soil’, commented one article.[66] For the rest of that month, Banks and Solander made frequent visits to Richmond during which time the King also examined their collection of plant drawings.[67]

When, in the year following the triumphant return of the Endeavour, the government decided on a second voyage to the Pacific, Banks began planning it as if it were his own. He convinced the First Lord of the Admiralty to let him radically alter the structure of HMS Resolution, the main ship, to accommodate him and his substantial entourage and equipment. He had gone too far. The ship was deemed unseaworthy on its first trial. Cook agreed, so did the Admiralty and the Navy Board, and the ship was ordered to be returned to its original state. Banks was devastated and angry at this turn of events and removed himself, his entourage and equipment from the ship and instead chartered a vessel, the Sir Lawrence, for his own scientific expedition to Iceland by way of the Hebrides.[68]

The Resolution debacle was undoubtedly a great disappointment to Banks but from it he learned a valuable lesson. He no longer tried to impose his will on others but sought instead to influence and persuade. In time he managed to restore his friendly relations with the Admiralty and Cook.

After the expedition to Iceland, and apart from a brief trip to Holland in 1773, Banks never went to sea again, but by then he had already spent four and a half years on ships sailing over much of the globe and collecting natural-history specimens. In this respect, Banks’s experiences set him apart from most naturalists of the time, but there was more to it than that, for during the time he was at sea he learned about how ships worked; about shipboard spaces, and how they might be altered for global botanical projects; and about how naval careers advanced and how much commanders mattered. Though Banks never went to sea again after he was twenty-nine, ships and the sea shaped the rest of his adult life.

Instead of travelling Banks established himself at home in England. In the summer of 1777, he moved from his accommodations in New Burlington Street to a grand house in Soho Square where his sister Sarah Sophia joined him. In the following year, at the age of thirty-five, he was elected President of the Royal Society, a post he occupied until his death in 1820. In 1779, Banks married Dorothea Hugessen and she joined the Soho Square household. A pattern of life was laid down: most of the year was spent in London, with a couple of months in the autumn at his country estates.[69]

Soho Square was much more than just a family home. It housed Banks’s personal library of books (in many languages and exceeding 20,000 titles at his death) and an unknown quantity of pamphlets and drawings;[70] as well as a vast herbarium, and zoological and mineral collections.[71] From 1773, Solander, Linnaeus’s disciple, was always near Banks, helping him with his collections, especially those gathered in the Pacific and on the Iceland expedition.[72] Soho Square’s international scholarly resources – including Solander: in himself, a major attraction – were made freely available to interested visitors from all parts of the world. Eventually, a five-volume catalogue of the library’s holdings was published and made public, under the guidance of Jonas Dryander, a Linnaean-trained Swede like Solander, who became Banks’s librarian following the latter’s death in 1782.[73]

In the study, close by the library and herbarium, were volumes of letters, both incoming and copies of those going out. It is estimated that at his death these volumes contained 100,000 letters and represented a global correspondence network of several thousand people from all walks of life, many of whom became life-long friends.[74]

Banks clearly lived a busy and satisfying life in England and yet, as he confided to his friend Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador to the Neapolitan court, he sorely missed the excitement of the scientific adventures of his youth.[75]

Although Banks and Solander were initially presented to the King at his summer home in Richmond, he soon moved to Kew, in a property that then stood in the gardens. The story goes back to the early 1730s when Frederick, the Prince of Wales, George’s father, leased a house opposite to what is now called Kew Palace.[76] This house, which soon came to be called the White House, was designed to be a royal residence and act as a family retreat during the summer months. Not long after signing the lease, the beginnings of a garden were laid out and plants were brought into cultivation. Over the following years the gardens were expanded as more land was bought.

On 20 March 1751, Frederick died unexpectedly aged forty-four and the house and gardens passed to his wife, Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales. With her close botanical advisers, especially John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute, who had his own magnificent garden at Luton Hoo, Augusta, who spent part of each year at the White House, was able to expand Kew gardens. Many exotic plants were donated by Bute himself and leading London botanists, many of whom he knew well – other plants were purchased from London nurserymen.[77] A key moment in the history of the gardens for the next few decades was the appointment in 1759 of William Aiton to be in charge of the physic garden.[78] Aiton was born in 1733 in Lanarkshire, Scotland and came to London in 1754, where he found work at the Chelsea Physic Garden, then under the direction of Philip Miller. Between Aiton and Bute, Kew’s stock of plants became large and diverse. By the end of the 1760s, with plants from many parts of the world, notably North America, Kew was, according to many contemporary observers, Britain’s best-stocked garden and rivalled similar royal gardens in Europe, especially the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the Schönbrunn in Vienna.[79]

Then another tragedy struck the royal family. Augusta died in February 1772. George III, who had been spending the summer months at Richmond Lodge, now removed his family to Augusta’s White House, which Queen Charlotte, his wife, began to redesign for their occupancy.[80] Bute disappeared from the scene and the royal gardens at Kew now came under the King’s direct control.

Banks’s relationship with Kew certainly went back to 1764, for it was then that he met Aiton, possibly through Daniel Solander or James Lee at the Vineyard Nursery, Hammersmith.[81]

For the next few years Banks had little more to do with Kew than to visit and observe.

By the end of 1776, however, Banks’s relationship with Kew had changed significantly.[82] Banks, himself, had trouble defining his new role: all he could say, as he tried to describe it in a letter to the Spanish Ambassador in London in 1796, was that for many years he ‘exercis[ed] a kind of superintendence over His Royal botanic gardens’.[83]

The ‘superintendence’, as he called it, might have been the single most important part of Banks’s exceedingly busy life. It was always on his mind and, whenever the opportunity presented itself for a naturalist or gardener to accompany a voyage, Banks tried to ensure that Kew’s needs were not forgotten.

This was the beginning of a very long relationship between Banks and the King. It would last for almost forty years and ended only in 1810 when George’s debilitating illness made contact impossible. Banks would meet the King whenever possible on a Saturday, usually at the royal gardens at Kew, and they would spend several hours walking, talking about plants and other topics of mutual interest, particularly about the development of the gardens at Kew.[84]

The stakes were very high. Plants mattered. The greater the splendour, the finer and rarer the visual and sensual experience they offered, the better. For the first few decades of Kew’s existence, its stock of plants had been the result of donations and exchanges with similar gardens. Many new varieties from all over the world found themselves at Kew by this route but there had not yet been any attempt at a systematic collection in the wild. By the time of the change in Banks’s relationship with the royal garden, however, this had altered dramatically. Kew’s first plant collector was already abroad, and over the following thirty years, he and Banks became very close.