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Introduction
The Young Banks

What shall we call the eighteenth century? How often, and how vainly, has it been summarized in a phrase! — stuffed into a single garment, as it were, from which it bursts at every seam, its uncontrollable, magnificent, startling life forcing itself upon the eye of the beholder in lavish and indecent contradiction. It was an Age, there seems no doubt of that — the Age of the Despots, of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, of Oratory, of Gin, the Mercantilist Age, the Age of the Augustans, the Age of Rococo, the Age of Johnson. There can be no harm, thinking of England, to which Johnson so immediately and forthrightly brings us, in conferring another name, no more nor less adequate: let us call those busy decades — or a sufficient selection of them — the Age of the Gentleman Amateur. For the century was, in so much of its activity, pre-professional. One must not say merely dilettante: that would be unjust. In the first place, the word has subtly changed its meaning; in the second, though the dilettante throve, never did he have a choicer field for his activity; never did dilettantism become, as with Horace Walpole, so exquisitely almost professional in itself. But no one would call dilettanti those men of profound scientific activity, Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish, any more than one would call this nonconformist minister and this recluse of a ducal family professional scientists. Was Lord Burlington merely dilettante in architecture, or Gibbon in history, or Gilbert White in natural history ? Or Arthur Young in agriculture, or that equally assiduous traveller, Thomas Pennant, in zoology, or in the free field of general observation and antiquities ? And for how many hundreds of the obscure do these large figures stand! — the country parsons devoted to local history, in at the birth, almost, of British archaeology; the scholars who had escaped from the common room and the port; the nobility who had no taste for gaming or politics — though was not politics itself, whatever its savagery and cupidity, its attraction

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for men on the make, still one of the great preserves of the Gentleman Amateur?

Science, above all, apart from politics, it is that comes to the aid of a generalization that may often seem to totter dangerously: there is so much that rushes forth as contrary evidence in literature and art and architecture, in theology and even in prize-fighting. Science had not been organized, Science was not at all professional and most imperfectly academic; Science, as we know it today, was almost at the beginning of things; and yet Science was popular. The educated classes of England, as of France, made it a cult; that most unscientific figure Dr Johnson was throughout his life given to ‘chemical experiments’. True, in the mid-century it was long since Sir Isaac Newton's Principia had begun to send its ceaseless eddies through the European mind; true, by 1760 the Royal Society had enjoyed a hundred years of irregularly scientific life; but even the Royal Society was predominantly a society of Gentlemen, and of amateurs. Science, indeed, as Priestley tinkered with his apparatus, and Cavendish plumbed new depths of analytic thought, and Western Civilization sailed in ships bearing the beneficent gifts of Commerce and of War to the uttermost bounds of the earth, saw empires expanding which had before been only a dream. Empires were for conquest, arduous but exhilarating: to the votaries of the descriptive, of geography, of zoology, of botany, how fair the prospect! How almost intoxicating the scene on which the natural historian could look forth, the young disciple of Linnaeus! — for it is that light, famous, venerable, omnipresent, that shines above our travellers, that presence that irradiates their farthest wanderings; there in Uppsala is the centre and bosom of learning from which, almost, all proceeds, to which all returns. To be the pupil of Linnaeus, his friend, his correspondent, his informant — this was to be sealed with the seal of a new virtue, this was to be enlisted under a banner, to be one of a brotherhood, to have a master and a father, and in Nature an intellectual home. Not even the great Buffon ever stood in quite this relation with European science. Should we, then, speak of the Age of Linnaeus? We might do worse; but it does not really matter. What matters was that science was both widening and deepening the scope of its command: not always with true learning, sometimes almost accidentally — led sometimes from old myth to new myth, undermining new as well as old with new experience. And now rose up, indeed, within Natural History, something new, something incomparably exciting, Man in the state of nature: the Noble Savage entered the study

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and the drawing-room of Europe in naked majesty, to shake the preconceptions of morals and of politics. He was not, it is true, universally admired, and behind him came illimitable files of savages something less than noble, insufficiently elegant, beings whose natural state caused the philosopher embarrassment. There were cultivated persons who, like Horace Walpole, were not entertained: scholars who, like Dr Johnson, refused to be instructed. But the science of ethnology was born.

So, on the scene of our scrutiny, into this busy age, steps the figure of Joseph Banks, the gifted, the fortunate youth: enthusiastic, curious, the voyager, the disciple of Linnaeus, the botanist and zoologist, the devotee of savages; not yet, as one examines his early career, a Public Figure, but certainly a Gentleman, certainly a figure typical of his age; and certainly as much as anyone, and more than most, the Gentleman Amateur of Science.

Joseph Banks came from that enviable class the landed gentry; close enough to the land to draw common sense from it, and with enough of it to draw from it also a handsome revenue; with brains enough, indeed, unlike some country gentry, to repay education, and with wealth more than enough to allow of a town as well as country existence, and of a standing in society which no mere rural squire could claim. The family was a Lincolnshire one; its seat was Revesby Abbey, not far from Boston; as the fens were drained its wealth increased, and intelligent management made its standing still greater.¹ Joseph's seventeenth century great-grandfather, another Joseph, was not merely wealthy, from his business as an attorney and from property transactions, but a member of parliament, for Grimsby and then for Totnes, and — we begin to see something of his descendant — an antiquary. His son, also Joseph, also an antiquary, also a member of parliament — for Peterborough — rebuilt Revesby church, served as sheriff of the county, and was a fellow of the Royal Society. This Joseph's son Joseph died in his twenties, unmarried, so that it was a William, a second son, who next came to the estate — member for Grampound, deputy-lieutenant of Lincolnshire, an agricultural improver, whose favourite pursuit, said his son, was drainage — i.e. drainage of the fens. William does not seem to have shone in antiquarian

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or other intellectual pursuits, but we can see a sort of family pattern. It is a respectable pattern, of service to, as well as profit from, the land, of prominent public duties met in the conventional way, of intelligent interest in affairs, of some mild feeling for learning. The hereditary cell-structure which lay behind the disposition of this respectable pattern was perhaps given a slight twist by the marriage of William Banks to Sarah, eldest daughter of William Bate of Derbyshire, in 1741; for while we can see the same elements in the make-up of the next Joseph, who was born on 13 February 1743,¹ in Argyle Street, Westminster, something has happened. With this new Joseph, everything is intensified, though the parliamentary tradition is broken: intelligence both deepens and widens, the affairs which claim his interest are practically everything except politics, interest becomes organization; the moderation of the polite antiquary is transformed into a consuming devotion to natural history, the travels from Lincolnshire to London become travels round the world, the county magnate becomes an international figure. One of the queer English excursions into individuality has happened. There has been also, it seems, a rise in the family's social fortunes: a sister of William Banks, Margaret, the delightful and radiant beauty Peggy Banks, for whom the Duke of Cumberland panted to give balls, married the Honourable Henry Grenville, and so came into a formidably aristocratic connection; her only child, Louisa, our Joseph's cousin, became the second wife of the third Earl Stanhope; and Sarah Banks's sister Hannah Sophia, Joseph's aunt on his maternal side, was the wife of the eighth Earl of Exeter. A child not himself born into ermine could hardly hope for more excellent connections. If he could have asked anything else of the gods, he might have asked for charm. He did not need to: that also they had given him. They gave him, to complete his felicity, in the year after that

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of his own birth, a sister as individual as himself, Sarah Sophia; and their individualities did not clash. William and Sarah Banks had no further children; but they had not done badly by the eighteenth century.

We know little enough of the earliest years of Joseph. Presumably they were largely spent at Revesby, where fresh air, the open fields, and plentiful play laid the foundations of a remarkably tough constitution, and private tutoring gave him sufficient educational grounding to take him to Harrow, in April 1752, at the age of nine. Thence, either to get the best of both worlds, or because of invincible opposition to learning in the Harrovian atmosphere — for, to quote his later friend, Henry Brougham, ‘Joe cared mighty little for his book’ — he was in September 1756 removed to Eton. A pleasant good-tempered boy he continued to be, but it was with extreme satisfaction that his tutor found him one day, at the age of fourteen, reading and not sporting in his hours of leisure. He was not, however, we may judge, reading in the classics; Joseph always trod a perilous path in the learned languages — if in a rash moment he ventured into that country at all. Something more important had happened: he had undergone a sort of conversion. He gave his own account of this, late in his life, to Sir Everard Home the surgeon, who transmitted it to posterity.¹ Joseph, river-bathing with his friends one fine summer evening, had lingered beyond them in the water; when he came out they were all gone and he dawdled back to school by himself along a flowery lane. Solitude, the flowers, perhaps the evening light, had their effect: ‘he stopped and looking round, involuntarily exclaimed, How beautiful! After some reflection, he said to himself, it is surely more natural that I should be taught to know all these productions of Nature, in preference to Greek or Latin; but the latter is my father's command and it is my duty to obey him; I will however make myself acquainted with all these different plants for my own pleasure and gratification. He began immediately to teach himself Botany’, with the assistance of the women who gathered simples for the apothecaries’ shops, paying sixpence for every valuable piece of information he got from them. Home for the holidays, he found in his mother's dressing-room an old and battered copy of Gerard's Herbal, with its woodcuts of the very plants he knew; he carried it back to school in triumph; ‘and it was probably this very book that he was poring over when detected by his tutor,

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for the first time, in the act of reading’. One branch of natural history led to another (the dutiful sense of his father's command felt by Joseph, we may suppose, sat but lightly on the enthusiast), already he had a power of persuasion with his fellows; ‘his whole time out of school was given up to hunting after plants and insects,’ writes Lord Brougham, the son of one of his schoolmates, ‘making a hortus siccus of the one, and forming a cabinet of the other. As often as Banks could induce [my father] to quit his task in reading or in verse-making, he would take him on his long rambles; and I suppose it was from this early taste that we had at Brougham so many butterflies, beetles, and other insects, as well as a cabinet of shells and fossils’.¹

In 1760 he went home from school to be inoculated against smallpox. The time taken by this was so great that when he had recovered it was thought his next step might well be not back to Eton but forward to Oxford — which, though not, quite obviously, his spiritual home, was at least a home for gentlemen; and he was accordingly at the end of the year entered at Christ Church as a gentleman commoner.² There he rapidly made a reputation as one ignorant of Greek; equally rapidly he came to a determination that though he was shunned as a classicist he would be consulted as a natural historian. But where to turn for higher instruction in the science which he had so far pursued with cullers of simples and in the Elizabethan pages of Gerard? The academic months were passing by. Oxford had a professor of botany, but nothing was farther from the professorial chair than the idea that its occupant might give instruction in the subject that he professed. Humphrey Sibthorp is not to be blamed; the idea was foreign to every other person as well, and it may indeed be esteemed an excess of educational devotion that he did give one lecture in thirty-five years. To the odd situation which young Mr Banks forced upon him, and to his own character, we owe one of the most masterly statements of irony in the English language — unless, as is conceivable, Lord Brougham had no talent for irony, and was simply being sincere. For when, we are told, Banks ‘applied to the learned doctor for leave to engage a lecturer, whose remuneration should be wholly defrayed by his pupil … it is highly creditable to the professor, and shows his love of the science, in which some of his family afterwards so greatly excelled, that he at once agreed to

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the proposal’.¹ He did more than signify his agreement: since there was no person eligible to teach botany in Oxford, he provided the aspiring youth with a letter of introduction to Professor Martyn, who occupied the chair at Cambridge — not to suggest that Professor Martyn might give lectures, but to inquire whether a teacher could possibly be found in the other university or its town. Banks's visit was triumphant: he found Israel Lyons, the son of a Jewish silversmith and teacher of Hebrew, and a young man early distinguished both in botany and in astronomy, and brought him back to be supported by the revenues of Revesby. Botany was thereupon prosecuted in Oxford; the unorthodox undergraduate grew in knowledge; and as it was the duty of the great to befriend and patronize the lowly, in due course Banks was able to recommend his tutor as astronomer on the Arctic voyage of 1773, on which Captain Phipps, R.N., another friend, looked unavailingly for a way to the North Pole.

Meanwhile — the Banksian chronology in these early years is not very distinct, but here at least we have another certain date — William Banks died unexpectedly, of ‘the breaking of an Imposthume in his Breast’, and was buried at Revesby on 1 October 1761.² Mrs Banks thereupon moved to London, or rather to Chelsea, with Sarah Sophia, to a pleasant house in Paradise Walk near the Apothecaries’ Garden that Sir Hans Sloane had founded not so very many years before. It was an excellent situation for botanical vacations. It had also the advantage of the neighbourhood of one whose Huntingdonshire country seat was not far from Lincolnshire, John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, a man who, though twenty-five years older than Banks, became his fast friend. Sandwich had for years already been deep in politics, his acquaintance with the World was wide and his way of thinking — to blunt the point of many accusations against him — liberal; to a talent for genial foolery he united great intelligence, and, in spite of his rather peculiar deep-jawed face, an extreme personal charm — a charm, indeed, even more winning and certainly more stable than that of Banks. He was to be useful to Banks, and he was, it seems, to form a pretty accurate estimate of some at least of the capacities of his young friend. Sandwich was capable of sharing a botanical expedition and both were passionate fishermen. Possibly it is to their association of this period, possibly to some later year, that we may refer a story that seems to have given the mature Banks a

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great deal of pleasure (it is again to Brougham that we owe our account): ‘So zealous were both these friends in the prosecution of this sport, that Sir Joseph used to tell of a project they had formed for suddenly draining the Serpentine by letting off the water; and he was wont to lament their scheme being discovered the night before it was to have been executed: their hope was to have thrown much light on the state and habits of the fish’.¹ The expectation for profitable research by this radical method is so tenuous that it is much more likely their hope was to have thrown confusion on London. The gentlemen, however, escaped trouble — into which Banks's other passion certainly brought him on a well known occasion. He had wandered out on the Hounslow road collecting plants and had crawled into a ditch. This was badly timed, for it was just after a traveller had been robbed by a footpad. The footpad decamped; search revealed Banks in his ditch — why did men hide in ditches ? — and in spite of indignant denials and struggles he was hauled off to a magistrate. A turning out of pockets must have surprised investigating Justice: the young man was eccentric and not criminal; no doubt there were appropriate apologies. One should not arrest landed gentlemen; but at least this one got a second valued reminiscence for his old age.²

Banks entered into his inheritance in February 1764. To the expansion of mind consequent on that event we may perhaps attribute his summary way of reorganizing university teaching, for it was in July of that year that Lyons gave his Oxford course of lectures.³ It was in that year also that Banks came down, with the world delightfully before him. A gentleman of means needed a London house; he bought one in New Burlington Street; and now, with town and country at his disposal, with Lincolnshire for shooting

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and fishing and the exercise of a young squire's benevolence (while Benjamin Stephenson, his father's steward, managed the estate), with London for society and an elevated converse, he might indeed be esteemed a happy young man. Towards his sister and his mother he was warmly affectionate, while his circle of friends began steadily to expand. They were excellent friends, curious about natural history and antiquities, and they themselves had their friends. No sooner was one in the philosophical circle, than it began to broaden out illimitably. To date acquaintanceship seems impossible, but to these years surely must belong something like intimacy with Thomas Pennant, Banks's senior by seventeen years, the Flintshire natural historian and traveller through Britain, the correspondent of Linnaeus, the friend of Gilbert White (Pennant must even then have been composing his folio British Zoology of 1766); and with Daines Barrington, the lawyer and antiquary; and at least friendship with Lightfoot the botanist; with Dr Morton, the librarian of the British Museum; with Dr William Watson, distinguished in physics and astronomy; with Professor John Hope, the botanist of Edinburgh. It was certainly about this time — we have his own word for it¹ — that he first met Daniel Carl Solander, whose name was to be so closely linked with his own, whose counsel henceforth was so much part of his life. Our young man was, in fact, hard on the heels of science, and we are not to be surprised that in April 1766 the Bishop of Carlisle joined with Dr Morton and Dr Watson to nominate him for the fellowship of the Royal Society. He had made no signal contribution to any department of learning whatsoever; but that, at that time, was no disqualification whatsoever; he was an excellent young man, energetic and interested, quite devoted to botany; a landed gentleman with a really enviable income; it would have been an insult to keep him out. The Royal Society duly elected him, quite unwitting that it had taken the first step towards an epoch in its own existence.

Even while it elected him, Joseph was at sea. Other men might cross the Channel, and take by coach the well-worn road to Paris, Lyons, Venice, Rome; other men might call on Voltaire or hobnob with cardinals or collect medals and marbles and reputations as virtuosi. But Banks was an original. He would go to Newfoundland and inspect Esquimaux; he would collect plants. If this be regarded

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as an extraordinary, as well as unexpected, step for a young person of wealth and comfort in 1766, the comment is that Banks was an extraordinary young person. In that century an extraordinary person did not lack opportunity to show his nature. The opportunity was now provided by the economics of empire. On the coasts of Newfoundland, French and English fishermen had long contested desirable rights and harbours. The peace of 1763 had done something both to affirm and to delimit British claims. British fishermen themselves, however, had to be kept in order, and a web of standing custom to be reinforced and maintained by royal regulation and naval supervision. The ship detailed to cross the Atlantic on this duty for the summer of 1766 was H.M.S. Niger, Captain Sir Thomas Adams; and among her officers was Lieutenant Constantine John Phipps. Lieutenant Phipps was himself a rather unusual person: the heir to an Irish peerage and the nephew of an English earl, he had entered the royal navy from Oxford; not only was his career assured, as a man of ‘interest’, but he was able to help his friends and Banks was an Oxford friend. It is really in no way odd, therefore, to find our young naturalist leaving London on 7 April to join a naval vessel, and beginning the first of his many journals of travel.¹ Nor is it odd, after his arrival at Plymouth on the 9th, that he should spend the days before the departure of his ship in exploring the natural history of Plymouth, in taking a critical view of that seat of opulence Mount Edgecumbe, and in visiting Mr Cookworthy's shop to collect the details of the china manufacture in which Mr Cookworthy was engaged; for a gentleman of enquiring mind enquired into everything.²

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The Niger sailed from Plymouth Sound on 22 April, and reached the harbour of St John's on the south-east coast of Newfoundland on 11 May. On the voyage Banks suffered and recovered from sea-sickness, netted and described jelly-fish, tried unsuccessfully to catch sea-birds with a hook and line, and saw a number of icebergs — the first ‘an Island of Ice … like a Body of whitish light’. Gales were succeeded by mist and frost, and when he went on shore at St John's he found the spring very little advanced. But what a country for walking and botanizing, for fishing and shooting! Lobsters, crabs, starfish, ‘great plenty of small trouts’, ‘Dog's violets both blew and white’, ‘water Bugs in abundance’, mosses, shrubs and birds: all were there, and the amiable sailors brought in rocks and a tortoise shell for him. Snow was a very minor interruption. He inspected, here and elsewhere, the sites of passages of arms between the French and British, and made the military observations proper to a gentleman. On June 11, in pursuit of a roving commission, Sir Thomas Adams set sail for Croque harbour, inside the northern peninsula of the island, where a vegetable garden was started and Phipps set up a habitation called Crusoe Hall; there, said his friend, ‘he works night and Day, and lets the Musquetos eat more of him, than he does of any kind of food, all through Eagerness’.¹ There was a white bear to look for, unsuccessfully. The weather became hot. Banks went out with the master in a shallop, examining the bays and harbours to the southward, botanizing where he could, sleeping in his clothes in ‘the aft Cuddy’; and then on further expeditions of the same sort, unable to keep his journal properly because his shipmates were so curious to see what he wrote down in it. Then the blow fell: for the greater part of July he was confined to the ship by a fever, ‘incapable of collecting Plants, at the very season of the year when they are the most plentifull’; indeed at one stage his life was despaired of. Weak and dispirited, he had to make do with what his servant² could bring in, and when he could get on shore again, he was ‘baffled by every Butterfly who chose to fly away’. His strength soon returned, and he was out on another boat expedition, this time to the north, which gave him not only some valuable plants but also, at last, on Belle Isle, the sight of a wild bear. No sooner

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was he on board ship again than she sailed for Chateau Bay on the coast of Labrador, inside Belle Isle, for a two months’ visit. Although the passage was made in a strong gale, he found to his pleasure that he had mastered his sea-sickness. There were more boat expeditions, on one of which, on 2 September, he and his friend the master had the narrowest possible escape from sinking in a further, and terrific, gale;¹ for the blowing season had come on, and Sir Thomas was henceforth very careful of his boats. Banks preferred Chateau Bay to Croque: the country was more barren, but the absence of brushwood made him always sure of a good walk, and the abundance of partridge, teal, and curlews gave him good shooting. Croque on the other hand he thought intolerable in summer from its heat, its thick woods and its prodigious abundance not of game but of mosquitoes and gadflies; while field-mice ravaged the vegetable gardens and weasels the eggs of the ship's poultry kept on shore. Meanwhile he was busy at his journal again, over an account he had gathered of the Newfoundland Indians, not without a certain scepticism — ‘if half of what I have wrote about them is true’, he said, ‘it is more than I expect’. They had their own method of taking a scalp, and a scalp he managed to get hold of. Then came accounts of the English and the French fisheries, and the habits of fishermen; followed by recipes for chowder, the soup made of salt pork, cod, and biscuit — which earned his great admiration — of spruce beer, and of the powerful variations which could be built upon it. The detail is very much Banks. He was in high spirits again; of which we may judge very well, not from his journal, but from the quite characteristic letter he wrote to Sarah Sophia from Chateau Bay, 11 August:

Dear Sister

I received yours two days ago with newspapers &c: &c: which I must thank you all for as I can assure you they were the greatest Comfort you can Conceive — we all sat round the Fire & hunted out all the deaths marriages &c: &c: as eagerly as a schoolboy does Plumbs out of a Pudding

How do you think I have spent my Leisure Time since I have been here Very Musically I can assure you I have learnt to Play upon a new Instrument as I have Forswore the Flute I have tried my hand upon strings what do you think it is now not a fiddle I can assure you but a Poor innocent Guittar which Lay in the Cabbin on which I can play Lady Coventries minuet & in Infancy &c: with Great success

¹ ‘when mere accident preserved my Life’, he wrote. Sarah Sophia preferred to think otherwise: ‘Providence’, she made her marginal annotation, p. 24.

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Pray My Love to Coz Bate & tell her that she & I differ a little in opinion about Stamford races as I had rather be here Than at all the races in Europe — not but what I beleive she was at Least as happy there as I am here

I hope M^r Lee has been Very Civil & Given you Nosegays as often as you have been to him if not tell him he shall not have one of my Insects when I come home give my Comp^ts to him also & tell him that if I did not think it might Endanger Cracking some of Your Ladyships teeth I would Let him know by you some of the Hard names of the things I have got

So Miss Frederick is going to be married to our countryman a dangerous Experiment I think he killed his Last wife in a hurry I hope he may keep her alive a little Longer but maybe she intends to Revenge Miss Pit & kill him I know you women are Sad Husband killers in your hearts

I do not know what Else to say I am almost Exhausted thank you however for your ague receipt it has one merit however I think for if it would not Cure an ague I am sure it would kill a horse

We are here in daily Expectation of the Eskimaux Ladies here I wish with all my heart they were Come as I might have sent you a sealskin gown & Petticoat Perfumd with train oil which to them is as Sweet as Lavander water but more of them when I know them better at Present adieu only Beleive

Me Your very affectionate Brother

J Banks

P: S: Pray My Comp^ts to all Freinds at Chelsea especialy our neighbours at the Garden I mean our Garden-ing uncle & aunt adieu¹

This letter does not indicate very much of the adventures of a naturalist across the Atlantic; it is not very witty; but it does indicate the easy good humour of its writer's mind — when things were going well — and his excellent relations with this admiring and admirable sister.

He did not, alas, see the Eskimaux Ladies; and on 3 October the ship returned to Croque to fill water and pick up what vegetables and poultry had survived. Banks collected a few more plants, and gives us an account of the seal-fishery. On 10 October the ship sailed for St John's, the rendezvous for the whole Newfoundland squadron, where he notes his approval of a person who was later to receive in very full measure his disapproval: the commodore was ‘Mr Palliser’ of the Guernsey, ‘whose civilities we ought to acknowledge, as he shewed us all we could expect’. And St John's?

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‘We all felt great pleasure in returning to Society, which we had so long been deprived of; St John's, tho’ the most disagreable Town I ever met with was for some time perfectly agreable to us’. Our journalist deals faithfully with St John's, the very cows of which, he was assured, ate fish. The compensation was Coronation Day. To the celebration of this Commodore Palliser bent all his sense of style, while his guests had to smother what taste for social discriminations they possessed. The Guernsey was dressed for the occasion: ‘after this we were all invited to a Ball, given by M^r Governor, where the want of Ladies was so great, that my Washerwoman and her Sister were there by formal Invitation; but what surprized me the most was, that after dancing we were conducted to a really elegant Supper, set out with all kinds of wine, and Italian Liqueurs, to the great emolument of the Ladies, who eat and drank to some purpose; dancing it seems agreed with them, by its getting them such excellent Stomachs’.¹ This gleam of light on social history — the poor ladies might well turn with enthusiasm from too much chowder and spruce beer to an elegant supper and Italian Liqueurs — is succeeded by an account of the sea-cow fishery; and that by the dimensions of a schooner, a remarkably good sea-boat; and that by a note on the absence of any distinct breed of Newfoundland dog; and that by further praise for Palliser as a governor. All was interesting, all was recorded; there was nothing that did not stimulate that rapid, that punctuation-free pen.

But the summer had come to an end, autumn drew on, fishing was over and the fishing-boats departed, the year was too far advanced for success in further plant-hunting; nevertheless, said the hunter, ‘I have vanity enough to believe, that to the northward not many will be found to have escaped my observation’.² On 28 October the Niger left St John's for Lisbon, there to spend part of the winter. The Atlantic provided the gale that first impressed Banks with his very lively sense of the precautions necessary in the ocean carriage of plants — precautions which are underlined with more and more elaboration in his later correspondence; for on 5 November, off the Western Islands, the vessel shipped a sea which stove in the quarter, flooded the cabin, broke all its furniture in pieces and entirely demolished his collection of seeds and growing specimens. But the dried specimens survived, the larger number of his trophies, and into safe keeping they went at New Burlington Street: the foundation, on the foreign side, of the great Herbarium that was to be the pride of British botany and a

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lodestone for the scientific curiosity of all Europe.¹ The ship reached Lisbon on 17 November, the date on which the surviving journal ends, with its later-written descriptton of the harbour, the town, and the customs of the inhabitants. Portugal treated Banks kindly: although he never saw the inside of a Portuguese gentleman's house, he made friends in natural history,² added a good deal to his collections, and saw for the first time that rare substance, caoutchouc or indiarubber. Early in the new year the Niger duly returned to England, and Banks with her. He arrived in London on 30 January 1767.³ There could by now be no doubt, even among the rare purists, that his election to the Royal Society was justified. Not only was he a man of substance, but he had travelled unconventionally; he had suffered the confinement of a naval vessel, storm, discomfort and fever, in the cause of science, and he had kept a journal with hard names that would endanger his sister's teeth. His journal, indeed, with the interest it displayed in everything, from fish to fortifications, and its treatment of human beings as essential parts of natural history, might be taken as a sort of trial run for the larger journal on which he was before long to embark. He had served his apprenticeship. He did not commit any of the journal to print, nor report on his adventures except in a social way. But he attended a meeting of the Royal Society for the first time on 15 February 1767; and there, no doubt, he bore himself with a proper dignity.

Meanwhile there were things to do in the metropolis, and beyond it. There was so much to raise the interest of an intelligent man. He went down into Kent on a little tour of universal enquiry — plants, shells, fossils, fortifications, the manufacture of vitriol, beer, and flints, dockyards, a fire ship and a court martial all claimed his attention — and then was again involved in London.⁴ We have a letter to Thomas Pennant of 5 May 1767:⁵

I am ashamed I have not Long before wrote to you to tell you the truth

¹ It speaks highly of Banks's generosity that he was prepared to lend his herbarium to his friend John Sneyd, of Bishton, Derbyshire, for the period of his absence on the Endeavour voyage. See Sneyd to Banks, Kew B.C. I, 31, n.d., requesting the loan, and asking him also to buy textiles for Sneyd's wife in China and Japan if he should visit those countries; and ibid., 30, 9 January 1773, thanking him for the loan.

² There are, for instance, in Kew B. C. I, several letters from Gerard De Vismes, of Lisbon, beginning with 2 June 1767; the second announces the gift of a hogshead of ‘that choice Calcavellas’, with instructions for its treatment.

³ There is a marginal note to this effect at the beginning of the description of Lisbon in the second copy of the journal by S. S. B. The Niger arrived at Plymouth on 20 January 1767.

⁴ Journal of an Excursion to Chatham, Rochester, Sheerness, Sheppey, &c. began Feb^ry 21st 1767 Ended March 4th 1767.—S.S.B. 1772.

⁵ Alexander Turnbull Library (hereafter referred to as ATL), ALS 269.

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my Idleness is only to be excusd by alledging a still greater as a palliative Circumstance which is that I have not yet got your Beaver [i.e. a print of the animal] Colourd to tell you the truth I have been so hurried Ever since you left town by furnishing my house that I have scarcely had time to think of anything Else.

M^r White called upon me today in your name & left some Specimens of Birds …. I intend tomorrow to call upon him at Horaces head and hold Ornithological Converse tho I can assure you it does not go on with the spirit it used to do when you was with us.

[A paragraph follows on the colouring of plates.] I want you of all things to visit a new Branch of trade I have lately discoverd which I think may be of Service to us the Horners a set of people who live by selling the Horns of all sorts of animals unworked up to those who work them into Knife Hafts &c. the People sell what they Call Buffaloes horns every day & must Certainly have many of animals unknown to us.

adieu Floreat Res Zoologica says
Your affectionate J Banks

Another to the same correspondent, of 14 May,¹ touches on journeys:

I am Just upon the wing setting out for Dorsetshire … I mean to be out about a fortnight in which time I shall visit Bristol & the other side of the Channell I am much obligd to you (for an obligation you are not perhaps at present apprizd of) I mean an acquaintance with M^r White who mentiond your name & promises to send divers & various discoveries to town……. Instead of remaining Idle as I intended till I should set out for Flint I find I am to be well employd for I must set out for Lincolnshire as soon as I return from my present expedition….

The ‘Dorsetshire’ visit was more in the line of the ordinary cultivated county tour of the day than was that sudden leap across the Atlantic, and it lasted longer than a fortnight. It was in fact a leisurely progress from 15 May, on which day Banks descended upon his aunt Mrs Grenville at Eastbury, to 20 June, when returned to New Burlington Street. Between those dates he went through Dorset and Somerset to Bristol, Chepstow — so that he did, as he planned, get across to ‘the other side of the Channell’ — Wells, Glastonbury and Taunton. There were country houses to inspect, starting with his aunt's — ‘exceedingly large and possibly one of the heaviest piles of stone S^r J^no Vanbrugh ever erected’; Pearcefield, ‘the finest place I ever saw’; Burton Pynsent, where Lord Chatham had in two years done a great deal to the house:

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‘He has built several rooms, some very good ones, but has shewn that his Buildings in Brick are not more durable than his Administrations, as he has already found it necessary to pull down and alter what he himself set up’ — an isolated political observation in all Banks's mass of papers. There was Chepstow Castle to admire; there was Tintern Abbey — ‘a most noble Ruin, by far the Lightest Pi[e]ce of Gothick architecture I ever saw’; the cathedral at Wells (where he went with his antiquarian friend the Rev. Richard Kaye), ‘Rather Good’; the abbey at Glastonbury, where he was ‘almost bit to death’ by gnats; there were pictures and coins and birds and the Cheddar gorge and fire engines, Roman circum-vallations and barrows for archaeological speculation, the fossilized bones of ‘an Elephant found bedded in Ocre on the Mendip hills’; there were riding and walking and a great amount of botanizing; and there was at Bristol ‘a very singular curiosity which was a woman who had for reasons not yet well known been confined since August Last in a deal Box which I myself measurd and found the dimensions to be Lengh 2 feet 6 inches, Breadth and Depth each one foot 4’. Finally on the way back to London, between Silbury and Marlborough, there were the great boulders of sarsen scattered about Fyfield Down, the ‘Grey Wethers’ of the local inhabitants, who were breaking them up to build their walls; so that the botanist and man of taste could geologize as well, take some pieces home, and find them to be ‘a very hard and fine graind Sand Stone’.¹ It is all very completely Banks, this tour, and this sample being given, we need not quote him on his other English, or rather British, journeys.²

Presumably this tour was followed by the visit to Lincolnshire, for Banks kept a close eye on his estate. There was also the anticipated journey to Flintshire and his friend Pennant. But was not something possible of nobler note ?

I am Just Returnd to London From my Excursion [he wrote to Pennant] & as I prophesied in my Last found two of yours which your kindness had sent to me in my absence

What will you say to me if I should be prevented from paying my respects to you & N: Wales this year tho I so fully intended it nothing but your Looking upon it with the Eye of an unprejudiced nat: Historian

¹ ‘Grey Wethers’—not ‘weathers’, as spelt by Banks—from their resemblance at a distance to a flock of sheep. The stone circle at Avebury, a mile and a half away, is believed to have been built with sarsens from this site, which was declared a nature reserve in 1956.

² His little journal of this tour exists in a copy by S.S.B., Hawley coll. It was admirably edited by Spencer George Perceval, and printed in the Proceedings of the Bristol Naturalists Society, New Series IX, 1899, pp. 6–37.

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can bring any excuse to be heard with Patience Look then with Zoologick Eyes & tell me if you could Blame me if I Sacraficed every Consideration to an opportunity of Paying a visit to our Master Linnaeus & Profiting by his Lectures before he dies who is now so old that he cannot Long Last

I know you cannot Blame me & you will not when I tell you that nothing shall hinder my attendance in Flintshire but such an expedition. …¹

An expedition to Uppsala would certainly not have been an impossible one, and it could hardly have failed to have been beneficial to Banks — if his capacity to assimilate lectures in Latin were sufficient — as well as gratifying to Linnaeus, who loved his foreign pupils, though he could speak no language of theirs. There would have been distinction, too, in such close contact with the Master. Nor was his demise so imminent at this time as Banks seems to have thought: he had just passed his sixtieth year, and though, his most energetic days of open-air teaching were gone, he was still a vigorous and lively presence, in lecture room or botanic garden. Banks did inevitably come under his notice, in due course, but only at second hand. For to Flintshire, not to Sweden, in this late summer of 1767 did our young man go, with companions of whom the most eminent, botanically, was the sociable apothecary William Hudson — whose Flora Anglica, with its Linnaean classification, had been the fundamental work on its subject since its first publication in 1762. It was a journey not only to Flintshire, but through Wales from south to north, on to Cheshire and Derbyshire, and south home again through Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. It was the longest of all Banks's British journeys, and it lasted from the middle of August 1767 to the end of January 1768.² He had not, however, abandoned thought of a pilgrimage to the Master's feet. More than that, he would tread in the Master's feet themselves, he would go to Lapland; Pennant, writing in

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January, is solicitous about the return from Chester to London, ‘thro all the perils of snow and ice, a good foretaste of your Lapland Journey’;¹ and in the following month Thomas Falconer, the classical scholar and learned antiquarian of Chester, wrote of his pleasure at the expected tour, for which he gave a good deal of advice to the tourist.² We do not know exactly when there flashed upon his mind the vision of a greater journey — an idea, if only it could be realized in fact, of a quite stupendously satisfying nature. This was the idea of a journey round the world and across the Pacific Ocean, where no natural historian had ever been before. It took on elaboration, it gathered weight, it was favourably received by the philosophical. And in this same season, it appears, of hope and speculative excitement, Joseph Banks fell in love.

Among the branches of science in which Banks was not interested, two, astronomy and geography, ranked pre-eminent. Yet the voyage on which he had fastened his mind was a voyage which had for its objects the increase of knowledge of precisely these two; and it was the result of impulses, from the Royal Society and the British Government, with which he had had nothing to do. It was a voyage, in short, for the observation of the transit of the planet Venus across the disc of the sun, and for the investigation of the great continent which was alleged by a number of theoretical geographers to exist in the more southern and western parts of the Pacific, and probably in high latitudes of the Atlantic as well — the Terra australis incognita of long tradition. The two men who in the eighteenth century most enthusiastically elaborated upon this theory were the French geographer Philippe Buache (1700–73) in whose Considérations géographiques et physiques sur les nouvelles découvertes de la grande mer (Paris, 1753) were what the author regarded as ‘hypothéses déraisonnables’ on the outlines and formation of the continent; and the Scotsman Alexander Dalrymple, whose Account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacifick Ocean, Previous to 1764 (London, 1769), displayed an immense and dogmatic confidence in its existence — founded, like the theories of Buache, on arguments both physical and historico-geographical. But indeed,

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most people accepted the general hypothesis with the simple faith that they gave to the existence of a south pole.

The Transit of Venus was a different matter. There could be no argument about it whatever. It was not a phenomenon that could be inspected every day. It had been first observed by the young, brilliant, and short-lived Jeremiah Horrocks in the year 1639, in his parsonage at Hoole in Lancashire; it had been last observed, with no great advantage to philosophy,¹ in 1761; it was due to occur again in 1769; and then more than a century would elapse till in 1874 it would give the astronomers another chance. Good observations would make it possible to calculate with some accuracy the distance of the earth from the sun, a pre-requisite to other important calculations in astronomy. In the event of 3 June 1769 therefore the Royal Society took a very lively interest; for undeniably, in 1761 British science — through no fault of its own — had not shone. The Rev. Nevil Maskelyne had been sent to St Helena, where a cloudy day had been sufficient reason for failure; and Messrs Mason and Dixon to Sumatra, which they had never reached — and, deposited by the exigencies of war at the Cape of Good Hope, they had found that by no means an ideal place for their operations. The Society was determined that no shortcoming on its part would inhibit a happier outcome on the next occasion, whatever the scientists of other nations might do, and as early as a meeting in June 1766 it resolved to despatch observers to ‘several parts of the world’. Discussion did not become close, however, till towards the end of the following year, when it was decided that the British effort should be devoted to three widely separated places of observation — the first, Fort Churchill in Hudson Bay, the second the North Cape, and the third some suitable island in the Pacific Ocean. But what island ? Mr Maskelyne, now Astronomer Royal, suggested the group called the Marquesas, or alternatively Rotterdam or Amsterdam, in the archipelago we know as Tonga; and there were other suggestions made, such as the Solomon Islands. The difficulty about any of these was that before a telescope could be stood upon it, it would have to be rediscovered; for the Solomons

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had not been seen since their discovery by Mendaña in 1568, or the Marquesas since their discovery, also by Mendaña, in 1595, or Amsterdam and Rotterdam since their discovery by Tasman in 1643. Assuming that the island could be rediscovered, how was it to be rediscovered? Again, astronomers themselves would need transit, and while the Hudson Bay Company would no doubt take observers to Fort Churchill, and they might go to the North Cape on the annual naval vessel for fisheries protection, the Pacific Ocean was a different matter. The Royal Society had no money with which to charter a ship; like other learned societies without funds, therefore, it decided to appeal to government. The Council submitted a memorial to the king requesting a grant of four thousand pounds and the necessary ship; observers it had in mind for the Pacific were Mr Dalrymple the geographer and Mr Green, late of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Mr Dalrymple, it may be noted, found it necessary to observe that he had no thoughts of making the voyage as a passenger, or in any other capacity than that of ‘having the total management of the ship intended to be sent’. As Mr Dalrymple, though neither ‘bred to the navy’ nor a professional seaman, had had some experience of command in the East Indies, this did not seem to the Society unreasonable; and the king having expressed his willingness to provide the money, the Admiralty was directed to provide a ship. The official investigations into this matter began early in March 1768, and by the end of that month the ‘cat-built bark’ Earl of Pembroke, soon to be given the more famous name Endeavour, had been brought into the navy.

Meanwhile there had been discussion of the command of the vessel. The Admiralty, quite unmoved by the claims of Mr Dalrymple, settled on Mr James Cook. This was somewhat surprising, because Mr Cook was not even a commissioned officer, and he did not have that ‘interest’ with government that was so useful as a means to promotion. He had, however, made his own interest by solid merit, more particularly by his distinguished career as a marine surveyor in Newfoundland, where, at the time of Banks's visit, he had been working on the south coast and had observed an eclipse of the sun from the Burgeo islands.¹ He was

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very well known to influential men like Captain Palliser, now of the Navy Board, and Philip Stephens the Admiralty secretary, and, though promotion came late to him, they had no doubt of his ability to command. The decision reduced Mr Dalrymple to fury; attending the Council of the Society in person, he reaffirmed his determination not to go on the voyage at all. There was nothing the Society could do but find another observer. Here it was in luck: Mr Cook appeared a proper person, and Mr Cook was appointed, with Mr Green as his astronomical colleague. Just at this point another naval vessel completed a voyage round the world by arriving in England: it was the Dolphin, Captain Samuel Wallis, and it reported the discovery of an island and harbour quite admirably fitted for the Society's purpose of observation. Furthermore, the position of this island had been accurately fixed; no time need be occupied in rediscovery. It was King George the Third's Island, and its harbour was Port Royal — or as we have learnt to call them, Tahiti and Matavai Bay. Early in June the Society informed the Admiralty of its wish to have the observers conveyed there; and simultaneously brought forward something new:

Joseph Banks Esq^r Fellow of this Society, [wrote the secretary] a Gentleman of large fortune, who is well versed in natural history, being Desirous of undertaking the same voyage the Council very earnestly request their Lordships, that in regard to M^r Banks's great personal merit, and for the Advancement of useful knowledge, He also, together with his Suite, being seven persons more, that is, eight persons in all, together with their baggage, be received on board of the Ship, under the Command of Captain Cook.¹

This was something new, however, only in the formal correspondence; for though we do not know, unfortunately, when Banks first had his brilliant idea, the time was certainly long before, and there had certainly been a great deal of talk — and, quite obviously, of preparation, because we have the suite already precisely numbered. The Council of the Royal Society had directed the sending of its letter last quoted on 9 June; and 9 June was the date on which Banks himself received a farewell letter from a

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friend: ‘I have for some time been in Doubt whether you was [in] England or on the Seas; last Night's Papers acquainted me that a North Country Cat was fitting out at Deptford for the South Seas, and was to take on board some Gentlemen of Fortune Students in Botany’.¹ But this was already late in the day: as early as 10 April Pennant was writing with advice on umbrellas, ‘both the thin silk french kinds and the strong oil skin ones; also oil skin coats to guard against the torrents of rain you may expect to meet’.² It is clear that Banks's friends caught some of his excitement — excitement summarized in his traditional reply to one more conservative, who expostulated over the hare-brained project, and advised the conventional Grand Tour instead: ‘Every blockhead does that; my Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe’.³

Now on 10 April, when Pennant was writing about umbrellas, the ship had been bought, and the mode of her fitting-out determined, and it seems clear that her master had been selected. But it does not seem likely that the Admiralty had by then agreed to accommodate Mr Banks, or even been asked to do so. Mr Banks, however, had had his idea, and clearly assumed that it would be acceptable to all others concerned. His assumption is characteristic: it is characteristic both of the young Banks and of the eighteenth century. A gentleman of large fortune who had had his own way since early youth, who had chosen his own subjects of study and provided the means himself, who went where he wished and took his place in any society he wished, whose friends were scientific, and naval, and ministerial — we must not forget the Earl of Sandwich — hardly needed to hesitate. What he was proposing to do was to plant himself, a train of dependants and a mass of impedimenta on a small and already overcrowded vessel, commanded by a man he did not know, for purposes not at all envisaged by government, in a fashion that would undoubtedly entail further expense on government and inconvenience on other people; and he was proposing it in the sure, certain, and unhesitating conviction that he had a right to be obliged, and would be made welcome. This it was that was so highly characteristic of the English gentleman of fortune of that age, so effortlessly superior, so candidly appropriative of privilege, upon his Grand Tour; this it was that was so completely the Banksian attitude to life. The extraordinary thing is, to a later age, that he brought it off. There were no

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difficulties raised. He simply, we may say, walked on board the Endeavour, elbowed her officers out of the way, and was made welcome. The touring Englishman expected a welcome, and generally got one, at his inn; but it was a professional welcome, he paid for it. There was no doubt about the welcome that met Banks; for there was no doubt about the Banksian charm. It was not a deliberate or calculated charm. Banks was not, like so many of his contemporaries on their travels, the grand seigneur. Indeed the grand seigneur could not by any stretch of the imagination have chosen the mode of travel that Mr Banks chose. There were times when Banks could act the spoilt child, and other times when he could put on style; but ordinarily it was the directness of the child, or the youth, that he displayed, mingled with his belief in his own privilege. As things turned out on this voyage, there were no seriously unpleasant consequences; and there were, in the presence and talents of Mr Banks, certain positive advantages. For once he had had his great idea, nothing, as we have seen, could stop him, and on 22 July Cook was directed by the Admiralty secretary to receive not only ‘Mr Charles Green and his Servant and Baggage’, but also ‘Joseph Banks Esq. and his Suite consisting of eight Persons with their Baggage, bearing them as Supernumeraries for Victuals only, and Victualling them as the Barks Company during their Continuance on board’.¹ (There were also a couple of dogs, but no doubt they were included with the baggage.) That is, once these persons were on board, they were to get no special treatment they did not pay for themselves, or that Mr Banks did not pay for. The Admiralty would give them food and cabin or hammock space — and not much of that — and they must make the best of it.

Who were these eight persons that Banks so blithely added to the eighty-six others already thrust on board the small ship under the newly created Lieutenant Cook's command? Their number, it will be noted, had risen by one since the Royal Society communicated with the Admiralty in June. They were, in some sort of order of social and scientific rank, Dr Daniel Carl Solander, Herman Didrich Spöring, Sydney Parkinson, Alexander Buchan, Peter Briscoe, James Roberts, Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton. Dr Solander already was a man of mark. He was a Swede, born at Pitea in the northern part of his country, in 1733. His medical studies were but his avenue into natural history. After the brilliant and beloved Petrus Löfling the ablest of the Uppsala pupils of Linnaeus, he contributed plants from his own province

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to the Linnaean herbarium, and earned golden opinions from the Academic Consistory of the University as well as from the Master himself. When the ardent London natural historians, Peter Collinson and John Ellis, both correspondents of Linnaeus, urged him to send a pupil to England to spread the gospel, the choice fell on Solander, and he was not unwilling. He bade farewell to Linnaeus at the beginning of April 1759, but, falling sick in the south of Sweden, did not arrive in England till July 1760.¹ Ellis took him in charge, with what Linnaeus called ‘paternal affection’, and before long he was widely known for both his extreme good humour and the acuteness of his learning. From as far as Charleston, South Carolina —‘a horrid country, where there is not a living soul who knows the least iota of Natural History’ — a naturalist friend of Ellis, Dr Alexander Garden, wrote with some despair, ‘I confess I often envy you the sweet hours of converse on this subject with your friends in and about London. How must you enjoy Solander! O my God!’² This was in 1761. By 1762 Solander was attending the meetings of the Royal Society;³ and Collinson testifies to his impact on English science and natural historians in a letter to Linnaeus of 2 September in that year: ‘My dear Linnaeus cannot easily conceive the pleasure of this afternoon. There was our beloved Solander seated in my Musaeum, surrounded with tables covered with an infinite variety of sea-plants, the accumulation of many years. He was digesting and methodizing them into order, and for his pains he shall be rewarded with a collection of them, which no doubt you will see. Afterwards at supper we remembered my dear Linnaeus, and my other Swedish friends, over a cheerful glass of wine…. Solander is very industrious in making all manner of observations to enrich himself and his country with knowledge in every branch of natural history’.⁴ A man so able was marked for learned preferment, and in 1762 the Petersburg Academy of

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Sciences was anxious, on the recommendation of Linnaeus, to appoint him its professor of botany. London was in despair: could not someone less eminent teach science to Russian bears?¹ But Solander himself refused to go to Russia; he liked his new friends, and they were diligently looking out for his advantage. It is now Ellis who writes to Linnaeus, in December 1762, about the delightful person: ‘He is exceedingly sober, well behaved, and very diligent, no way expensive; so that I hope he will do very well. I can assure you, the more he is known, the more he is liked; and now peace is near settled, he has a greater probability of succeeding, than when we were engaged in the hurry of a troublesome, though victorious war’.² Solander had one defect, it must be admitted, of which Linnaeus had had experience, and which most of his friends were to remark: he was reluctant to answer letters. This was unfortunate, and we feel the misfortune even today, because when he conquered his reluctance he was an excellent letter-writer. Short and plump men are not infrequently bustling: it is clear that Solander, though short and to become plump, never bustled. Meanwhile his reputation as a natural historian of the widest interests and knowledge continued to grow, and at last in 1764 he obtained an assistantship in the British Museum; in this year too he was elected F.R.S. He was busy making catalogues; he surveyed the fabulous collection of the Duchess of Portland.³ Mr Banks, who in 1764 entered upon his independency and his career in London, could hardly have been unaware of the existence of this brilliant and amiable man, and when they met, they quickly formed a firm and mutual regard. It was at Lady Anne Monson's, at dinner, that Solander, fired with the conversation about the forthcoming voyage, leapt to his feet and proposed himself as a travelling-companion. Banks was enraptured; and next day he talked the Admiralty into acquiescence.⁴ Solander had placed himself in a great line; for there was a Linnaean tradition of travel, and from the study of the man who had tramped through Lapland his ‘apostles’ went north, south, east and west, to the Arctic, North America, Guiana, Arabia Felix, the Cape, to the Atlas mountains and Palestine, to the East Indies, China and Japan. They were

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victims of pirates and plague, hunger, thirst and poverty, and some of them died far from home; but, by so great sacrifices, the harvest of knowledge was enormous. It was one of the heroic ages of science, and it was only by extreme good luck that Solander was not one of the apostles who died.

Of Spöring we know a great deal less. His father was a professor of medicine at the University of Åbo in Finland, and, like so many of the learned, a correspondent of Linnaeus. The son was born about 1730: he was a student at Åbo from 1748 to 1753, going afterwards to Stockholm for a course in surgery. He must have sought his fortune in London and become known there, and he must have become an able naturalist, as did other men trained in medicine. Banks seems to have engaged him as a sort of secretary.¹ ‘A grave thinking man’, as he was later called by his employer, he was also a good draughtsman, and clever with his fingers in the mechanical way: amid all the miscellaneous collections of appliances on board the Endeavour, the set of watchmaker's tools was taken by him. Sydney Parkinson, the botanical or natural history draughtsman, was born about 1745, the younger son of a Quaker brewer, Joel Parkinson of Edinburgh. This was one brewer who did not in that century amass wealth: his sons, on his death, having to fend for themselves, Sydney was apprenticed to a woollen-draper. His talent for drawing, however, would out; he came to London, where his flowers and fruits attracted the attention of botanists and other connoisseurs of natural history — among whom was Banks. It was to Parkinson that Banks in 1767 committed the task of copying on vellum a collection of drawings brought back from Ceylon by Governor Loten,