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Joseph Banks and Kew

‘If I am to do all to write all to direct all & to pay for all & no human being feel inclined to thank me I shall I fear in due time feel as sulky as an old sow who has lost her scrubbing Post . ’ [1]

Who was Joseph Banks?[2] He was born on 13 February 1743 in London to William and Sarah Banks, the couple’s first and only son.[3] William entered Middle Temple, London, but is not known to have pursued any legal career. Though he and his wife, who was from Derbyshire, spent some of their time in the St James’s area of London at their Argyll Street home, most of their life was lived at their country estate at Revesby Abbey, Lincolnshire. Here, William, now also a Member of Parliament for a Cornwall constituency, devoted himself to the Lincolnshire estates which he had inherited from his father in 1741.

Joseph’s formal education began at the age of nine at Harrow School but four years later he was transferred to Eton, where he followed a curriculum primarily in Latin, Greek and English literature, which he studied dutifully but without much enthusiasm or success. Towards the end of his stay, he was also instructed in algebra, geography and French.

Next was Christ Church, Oxford, which he entered as a gentleman-commoner on 16 December 1760, aged seventeen. During his first year at the university, Joseph’s father William died aged forty-one. When he came of age in 1764, Banks inherited his father’s Lincolnshire estates and thus became an extremely wealthy young man.

Banks continued to attend university and during his time there he became intensely interested in natural history. As a boy, he had collected plants and insects like many others of his age and class but now he wanted to study botany seriously. To get some kind of formal instruction in botany – the subject was not on the curriculum at Oxford – Banks, who now had money, and with the support of Humphrey Sibthorp, the Sherardian Professor of Botany (who did not teach the subject), paid to be present at a set of lectures delivered during the summer of 1764 to a group of sixty enthusiastic students by Israel Lyons, a Cambridge botanist and astronomer.[4]

Lyons was one of the earliest exponents of the new Linnaean system in Britain and shared his understanding of and passion for it with Banks. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus, who was born in southern Sweden in 1707, published a new, simple and radical classification system based on the sexual characteristics of plants (the number of stamens and pistils).[5] The nomenclature he devised consisted of a binomial description of genus followed by species. At Uppsala University, where he taught medicine and botany, Linnaeus educated a large number of devoted students, many of whom travelled abroad searching for plants and spreading knowledge of his botanical system.[6] Although Banks wanted to meet Linnaeus, he never did (Linnaeus died in 1778) but his close associates, Daniel Solander and Jonas Dryander, were both educated by Linnaeus, as was one of his collectors and many others in his circle.

Lyons and Banks became close friends and their association worked to both men’s benefit over the coming years until 1775, when Lyons died at the age of thirty-six.

Banks left Oxford without a degree shortly after Lyons’s lectures. He could have done anything he liked – gone into the law, Church, or the City – or simply enjoyed himself as a wealthy young man about town, but his great enthusiasm was for plants. As soon as he could he moved to Bloomsbury close by the newly opened British Museum, to which he obtained a reader’s ticket on 3 August 1764, and there threw himself into the study of botany, helped by its world-famous herbaria, illustrations and texts.

At that time, the British Museum was the only public space in London where natural history could be studied. While he was there, Banks became acquainted with others like himself, and through his new contacts and friendships, he was elected in his absence at age twenty-three a Fellow of the Royal Society on 1 May 1766.

Like every enthusiastic naturalist, Banks went out and about botanising, observing and collecting living specimens in their habitat. A rare chance to botanise beyond Europe came Banks’s way in April 1766, when an old school friend, now Lieutenant Constantine Phipps, invited him to join HMS Niger bound for Newfoundland and Labrador, on fisheries protection duty.[7] Banks eagerly accepted the opportunity.

The Niger, with Banks aboard, was away from England for nine months, from 22 April 1766. Six of those months were spent in and around Newfoundland and Labrador. Coming home by way of Lisbon on 26 January 1767, Banks landed with a substantial haul of new natural specimens – plants, birds, insects and fishes – all of which needed to be classified and some of which were illustrated as well, for which task he principally employed the great and highly established Linnaean artist, Georg Ehret, and the young Scottish artist, Sydney Parkinson, to whom Banks had just been introduced by James Lee, the part owner of the famous Vineyard Nursery in Hammersmith.[8]

Exciting as this adventure was, it paled into insignificance when compared to the next one. Not only was it a longer expedition and to a part of the world that only a few Europeans had ever been to, but it would be partly sponsored by the Royal Society, of which he would become one of its most famous Fellows. This epic voyage to the South Pacific would become a defining moment in Banks’s life and interests.

There are many beginnings to the voyage of HMS Endeavour but a significant one took place on 15 February 1768 when King George III received a ‘Memorial for Improving Natural Knowledge’ from the Royal Society.[9] The Society was appealing to the King for his financial support to send two men to the South Pacific somewhere in a rectangle bounded by a latitude ‘not exceeding 30 degrees [south] and between the 140th and 180th degrees of longitude west’, as defined by Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal, to observe the transit of Venus, predicted to be visible there on 3 June 1769 – an event that would not occur again until 1874.[10] The Royal Society had been discussing since at least June 1766 how they would contribute to observing and recording this rare but crucially important astronomical occasion, from which it was hoped they could calculate the size of the solar system. On 19 November 1767, the Society’s newly constituted Committee for the Transit had agreed the general plan of sending observers on a ship to the Pacific that would need to be rounding Cape Horn no later than January 1769.[11] Time was running out for adequate preparations to be made. ‘The Royal Society’, the memorial pleaded, ‘was in no condition to defray this Expence [which they had estimated at £4000, not including the cost of the ship], their Annual Income being scarcely sufficient to carry on the necessary business of the Society.’ Time was of the essence. Several other European powers (the memorial pointed to France, Spain, Denmark and Russia) were already making their own preparations for the event and Britain, in the forefront of astronomical science, simply could not afford to be a bystander. The memorial was signed by James Douglas, Earl of Morton, the Society’s president, and fourteen Fellows including Benjamin Franklin and Nevil Maskelyne.[12]

By late February 1768, the King had consented to defray the costs of sending observers to the southern hemisphere and, at the same time, he ordered the Admiralty to provide a suitable ship to take them to their destination.[13] By the end of March, the Admiralty had agreed which ship to purchase. It was called the Earl of Pembroke. It had been built in Whitby a little more than three years earlier and was currently lying unused in the Thames to the east of the present location of Tower Bridge. Just over a week later, on 5 April, the Admiralty informed the Navy Board, who were responsible for the day-to-day administration of the Royal Navy, that the ship, now renamed HMS Endeavour, and at the relatively small size of 32 metres long and 9 metres wide, should be prepared and armed as necessary for ‘conveying to the southward such persons as shall be thought proper for making observations on the passage of the planet Venus over the sun’s disc’.[14]

For the time being, the ship had no commander and, more importantly, no specific destination in the southern hemisphere for observing the astronomical event. In the discussions leading to the drafting of the memorial, however, suggestions were made that one of the Marquesas Islands, which had been sighted by Álvaro Mendaña in 1595, or one of two islands in Tonga (then named Rotterdam and Amsterdam Islands and last seen by Abel Tasman in 1643), might be suitable, but no one was certain precisely where in the ocean these likely candidates were.[15]

While the issue of the ship’s destination remained unresolved, that of the Endeavour’s commander was moving swiftly along. Sometime during the week after the order to get the ship ready for sea, that is before mid April 1768, the Admiralty found in James Cook the man that they wanted to appoint to command. Cook was not a young man and, as far as the Royal Navy was concerned, fairly inexperienced, but he certainly had talent.[16] He was born in Yorkshire and first went to sea when he was eighteen years old working for a Whitby company involved in carrying coal from the northeast of England to London. Once Cook’s apprenticeship was over he sailed on ships throughout the North Sea, from Holland in the south to Norway in the north. He did well, and he was promoted, but then, and for no reason that has come down to us, he volunteered, in 1755, to join the Royal Navy in Wapping, East London. Two years later he became a master, qualified, therefore, to sail naval ships. By then, however, war had erupted between Britain and France and their respective allies, and Cook was sent on a naval squadron to North America where he participated in several battles in and around the St Lawrence River. When, in 1763, peace came to bring an end to what was then referred to as the Seven Years War, Cook, who had by now distinguished himself in surveying and cartography, in addition to navigation, was appointed to be the surveyor on a naval expedition to Newfoundland over which Britain had been given sovereignty under the terms of the peace treaty. There he remained, apart from short spells back in London, until the early part of November 1767, when he returned bearing a cache of elegantly produced maps and hydrographic surveys of the coasts of this geographically complicated island.[17]

Cook intended to return to Newfoundland in the spring of 1768, once he was satisfied that the engravers were competently handling his manuscript maps, but this didn’t happen. His requisitions to the Admiralty to prepare his surveying ship for the next season coincided precisely with their search for someone to command HMS Endeavour. Cook never crossed the North Atlantic again. Instead, from now until his murder in Hawaii in February 1779, his life was bound up wholly with the Pacific.

It was now May 1768. The Endeavour was being prepared but where was it heading? Cook, and Charles Green, whom the Royal Society had already appointed as the expedition’s astronomer, were the designated observers. They needed an island on which they could erect their observatory. Would Cook be able to find the Marquesas or Amsterdam and Rotterdam island? And if he could, would the ship be welcomed or attacked?

While these questions were being discussed in the Admiralty and the Royal Society, something wholly unexpected happened.[18] On 20 May 1768, Samuel Wallis, a naval commander, arrived in London with incredible news. In August 1766, Wallis had been given command of HMS Dolphin whose objective was to sail into the Pacific in search of Terra Australis Incognita, the substantial land mass that was supposed to exist in southern latitudes – Alexander Dalrymple, the noted hydrographer and cartographer, preferred to use the term ‘Southern Continent’ and many followed his example.[19] Wallis reported that high land had been seen in the distance during the voyage but what caught his and everyone else’s imagination was his discovery of an extraordinary island and civilisation, which he named, in honour of his sovereign, ‘King George the Third’s Island’.[20] Wallis was an excellent navigator and equipped with the latest instruments to calculate that most elusive of navigational parameters – longitude. He reported that this island, which had abundant food and water, a healthy climate, a good anchorage and welcoming people, and which we now know as Tahiti, lay at 17 degrees 30 minutes latitude and 150 degrees longitude, west of London, precisely within Maskelyne’s oceanic rectangle.

Wallis knew nothing about the Royal Society’s interest in tracking Venus and the Admiralty had not expected him to arrive back in London for at least a year, that is sometime in 1769. As it happened, because of widespread illness among his crew, his own weakness and serious doubts that his ship could stand any more wear and tear, Wallis had decided to abandon a part of his surveying objectives and hurry home by way of the Cape of Good Hope (in spite of his instructions to return by way of Cape Horn).[21] History would have been very different had he carried out his instructions to the letter.

Wallis’s discovery of the island and of an excellent anchorage in the very north of the island, at a place he named Port Royal, or Matavai Bay in Tahitian, where he had anchored on 23 June 1767, could not have been better news for the Royal Society. The vague destination of the Marquesas and Tonga was now replaced by a firm, precise and, therefore, perfectly findable location. The predicted date of the transit was almost the same as the date of Wallis’s anchorage so that what he described then, especially the weather, would equally apply to the Endeavour’s stay. On 9 June 1768, a fortnight after Cook had officially taken charge of the Endeavour, the Council of the Royal Society endorsed the choice of the island discovered by Wallis as the expedition’s destination.[22] In the following month, the Admiralty reaffirmed the Society’s decision of where to observe the track of Venus when they presented their instructions to James Cook, who had, in the meantime, been promoted to the rank of lieutenant.[23] To guide him to Tahiti, the Admiralty presented Cook with copies of ‘such Surveys, plans and Views of the Island and Harbour as were taken by Capt Wallis, and the Officers of the Dolphin when she was there’.[24]

The Royal Society Council meeting minute of 9 June 1768 recorded the important decisions that had been taken since the ‘Memorial’ of mid February: the observers, Cook and Green, had been chosen and their salaries agreed; the ship and its commander had been commissioned; and the location pinpointed in Maskelyne’s rectangle of southern sea.

At this point, the scientific aspects of Cook’s expedition to the Pacific were astronomical and geographic. The minute of the Royal Society’s Council meeting, which recorded Cook and Green’s appointment, also had a small note to the effect that the Society’s secretary would be asking the Admiralty that ‘Joseph Banks … being desirous of undertaking the same voyage … for the Advancement of useful knowledge … He … together with his Suite … be received on board of the Ship, under the Command of Captain Cook.’[25]

Banks attended his first meeting at the Royal Society on 12 February 1767 shortly after his return from Newfoundland and Labrador.[26] Though he was not in London when, in November 1767, the Committee of the Transit recorded its decisions about how the Society wished to have Venus’s track observed, it is very possible that he knew about it shortly afterwards, and certainly by the time of the ‘Memorial’ to the King on 15 February 1768, Banks had made up his mind to try and join the expedition.[27] Over the next few months, by dint of careful negotiations and relationships, especially with Philip Stephens, the First Secretary of the Admiralty, whom he had met at the British Museum, Banks convinced those in authority that he should go to the Pacific.[28] The Royal Society Council minute of 7 June 1768, requested the Admiralty to accept Banks, accompanied by seven others, including two artists (Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan), a secretary (Herman Spöring) and four assistants and servants (James Roberts, Peter Briscoe, Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton), all paid for by him, to join the ship.[29]

More than a month later, on 22 July, the Admiralty informed Cook that the Royal Society’s request had been accepted. Instead of seven in Banks’s accompanying suite, they now stipulated that eight, in addition to Banks, would be going.[30] The eighth person was Daniel Solander, probably the most important person in Banks’s intellectual life since Israel Lyons.

Solander was Linnaeus’s best and most favourite student, and had been invited to England from Sweden, especially by the botanist John Ellis, to expound his teacher’s new system of classification. Since 1763 he had been busily working on cataloguing the Museum’s natural-history collections, primarily those that Hans Sloane had bequeathed. In the following year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.[31]

Solander, ten years Banks’s senior, probably met Banks when he first used the British Museum’s Reading Room, and soon after this meeting he took over Banks’s botanical education where Lyons had left off. He had prepared Banks for his Newfoundland voyage and, on his return, helped him catalogue the plants that had been collected.[32] It is not surprising then that Banks confided in Solander that he was planning to join the Endeavour. Solander was ‘very excited by my plans, and immediately offered to furnish me with information on every part of natural history which might be encountered on such an ambitious and unparalleled mission’. Banks later explained that several days later, when they were dining at the home of a mutual friend, the topic of the Endeavour came up. Solander jumped to his feet and asked Banks if he wanted a companion to join him. Banks replied, ‘Someone like you would be a constant benefit and pleasure to me!’ Solander did not hesitate. ‘I want to go with you,’ he exclaimed.[33]

On 24 June 1768 Solander wrote to the Trustees of the British Museum to tell them about Banks’s offer, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had the power to grant leaves of absence, had agreed he should go. Solander added that this unique opportunity would allow him to collect for the museum.[34] Banks may have been well known in the Royal Society, especially its exclusive dining club, which he frequented increasingly after the ‘Memorial’ had been sent to the King, and in the British Museum’s Reading Room, but in the world of botany, it was Solander who was the more famous. He was a great addition to the voyage.

This was now quite a different expedition from what had been planned by the Royal Society when they petitioned the King for financial help. It wasn’t just advances in astronomy and geography that they hoped would gain from the expedition. Now natural history, and botany in particular, had a leading role. There were also two Fellows of the Royal Society on board.

John Ellis, who had known Banks since 1764, wrote to Linnaeus excitedly, telling him about the forthcoming voyage.[35] Ellis’s main news for Linnaeus was that his student, Daniel Solander, was accompanying Joseph Banks, whom he described as a ‘very wealthy man’, to the Pacific. Ellis added that they were very well-equipped, with a fine library and all of the tools necessary to collect and preserve natural history specimens; or, in Ellis’s own words: ‘No people ever went to Sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly.’ What Ellis did not mention was the huge quantity of cases and book shelving that Banks was taking on board – ‘such a Collection … as almost frighten me’, Banks remarked.[36]

Banks and his suite were given rooms next to Cook’s. The ‘scientific gentlemen’ would be sharing his great cabin: specimens in bottles and in presses, nets and hooks, and sheets of drawing paper were jammed up next to maps and mathematical instruments.[37] Deferentially, Ellis concluded his letter to Linnaeus by saying that ‘All this is owing to you and your writings’.

On 30 July 1768, Cook received his instructions. He was to take the ship to Port Royal Harbour by way of Cape Horn. On the way, the Lords of the Admiralty remarked, ‘You are at Liberty to touch upon the Coast of Brazil, or at Port Egmont in Falkland Isles, or at both in your way thither.’ The first stop though was Madeira, where Cook was ordered to ‘take on board such a Quantity of Wine as you can Conveniently stow for the use of the [Ship’s] company’.[38]

So, on 25 August, the Endeavour, with almost one hundred men on board, ten of whom had already been to the Pacific on the two previous voyages of HMS Dolphin, left Plymouth for the Pacific Ocean.

Following his instructions, Cook took the Endeavour to Madeira where he stocked up with 14,000 litres of wine. Banks and Solander had been collecting specimens from the sea as the Endeavour made its way south, but Madeira now gave them the first opportunity to try out their methods for collecting on land and for recording and drawing botanical specimens, in the ship’s great cabin.[39] With the generous assistance of the English Consul and the resident English physician (himself a naturalist) and despite it not being the best time of the year for botanising, by the end of their five days’ stay, over three hundred species of plants had been collected – Solander reported to Linnaeus that of these fifty or sixty were new species.[40]

On 18 September, Cook set sail for Rio de Janeiro on the other side of the Atlantic. The stay in the city, from 14 November until 7 December, was generally a frustrating time for Banks and his entourage. Their welcome from the authorities was frosty, and they were not given permission to land. It was a bitter disappointment, especially when compared to their warm reception in Madeira. Surreptitiously evading the restrictions, Banks and Solander managed a few precious hours on shore and, in the end, either by their own means or by bribing locals to bring plants to the ship, they managed to collect about three hundred specimens: Parkinson drew about 10 per cent of them. The ship’s company hurriedly wrote letters home as they did not know when they would get another chance to send them. Soon they would be entering a part of the Pacific where there would be no passing European ships to which they could entrust their letters. They did not even know at this stage by what route they would be returning home, or when.

For about five weeks, the Endeavour made its way south through the Atlantic until 14 January 1769, when the ship anchored in a sheltered bay near the tip of Tierra del Fuego. Solander and Banks rushed to collect as much as they could. Banks was anxious to go into the interior. The local people seemed friendly and the naturalists’ activities were not made difficult as in Rio de Janeiro. But it was here that the first tragedy of the voyage struck.

When they were climbing a part of the interior that resembled the Alps, the weather suddenly turned cold, with snow and icy winds. They were too far from the ship to make it back before nightfall and two of Banks’s black servants, George Dorlton and Thomas Richmond, having drunk too much, literally froze to death.

Banks continued to collect but stayed closer to the ship. On 21 January, the Endeavour left its anchorage and headed for Cape Horn where the ship left the Atlantic and entered the Pacific Ocean. The botanic haul was small but with about a hundred specimens, it was respectable nevertheless.

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.