The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Richard Holmes

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СКАЧАТЬ engravings that entranced him. It is thus that he is shown in a family portrait (possibly by Zoffany): an attractively long-haired and long-legged teenager, alert and faintly insolent, confidently posed in a studded leather chair with a portfolio of botanical engravings spread before him. Just under his left elbow, extraordinarily prophetic, is a large geographer’s globe in its mahogany cradle, with a rhumb-line of sunlight curving down towards the equator.

      From then on Banks saw his destiny as a naturalist, and began avidly collecting rare plants, wildflowers, herbs, shells, stones, animals, insects, fish and fossils. His conversion story reveals other elements of his life and character: self-confidence, wealth, surprising sensitivity, unconventional directness, and an attraction to women. At university he made himself a disciple of the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, the leading Enlightenment botanist of Europe. Linnaeus had redefined the taxonomy of plants by identifying them according to their reproductive organs, re-cataloguing them in Latin according to genus, species and family, and collecting an unmatched array of specimens in his gardens at Uppsala.

      Finding that there was no Linnaean lecturer in botany at Oxford, Banks reacted in a characteristic way. He rode to Cambridge, begged an interview with the Professor of Botany there, John Martyn, and simply asked to be recommended the best young botanist available. He came back triumphantly with a gifted young Jewish botanist, Israel Lyons, who had agreed to teach the subject to Banks and a group of like-minded undergraduates at Oxford. Banks paid Lyons a good salary out of his own pocket. Later he recommended him to an Admiralty expedition, and he remained his friend and patron for life. Lyons was Banks’s first scientific protégé. From the start Banks displayed the commanding air, as well as the charm, of a wealthy man. This trait was given free rein when his father died in 1761. At the age of eighteen he was now sole heir to large estates in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (they included over 200 farms) which would bring him £6,000 per annum (eventually rising to over £30,000), an enormous income for the period.

      The family money made Banks a complete gentleman of leisure, a potentially fatal development, and he moved with his beloved mother and his only sister, Sophia, to a large house in Chelsea, near the Physic Garden. The conventional thing would have been for him to embark, like most of his friends, on the Grand Tour of Europe. Instead, the twenty-two-year-old Banks bought himself a berth on HMS Niger, 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 СКАЧАТЬ