Joseph Banks. Patrick O’Brian
Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Joseph Banks - Patrick O’Brian страница

Название: Joseph Banks

Автор: Patrick O’Brian

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

Серия:

isbn: 9780007467457

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ

      Patrick O’Brian

      JOSEPH BANKS

      A Life

      CONTENTS

       Title Page

       Preface

       1 Origins, Education, Botany

       2 Newfoundland and Labrador

       3 The Royal Society: Solander: the Endeavour Voyage

       4 Tahiti and the Transit of Venus

       5 New Zealand, Botany Bay and the Great Barrier Reef

       6 Home Again: Resolution: Iceland

       7 The Great Florilegium: Omai: Soho Square

       8 President of the Royal Society: Marriage: the King and Kew: Botany Bay

       9 HM’s Sheep: Plant Collectors: Bligh and Bounty: Revolution in France

       10 War: New South Wales: the Privy Council

       11 Trouble in Sydney and Iceland: Declining Health: the End

       12 His Will, and some Letters

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       About the Author

       By the same author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       for Mary, with love

       MAP

       PREFACE

      THE writer of a book of this kind must of course turn to those who possess the original papers, and in the very first place I am to acknowledge Her Majesty’s gracious permission to use material from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Then again he must necessarily owe a great deal to his predecessors: it is with gratitude and respect I hasten to acknowledge my debt to Mr Edward Smith, who published a valuable life of Sir Joseph Banks in 1911; to Dr Cameron, who brought out another in 1952; to Professor Beaglehole of New Zealand, who produced a most scholarly edition of Banks’s Endeavour journal in two fully annotated volumes; to Dr Averil Lysaght, who did even better with his Newfoundland diary; and above all to Mr Warren R. Dawson for his calendar of the Banks correspondence.

      In this great book, which the British Museum published in 1958, Warren Dawson condensed some seven thousand of the letters written or received by Banks that have been preserved in the United Kingdom; and when one reads them one not only sees the extraordinary range of Sir Joseph’s interests, from agriculture to zoology with practically all the sciences that lie between except perhaps for mathematics and astronomy, but one also enters deeply into the life and mind of an unusually likeable man. The correspondence covers something like fifty years, and since for forty-one of these years he was the President of the Royal Society it includes communications from people who had discovered perpetual motion or a way of finding the longitude at sea that would put Aristotle, Archimedes and Newton to shame, and from a gentleman in Dublin who was convinced that the Irish language agreed perfectly with Arabic, while its structure conformed to that of Chaldean; but it also includes letters to or from almost every illustrious name in the natural philosophy of the time – Buffon, Cavendish, Condorcet, Cuvier, d’Alembert, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Euler, Benjamin Franklin, Linnaeus, and so the list runs on to Arthur Young and beyond, with some unexpected appearances such as that of Henri Christophe, King of Haiti; and there are of course ministers, statesmen, high civil servants and people concerned with the other great interests of Banks’s life, Kew, the settlement of Australia, and the draining of the Fens.

      The gathering of all these letters was a most prodigious task, for although Banks had kept everything in the most exact order, both in London and at Revesby Abbey, his country house in Lincolnshire, they were dispersed after his death. He had no legitimate children, nor I think any surviving natural child, and in his will he asked Sir Edward Knatchbull, a nephew by marriage and one of his executors, to look through the papers in his room in Soho Square and the passage next to it, to select those that had to do with Lincolnshire and his estate there (these were to be sent to Revesby), those which were of interest to the Royal Society and the Mint (which were to be sent to those bodies), and the foreign correspondence, bound or unbound (which was to go to the British Museum), and to burn the rest.