Joseph Banks. Patrick O’Brian

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СКАЧАТЬ ordinary times Uppsala had five hundred undergraduates; when he held the chair of botany the number rose by a thousand. He filled his students with his own passionate love of the subject, and many of them, travelling to remote parts of the world, have had the plants they discovered named after them, so that a botanical catalogue is not unlike a list of Linnaeus’s pupils – Tärnstrom, Kalm, Osbeck, Lagerström, Sparrman, Alströmer, Thunberg at once come to mind, and there are many others. This century, opening wide to science, was the time for immortality; yet it is an odd kind of immortality, too, for one does not always remember that Volta and Ampère were living men, nor that it was Linnaeus and his friends who placed their contemporaries Magnol, Dahl and Alexander Garden in the botanical firmament with an “ia” added to their names.

      It is small wonder then that Solander, having studied classics and law for a while, wished to move over to the scientific side and join Linnaeus’s numerous band of disciples. Linnaeus had stayed with Solander’s parents at Piteå during his Lapland journey and he persuaded them to let the youth make the change and read for a medical degree.

      The great man did not regret his intervention: Solander had a remarkable aptitude for natural philosophy and he soon became one of Linnaeus’s favourites, both as a student and a person. As early as 1752 he helped his master in the cataloguing of the royal collections as well as those of Count Tessin: some time later he made two botanical journeys of his own, the first into the Kjöllen range north-west of Piteå and so over into Norway, and the second in the Torneå basin in Lapland. He also published Caroli Linnaei Elementa Botanica, a shortened version of the system; and he indexed the sumptuous great catalogues and saw them through the press, acting as the professor’s right-hand man. Indeed, the two were so close that Linnaeus, who had four handsome daughters, hoped that in time Solander would become his son-in-law and his successor. Solander was also his choice when his correspondents Peter Collinson and John Ellis asked him to send a student to England. Collinson was a wealthy Quaker merchant trading with North America, an ardent botanist who had brought many American plants to England, and a Fellow of the Royal Society: he wanted a skilled young man to catalogue his garden according to the Linnaean system. Ellis was also a Fellow and a botanist with interests in the West Indies (he was agent for Dominica) and the Orient (he published Directions for bringing over Seeds and Plants from the East Indies), but his great love was zoophytes, particularly the corallines, upon which he was an authority. He was also a very sensible man in other directions, and he advised Linnaeus to tell Solander to improve his English before coming over.

      As it happened Solander had plenty of time to do so, since illness and bad weather and the fact that the Seven Years War was in progress put off his departure for more than a year, and when he arrived in 1760 he spoke the language remarkably well. In any case he was, like so many Swedes, an excellent linguist: his Latin was of course fluent, since it was the medium of instruction at Uppsala, and he also knew German and Dutch.

      Linnaeus had asked Ellis to take care of “my beloved pupil”, and both Ellis and Collinson did so. Solander could not have had a better introduction to the English world of natural philosophy in general and of botany in particular. His early letters to Linnaeus, often accompanied by seeds and plants from English naturalists, or books, such as the Flora Anglica in which William Hudson, sub-librarian at the British Museum, had adopted the sexual system, show that he had soon met a great many people, including Philip Miller of the Physic Garden and J. Empson of the British Museum, G. Brander, FRS, a director of the Bank of England and also connected with the Museum, Richard Warner the botanist, George Edwards, FRS, the author of a valuable History of Birds, and Sir William Chambers the architect (a Swede by birth) who had just finished the pagoda in the royal gardens at Kew – a significant mixture of Fellows of the Royal Society, people belonging to the British Museum, and great men owning great gardens or closely concerned with them. He had also travelled over much of southern and south-western England, viewing the country, its plantations and its gardens, or, when he was with John Ellis, its shores, its zoophytes, sponges and sea anemones.

      He was well received, not only because he was Linnaeus’s pupil and because he was well introduced but because he was himself amiable. Sir James Smith, who eventually bought Linnaeus’s vast collections, founded the Linnean Society, and compiled A Selection from the Correspondence of Linnaeus, said of him that “he was esteemed … for his polite and agreeable manners, as well as his great knowledge in most departments of Natural History”. And some time later Fanny Burney called him “very sociable, full of talk, information, and entertainment”, while Mrs Thrale said “The Men I love best in the World are Johnson, Scrase, and Sir Philip Jennings Clerke. The Men I like best in the World are Burney, Solander, and the Bishop of Peterborough”, and Sir Charles Blagden, later secretary of the Royal Society and a close friend of Banks and Solander for many years spoke of him as “the mildest, gentlest, most obliging of men”.

      He was no less dear to Linnaeus, who arranged for him to have the chair of botany at St Petersburg in 1761 and who the next year offered to name him as his successor at Uppsala. After some hesitation Solander declined both offers: he had decided to stay in England.

      There was no communication between Solander and Linnaeus from the autumn of 1762 until 1768, and this breach is sometimes attributed to the marriage of Linnaeus’s eldest daughter Elizabeth Christina to a soldier. Dr Rauschenberg, who has made a deep study of Solander, does not believe the explanation, and certainly it does seem a little strange, since Solander never appears to have taken any interest in women at all.

      However that may be, Solander certainly began to cut his ties with Sweden: he was a most indifferent correspondent all his life, but now he quite stopped writing to his widowed mother as well as to Linnaeus.

      At this period his friends were busily trying to get him a post at the British Museum, which had opened in 1759 and which was struggling along with high ideals and an income of nine hundred pounds a year. Many friends were concerned, since in the eighteenth century as much influence as possible was required for even a modest official appointment; and it is said that Collinson went so far as to ask Lord Bute to speak to the King. These solicitations were successful, and Solander joined the meagre staff in February 1763. The appointment was modest enough, in all conscience, yielding rather less than sixty pounds a year, and at first there was no working-place apart from the public rooms; but the work itself was interesting, and Solander was ideally suited for it: he spent his days classifying, describing and cataloguing plants, insects, mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles, fossils and indeed almost anything that could be said to belong to the realm of natural philosophy and therefore to possess an inherent order that was susceptible of being brought to light. This eventually included the rather sparse collection of objects from the Pacific brought home by Commodore the Hon. John Byron, RN (the poet’s grandfather, known in the service as Foulweather Jack) after he had sailed round the world in that fine copper-bottomed ship the Dolphin, a voyage more remarkable for its rapidity (a mere twenty-two months) than for any discoveries in the South Seas. But this is to anticipate, since the Dolphin, having taken possession of the Falklands in 1765, did not reach home until 1766.

      Before this time, that is to say in 1764, Banks and Solander had become acquainted, as it was natural that they should, having so many friends and so many interests in common. In these earliest years, however, the acquaintance did not develop into that close friendship which was to be so important to both men in later times: Banks was much taken up with Revesby and his other estates – farming was, after all, a form of applied botany – with Oxford and with settling into independent life. And, since the war was now over, he was also much engaged with those friends who had been concerned with the fighting and who had now come home.

      ^* There is a pleasant anecdote of Dr Barnard in Thraliana. “To return to Mr Pepys. He told me one Day a comical Thing concerning his quitting Eton School: Dr Barnard under whom he was educated, had it seems a way of talking to the Boys who were taking Leave of him at once so tender and so full of Admonition that many of them had been known to shed Tears at parting – says Pepys to his Companion who went home the same Day, I dread going up to the СКАЧАТЬ