PLANTING THE WORLD
Joseph Banks and His Collectors: An Adventurous History of Botany
Jordan Goodman

Copyright

William Collins

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London SE1 9GF

WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Jordan Goodman 2020

Cover illustrations: Ship © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images; Plant © Florilegius/Bridgeman Images

Jordan Goodman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007578832

Ebook Edition © May 2020 ISBN: 9780007578849

Version: 2020-04-06

Dedication

For Cordelia

Epigraph

‘I envy you your situation within two miles of an Erupting Volcano you will easily guess I read your Letters with that Kind of Fidgetty anziety which continuously upbraids me for not being in a similar Situation I envy you I pity myself I blame myself & then begin to tumble over my Dried Plants in hopes to put such wishes out of my head which now I am tied by the leg to an armchair I must with diligence suppress’

Joseph Banks to William Hamilton, 4 December 1778

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

List of Illustrations

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Introduction: Joseph Banks and Kew

PART I: TO EVERY CORNER OF THE EARTH

Preface

1. 1772: Masson Roams the Atlantic

2. 1779: Return to Botany Bay by Way of Southwest Africa

3. 1780: The First Circumnavigation of Archibald Menzies

4. 1782: The Brothers Duncan in Canton

5. 1786: The Madras Naturalists and Dreams of Oaxaca

PART II: FLOATING GARDENS AND THE COTTON CLUB

Preface

6. 1786: The First and Second Fleet

7. 1787: Anthony Pantaleon Hove in Gujarat

8. 1787: Mr Nelson’s Unfortunate Bounty Voyage

9. 1790: The Second Circumnavigation of Archibald Menzies

10. 1791: The Gardeners of the Providence

PART III: AN EMBASSY, A FREE TOWN AND A PLANT EXCHANGE

Preface

11. 1791: ‘An Intertropical Abode’: Afzelius in Sierra Leone

12. 1792: Macartney, Staunton and the China Embassy

13. 1793: The Accidental Naturalist in Qianlong’s Empire

14. 1794: To Calcutta and Back

PART IV: FIFTH QUARTER OF THE WORLD

Preface

15. 1795: The Farrier’s Son Finds Banks

16. 1800: Caley and Moowattin

17. 1800: Not Since the Endeavour

18. 1801: Australia Circumnavigated and Beyond

PART V: BOTANICAL DIPLOMACY AND THE TROPICS

Preface

19. 1803: William Kerr in Canton

20. 1812: And Still Not First-Hand

21. 1814: Accidentally in Brazil with Bowie and Cunningham

22. 1815: Lockhart Survives the Congo

Epilogue

Postscript

Picture Section

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Jordan Goodman

About the Publisher

Maps

Key

The Atlantic

The Pacific

Indian Ocean, southeast Asia and China seas

China and Japan

India

Australia

Pacific Northwest

Illustrations

PEOPLE

Joseph Banks, oil portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, after 1795. (© Trustees of the British Museum)

Archibald Menzies, oil portrait by E.U. Eddis, 1836. (Linnean Society of London)

Francis Masson, oil portrait by George Garrard, 1887. (Linnean Society of London)

John and Alexander Duncan. (Courtesy of Cathy and Andrew Duncan)

Allan Cunningham, oil portrait, c.1835. (National Library of Australia PIC Screen 51 #R88)

Portrait of Sir John Barrow (1764–1848). (Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0)

Matthew Flinders, c.1800, watercolour miniature portrait. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

Captain William Bligh. (GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)

Robert Brown. Line engraving by C. Fox, 1837, after H. W. Pickersgill. (Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0)

George Macartney and George Staunton. Pencil, pen and ink, wash and watercolours. Images taken from Album of 372 Drawings of Landscapes, Coastlines, Costumes and Everyday Life Made during Lord Macartney’s Embassy to the Emperor of China. Originally published/produced in 1792–1794. (© British Library Board. All rights reserved/Bridgeman Images)

Daniel Charles Solander. Lithograph by Miss Turner after J. Zoffany (Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0)

Arthur Phillip, oil portrait, 1786, by Francis Wheatley. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

THINGS

Drawing of a flat peach made in Canton by John Bradby Blake and Mok Sau c.1773. (Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Upperville, Virginia)

Sketch by William Bligh of the plant nursery on HMS Bounty, 1787. (Sir Joseph Banks Collection, SS 1:1, Sutro Library, California State Library)

Sketch of plant cabin on HMS Guardian, 1789. (Sir Joseph Banks Collection, G 1:5, Sutro Library, California State Library)

The mutineers turning Lieutenant Bligh and part of the officers and crew adrift from HMS Bounty, painted and engraved by Robert Dodd, 1796. (Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales)

HMS Providence and HMS Assistant at the Lizard, 1791, watercolour by Lieutenant George Tobin. (State Library of New South Wales, SAFE/PXA 563)

William Alexander’s watercolour drawing of an opuntia and cochineal from Rio de Janeiro, 1792. (Sir Joseph Banks Collection, En 1:20, Sutro Library, California State Library)

Breadfruit, 1792, watercolour by Lieutenant George Tobin. (State Library of New South Wales, SAFE/PXA 563)

White peony by an unknown Chinese artist, c.1794–6. (Courtesy of Cathy and Andrew Duncan)

A view of Funchal, Madeira, oil painting by William Hodges (1744–97). (Art Collection 2/Alamy Stock Photo)

Transplanting of the bread fruit trees from Otaheite, painting by Thomas Gosse, 1796. (Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo)

PLACES

The library at the home of Joseph Banks, Soho Square, undated drawing attributed to Ralph Lucas (1796–1874). (Natural History Museum)

Kew Gardens: the Pagoda and Bridge, 1762, oil painting by Richard Wilson. (Yale Center for British Art, B1976.7.172, Paul Mellon Collection)

Cape Town, 1791, watercolour by Lieutenant George Tobin. (State Library of New South Wales, SAFE/PXA 563)

Adventure Bay, 1792, watercolour by Lieutenant George Tobin. (State Library of New South Wales, SAFE/PXA 563)

Point Venus, Matavai Bay, 1792, watercolour by Lieutenant George Tobin. (State Library of New South Wales, SAFE/PXA 563)

Presidio at Monterey, c.1792, watercolour by William Alexander (after John Sykes). (Edward E. Ayer Digital Collection, Newberry Library)

Friendly Cove, Nootka Sound, c.1792, watercolour by William Alexander. (Edward E. Ayer Digital Collection, Newberry Library)

Qianlong’s court (showing George Thomas Staunton on one knee in front of the Emperor), 1793, watercolour by William Alexander. (Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Gilbert Davis Collection)

A scene at Tientsin, 1793, engraving by William Alexander, The Costume of China, 1805.

View of Sir Edward Pellew’s Group, Gulf of Carpentaria, c.1802, oil painting by William Westall. (ZBA7944, © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)

The European factories, Canton, 1806, oil painting by William Daniell. (Yale Center for British Art, B1981.25.210, Paul Mellon Collection)

The road to the home of Baron von Langsdorff on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, 1817–18, watercolour by Thomas Ender. (HZ 13845, Graphic Collection Academy of Fine Arts Vienna)

A panorama of São Paulo, 1817–18, watercolour by Thomas Ender. (HZ 13309, Graphic Collection, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna)

Dramatis Personae

Clarke Abel (1780–1826). Surgeon to the Amherst embassy to China 1816–17

Adam Afzelius (1750–1837). Botanist, student of Linnaeus, Swedenborgian, hired by Sierra Leone Company and Banks’s plant collector in Sierra Leone 1792–6

William Aiton (1731–93). Head Gardener Kew 1759–93, Banks’s main contact at the royal garden

William Townsend Aiton (1766–1849). Son of the above and Head Gardener Kew 1793–1841, taking over his father’s duties and contact with Banks

William Alexander (1767–1816). Artist to the Macartney embassy to China 1792–4

John Allen (1773–1806). Lead miner, Banks’s appointed mineralogist on HMS Investigator 1801–3

William Amherst (1773–1857) 1st Earl Amherst of Arracan. Leader of the third British embassy to China (Amherst embassy) 1816–17, Governor-General of India 1823–8

James Anderson (1738–1809). Physician General East India Company Madras, naturalist, first person to bring cochineal to Banks’s attention in 1786

George Austin (?–1790). Banks’s appointed gardener on HMS Guardian 1789

Joseph Banks (1743–1820). Botanist, President of the Royal Society

Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818). Sister of Joseph Banks

(Lady) Dorothea Banks (1758–1828). Wife of Joseph Banks

Francis Baring (1740–1810). Banker, head of Baring and Co. London’s chief merchant bank, Director 1779–1810 and Chairman East India Company 1792–3, responsible for the Company’s role in the Macartney embassy to China 1792–4

Francis Louis Barrillier (1773–1853). Army officer, surveyor in New South Wales 1800–3

John Barrow (1764–1848). Comptroller on Macartney embassy to China 1792–4, Secretary to George Macartney Cape Colony 1797–1804, Second Secretary to the Admiralty 1804–45

Henry Bathurst (1762–1834) 3rd Earl Bathurst. Politician, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies 1812–27

Nicolas Thomas Baudin (1754–1803). Naval officer, commander French exploration vessel Le Géographe on its intended circumnavigation of Australia 1800–3, met Matthew Flinders in present-day South Australia in April 1802

Franz Bauer (1758–1840). Botanical artist active at Kew

Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826). Botanical artist, brother of the above, Banks’s appointed artist on HMS Investigator 1801–3

Lord Beauchamp. See Francis Seymour Conway

Andreas Berlin (1746–73). Botanist, student of Linnaeus, plant collector in Sierra Leone alongside Henry Smeathman 1773

Charles Blagden (1748–1820). Physician, Secretary to the Royal Society 1784–97, Banks’s confidant

John Bradby Blake (1745–73). Supercargo East India Company Canton 1770–3, co-producer of hybrid Chinese-British botanical drawings

William Bligh (1754–1817). Naval officer, commander HMS Bounty and HMS Providence 1787–9 and 1791–3 respectively, Fourth Governor of New South Wales 1806–8

Essex Henry Bond (1762–1819). Naval officer, commander East India Company ship Royal Admiral

Jacob Bosanquet (1755–1828). Director from 1782, Deputy-Chairman Court of Directors 1797, 1802, 1810, Chairman Court of Directors 1798, 1803, 1811 East India Company

James Bowie (c.1789–1869). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector in Brazil 1814–16 and at the Cape 1816–23

William Broughton (1762–1821). Naval officer, commander HMS Chatham 1791–3

Robert Brown (1773–1858). Botanist, Banks’s plant collector in Australia on HMS Investigator 1801–3, Banks’s librarian 1810–20

Earl of Buckinghamshire. See Robert Hobart

Charles Bunbury (1740–1821). Politician, Chairman Bunbury Committee on crime and punishment 1778–9

David Burton (?–1792). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector in Australia

George Caley (1770–1829). Gardener, botanist, Banks’s plant collector in Australia 1800–10, Superintendent St Vincent Botanic Garden 1816–22

John Call (1731–1801). Engineer, politician, promoted transportation and the establishment of penal colonies

Duncan Campbell (1726–1803). Merchant, shipowner, contractor for transportation and for the provision of convict hulks

Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822). Politician, President of the Board of Control 1802–6

Charles Cathcart (1759–88). Military officer, politician, leader of the first British embassy to China (Cathcart embassy) 1787–8

Henry Chamberlain (1773–1829). Diplomat, British consul-general in Brazil, an important contact for James Bowie and Allan Cunningham while plant collecting in Brazil

John Clarkson (1764–1828). Naval officer, abolitionist, Governor of Sierra Leone 1792, responsible for bringing the first settlers from Nova Scotia

David Collins (1756–1810). Military officer, judge advocate of New South Wales 1788–96

James Colnett (1753–1806). Naval officer, fur trader, commander merchant vessel Prince of Wales 1786–8

Francis Seymour Conway (1743–1822) Lord Beauchamp. Politician, headed the Beauchamp Committee hearings into transportation 1785

James Cook (1728–79). Naval officer, explorer, commander HMS Endeavour 1768–71, HMS Resolution 1772–5, 1776–9

John Cranch (1758–1816). Naturalist on HMS Congo 1816

John Crosley (1762–1817). Astronomer on HMS Investigator 1801–3

Allan Cunningham (1791–1839). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector in Brazil 1814–16 and Australia 1816–31

Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808). Cartographer, First Hydrographer of the British Admiralty 1795–1808

Nathaniel Dance (1748–1827). Naval officer, commander East India Company ship Earl Camden 1802–4 engaging French fleet in the Battle of Pulo Aura 1804

William Devaynes (1730–1809). Politician, merchant, banker, Chairman East India Company 1770–1807 passim

James Dickson (c.1738–1822). Botanist, nurseryman in Covent Garden

George Dixon (1748–95). Naval officer, fur trader, commander merchant vessel Queen Charlotte 1785–8

Jonas Dryander (1748–1810). Botanist, Banks’s librarian 1782–1810

Alexander Duncan (1758–1832). Surgeon to the East India Company Canton 1788–97, Banks’s plant collector in Canton during this period

John Duncan (1751–1831). Brother of the above, Surgeon to the East India Company Canton 1783–8, Banks’s plant collector in Canton during this period

Henry Dundas (1742–1811) 1st Viscount Melville. Politician, Treasurer of the Navy 1782–1800, Home Secretary 1791–4, President Board of Control 1793–1801, Secretary of State for War 1794–1801, First Lord of the Admiralty 1804–5

Hinton East (?–1792). Planter, botanist, Receiver-General of Jamaica 1779, Banks’s important contact in Jamaica

John Ellis (c.1710–76). Naturalist, early proponent and supporter of the Linnaean classificatory system

Richard Cadman Etches (1744–1817). Merchant, entrepreneur, formed the King George’s Sound Company the first British company to trade for furs in the Pacific Northwest 1785

Matthew Flinders (1774–1814). Naval officer, commander HMS Investigator 1801–3

George III (1738–1820). King of the United Kingdom 1760–1820

Hugh Gillan (?1745–98). Physician to the Macartney embassy to China 1792–4, plant collector in Brazil and China on this mission

Peter Good (?–1803). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector in Calcutta 1794, Banks’s appointed gardener and plant collector on HMS Investigator

William Goulburn (1784–1826). Politician, Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies 1812–21

Erasmus Gower (1742–1814). Naval officer, commander HMS Lion conveying members of the Macartney embassy to and from China 1792–4

Charles Green (1734–71). Astronomer on HMS Endeavour 1768–71

William Grenville (1759–1834) 1st Baron Grenville. Politician, Home Secretary 1789–91

Charles Francis Greville (1749–1809). Politician, antiquarian, collector

William Hamilton (1730–1803). Antiquarian, collector, British Ambassador to Naples 1764–1800

George Harrison (1767–1841). Civil servant, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury 1805–26

Lord Hawkesbury. See Charles Jenkinson

Robert Hobart (1760–1816) 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire. Politician, President of the Board of Control 1812–16

James Hooper (?–1830/1). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector in China on the Amherst embassy 1816–17, head gardener Buitenzorg (now Bogor) Botanic Gardens 1817–30

John Hope (1725–86). Physician, Professor of Botany and King’s Botanist University of Edinburgh 1761–86

Anthony Pantaleon Hove (?–1830). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector in southwest Africa 1786, Gujarat 1787–8

John Hunter (1737–1821). Naval officer, Second Governor of New South Wales 1795–1800

Charles Jenkinson (1729–1808) Lord Hawkesbury. Politician, President of the Board of Trade 1786–1804

Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770–1828) 2nd Earl of Liverpool. Politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1812–28

William Jones (1746–94). Jurist, philologist, orientalist, judge Supreme Court Calcutta 1783–94

Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716). Naturalist, physician to the Dutch East India Company Nagasaki 1690–2

Paul Ke (c.1752–?). Missionary, Chinese interpreter to Macartney embassy to China 1792–4

William Kerr (1779–1814). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector in Canton 1803–10, Superintendent Ceylon Botanic Garden 1810–14

James King (1750–84). Naval officer, commander HMS Discovery on James Cook’s Third Voyage 1779–80

John King (1759–1830). Civil servant, Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Department 1791–1806

Philip Gidley King (1758–1808). Naval officer, Third Governor of New South Wales 1800–6

Johan Gerhard Koenig (1728–85). Pharmacist, physician, botanist, plant collector on India’s Coromandel Coast 1768–85

Robert Kyd (1746–93). Military officer, Superintendent Calcutta Botanic Garden 1787–93

David Lance (c.1755–1820). Supercargo East India Company in Canton 1775–89 and 1803–4

Baron Georg Langsdorff (1774–1852). Physician, naturalist, diplomat in Brazil 1813–30

William Elford Leach (1791–1836). Zoologist, assistant librarian British Museum 1813–22

James Lee (1715–95). Nurseryman, joint owner Vineyard Nursery Hammersmith 1745–95

Jacob Li (c.1752–?). Missionary, Chinese interpreter to Macartney embassy to China 1792–4

James Lind (1736–1812). Astronomer, physician, accompanied Banks to Iceland 1772

Carl Linnaeus (1707–78). Botanist, physician, Professor of Medicine Uppsala University 1741–72, Rector Uppsala University 1750–71, established modern botanical nomenclature

Charles-Alexandre Linois (1761–1848). Naval officer, commander of the Marengo and the French fleet during the Battle of Pulo Aura 1804

Lord Liverpool. See Robert Banks Jenkinson

David Lockhart (1786–1845). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector on HMS Congo 1816, Superintendent Trinidad Botanic Gardens 1818–45

Israel Lyons (1739–75). Botanist, mathematician, astronomer, an early exponent of Linnaean taxonomy and nomenclature, taught (1764) and inspired Banks

George Macartney (1737–1806). Diplomat, Governor of Madras 1781–5, leader second British embassy to China (Macartney embassy) 1792–4, Governor of the Cape Colony 1796–8

James Main (c.1765–1846). Gardener, plant collector in China 1790s

William Marsden (1754–1836). Orientalist, First Secretary of the Admiralty 1804–7

Nevil Maskelyne (1732–1811). Mathematician, Astronomer Royal 1765–1811

Francis Masson (1741–1805). Kew gardener, plant collector at the Cape, the Atlantic and Caribbean, the Mediterranean and North America.

James Matra (1746–1806). Sailor, diplomat, promoter of settlement in New South Wales 1783–5

Murray Maxwell (1775–1831). Naval officer, commander HMS Alceste on the Amherst embassy to China 1816–17

Archibald Menzies (1754–1842). Assistant surgeon Royal Navy, gardener, botanist, Banks’s plant collector in the Pacific on the Prince of Wales 1786–9 and on HMS Discovery 1791–4

Anne Monson (c.1727–76). Botanist and plant collector

John Montagu (1718–92) 4th Earl of Sandwich. First Lord of the Admiralty 1748–51, 1763, 1771–82

Dan Moowattin (c.1790–1816). Dharug guide with George Caley in Australia 1805–10

Thomas Morton (?–1792). Secretary to Court of Directors East India Company 1783–92

David Nelson (?–1789). Gardener, Banks’s plant collector on HMS Discovery 1776–80 and on HMS Bounty 1787

Evan Nepean (1752–1822). Administrator, Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department 1782–94, First Secretary to the Admiralty 1795–1804

August Nordenskjöld (1754–92). Chemist, Swedenborgian, hired by Sierra Leone Company

Franz Pehr Oldenburg (1740–74). Soldier, plant collector in the Cape meeting Banks, Solander and Masson 1771–3

Mungo Park (1771–1806). Surgeon, Banks’s sponsored explorer in West Africa 1795–7

Sydney Parkinson (c.1745–71). Banks’s appointed botanical artist on HMS Endeavour 1768–71

William Paterson (1755–1810). Military officer, botanist and explorer in Australia 1791–1810, Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales 1801–10

Robert Peel (1788–1850). Politician, Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies 1810–12

James Pendergrass (1766–1851). Naval officer, commander East India Company ship Hope to and from Canton 1805–6

Arthur Phillip (1738–1814). Naval officer, commander HMS Sirius First Fleet to New South Wales 1787–8, First Governor of New South Wales 1788–90

Constantine Phipps (1744–92) 2nd Baron Mulgrave. Naval officer, explorer, Banks’s close friend for over thirty years

William Henry Pigou (fl.1775–83). Supercargo East India Company in Canton

William Pitcairn (1712–91). Physician, botanist, President Royal College of Physicians 1775–85, owner of substantial garden in Islington

William Pitt (1759–1806). Politician, Prime Minister of Great Britain 1783–1801, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1801, 1804–6

Home Popham (1762–1820). Naval officer, Rear Admiral 1814–20, politician 1804–12 passim

Nathaniel Portlock (c.1747–1817). Naval officer, commander merchant vessel King George 1785–8, commander HMS Assistant 1791–3 to Tahiti

John Pringle (1707–82). Physician, President of the Royal Society 1772–8

Puankhequa I (1714–88). Principal Hong merchant in Canton

Puankhequa II (1755–1820). Son of the above and principal Hong merchant in Canton

Qianlong Emperor (1711–99). Sixth Emperor of the Qing dynasty China 1735–96

William Ramsay (fl.1771–1814). Secretary, Court of Directors, East India Company c.1792–1806

John Reeves (1774–1856). Assistant inspector of teas East India Company in Canton, Banks’s plant collector in Canton 1812–20

John Rennie (1761–1821). Civil engineer involved in assessing the steamboat HMS Congo 1815–16

Matthew Riches (1755–?, fl. 1791–1814). Naval officer, commander of the East India Company ship Thames to and from Canton 1806–7

Edward Riou (1762–1801). Naval officer, commander HMS Guardian 1789–90

Henry Roberts (1756–96). Naval officer, Lieutenant HMS Discovery 1776–80

William Roxburgh (1751–1815). Surgeon, botanist, Superintendent Calcutta Botanic Garden 1793–1814

Patrick Russell (1727–1805). Physician, naturalist to the East India Company in the Carnatic 1785–91

Friedrich Sello var. Sellow (1789–1831). Gardener, botanist, plant collector in Brazil 1814–31

Granville Sharp (1735–1813). Lawyer, abolitionist, proponent of the settlement of Sierra Leone 1787–9

Henry Smeathman (1742–86). Naturalist, entomologist, plant collector in Sierra Leone for a consortium including Banks 1771–5

Christen Smith (1785–1816). Banks’s botanist on HMS Congo 1816

Christopher Smith (?–1807). Banks’s appointed gardener on HMS Providence 1791–3, Banks’s appointed gardener on the Royal Admiral 1794, Superintendent Penang Botanic Garden 1805–7

James Smith (?–1789). Banks’s appointed gardener on HMS Guardian 1789

James Edward Smith (1759–1828). Botanist, President of the Linnean Society of London 1788–1828

Percy Smythe (1780–1855) 6th Viscount Strangford. Diplomat, British Envoy to Portugal (Brazil) 1806–15

Daniel Solander (1733–82). Botanist, student of Linnaeus, Keeper Natural History Department British Museum 1773–82

Anders Sparrman (1748–1820). Botanist, student of Linnaeus, naturalist on HMS Resolution 1772–5

George Spencer (1758–1834) 2nd Earl Spencer. Politician, First Lord of the Admiralty 1794–1801

George Leonard Staunton (1737–1801). Physician, diplomat, Secretary to George Macartney on the Macartney embassy to China 1792–4

George Thomas Staunton (1781–1859). Son of the above, sinologist, East India Company employee 1798–1816

Philip Stephens (1723–1809). Politician, First Secretary of the Admiralty 1763–95

John Stuart (1713–92) 3rd Earl of Bute. Politician, Prime Minister of Great Britain 1782–3, adviser to Augusta Dowager Princess of Wales concerning Kew 1751–72

George Suttor (1774–1858). Market gardener, plant collector in Australia 1800–20 passim

Olof Swartz (1760–1817). Botanist, student of Carl Linnaeus the younger, Banks’s close friend

Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Mathematician, engineer, visionary

Lord Sydney. See Thomas Townshend

Edward Thompson (c.1738–86). Naval officer, commadore of the Africa Station Royal Navy 1782–6, commander HMS Grampus 1785–6

Thomas Boulden Thompson (1766–1828). Naval officer, commander HMS Nautilus 1785–6

Henry Thornton (1760–1815). Politician, banker, abolitionist, Chairman Sierra Leone Company 1791–1808

Carl Peter Thunberg (1743–1826). Botanist, student of Linnaeus, surgeon to the Dutch East India Company Nagasaki 1775–6

Thomas Townshend (1733–1800) 1st Viscount (Lord) Sydney. Politician, Home Secretary 1783–9

George Tripp (1752–1830). Naval officer, commander HMS Grampus 1786, commander HMS Sphinx 1790–1

James Kingston Tuckey (1776–1816). Naval officer, commander of HMS Congo 1815–16

William Tudor (?–1816). Comparative anatomist on HMS Congo 1816

George Vancouver (1757–98). Naval officer, commander HMS Discovery 1791–5

Gerard De Visme (1726–97). Merchant based in Lisbon 1746–91

Carl Bernhard Wadström (1746–99). Industrialist, abolitionist, promoter of the colonisation of West Africa

Samuel Wallis (1728–95). Naval officer, commander HMS Dolphin 1766–8

James Watt Jr. (1769–1848). Mechanical engineer, businessman, consultant to the navy regarding the steam engine on HMS Congo

William Westall (1781–1850). Banks’s appointed landscape artist on HMS Investigator 1801–3

Whang at Tong (fl.1774–96). Linguist, scholar and businessman in Canton, visited England 1774–?81 and accompanied Banks in and around London

William Wilberforce (1759–1833). Politician, abolitionist, Director Sierra Leone Company

James Wiles (1768–1851). Banks’s appointed gardener on HMS Providence 1791–3

George Yonge (1731–1812). Politician, Secretary at War 1782–94

Prologue

When I first thought of writing this book, I had in my mind an image of Joseph Banks that I had pieced together from the various biographies that had been written about him in the twentieth century and supplemented by other accounts in which he appeared as a major character. The image I formed was of a man who was an autocratic administrator; a man of great personal wealth who manipulated his powerful connections at the highest level in order to make Britain the greatest nation on earth and its empire second to none; a man who used science for these ends; a man who could be seen and caricatured as a powerful spider at the centre of an enormous web.

This was the image I brought to my research, but as I began reading through Banks’s voluminous extant correspondence – letters to and from him – and the endless amount of scribbled-on paper, in the form of notes, lists, draft reports and memoranda – the image of the powerful spider at the centre of the web began to dissolve, to be replaced by a radically different impression, that of someone who was less authoritarian, less one-dimensional and less in control; who was more responsive and less manipulative; someone whose relationships were more personal and informal; and who was more appealing, in short, more human. Ultimately, Banks was a figure who represented the culmination of an era that was on the wane, an era when an individual could still, by amassing a great library and mastering its contents, provide critical aid and information to a great variety of projects in the wider world.

This book is not a biography although I do provide a biographical sketch in the introduction. I am focusing on just one of Banks’s many interests, albeit the central and most fervently held, his love for plants. This passion combined the scientific study of plants and his personal dedication to supplying King George III’s garden in Kew with the finest examples of the world’s botanical bounty.

As a young man, Banks had gone as a naturalist on three important scientific voyages, one of which was an unprecedented circumnavigation of the globe lasting almost three years. Yet, after he was thirty, he never went to sea again; it is tempting to see his enthusiasm for sending other men to collect and move plants across the seas on his behalf as a vicarious reliving of his earlier experiences.

Many of these collectors were gardeners who had worked at Kew, but others, mostly from Scotland and the European continent, were trained botanists; a few were ship’s surgeons and government officials, and others who having no specifically relevant occupation had become fascinated by natural history. Banks chose some of these men to travel and collect on his behalf; but many others contacted him to volunteer their services.

The twenty-two chapters in this book, based primarily on Banks’s correspondence and jottings, tell the stories of these collectors: the different ways in which they entered Banks’s life, their practices and problems across the world – how they interacted with their shipboard companions, especially the ship’s captain; how they decided which plants to gather; how they found them and how they tried to move them by ship across the oceans. Banks referred to these activities as his favourite project and to himself as a projector: his role, he once explained, was no more than to facilitate their execution. Though the projects did not always begin with botany in mind, nor for that matter were they necessarily even initiated by Banks, once he became involved, either by being invited or by just joining in, he gave them a botanical twist.

Building chronologically and across the world, layer by layer, each chapter reveals how and when Banks became involved; what he did to give the projects a botanical direction, and with what consequences. At the same time, it recounts, where possible in their own words, how collectors pursued their instructions, how they conducted themselves far away from home, how they interacted with their environment, local materials and particularly local people. The results were not always satisfactory: collectors, like their plants, often did not survive the ordeals that beset them.

Banks, like his contemporaries, took it for granted that plants were there for the taking. They did not concern themselves with questions of ownership; at the same time, they were also generally unaware of the consequences of transplantation and the introduction of foreign species into new habitats. They assumed it was beneficial.

Banks was immensely curious, and it is his desire for knowledge that drives the narrative of the book. People and plants were the motivating force for his actions and sent his mind and his collectors exploring the world and its oceans.

Introduction

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.

PART I

Preface

Between 1777 and 1779 Joseph Banks’s life changed in several important ways that set a pattern for the rest of his days. In 1777, he moved with his sister, Sarah Sophia, into his permanent home in Soho Square. It was a large house with enough space to accommodate his domestic life and his professional interests. His great library focused principally on natural history and its associated texts, manuscripts, drawings and specimens. In 1778, Banks was elected President of the Royal Society after having been a Fellow for just over a decade; he was only thirty-five years old. In 1779, he married Dorothea Huggesen, who moved into Soho Square with him and Sarah Sophia. In the same year, Banks leased and subsequently bought Spring Grove, a property with extensive grounds in Heston, Middlesex. Over time Banks had gardens laid out, and greenhouses and hothouses built. Produce grown there was sent to Soho Square and this was where Banks carried out a number of important horticultural experiments. Banks also began what became an annual pilgrimage to manage his Lincolnshire estates, centred on his country home at Revesby Abbey, where he, his wife and sister would spend every September and October.

In contrast to the English focus of his domestic life in London and Lincolnshire, Banks was being drawn in other, more outward-looking and global directions. In 1776, Francis Masson, Kew’s first official collector since 1772, became Banks’s direct responsibility. Masson had already been to the Cape of Good Hope collecting for the royal gardens at Kew, and he was on his way to Madeira to continue his assignment when Banks took over his direction. During the next three decades, while Masson travelled through the Atlantic region, Banks handled all his preparations, telling him where and what to collect, arranging his finances and managing the receipt of his specimens for Kew.

Banks, already a wealthy man, now settled down as a county notable and the President of the Royal Society. His contact with Masson offered Banks something entirely different, something unpredictable that must have reminded him of his experiences on the Endeavour. Banks could share vicariously in the excitement of finding new plants to send to Kew, of making Kew a place where plants from all over the globe could thrive, far from their native habitats. It gave Banks, as he said himself, the greatest of pleasures, to harness the intellectual resources of Soho Square, its library and herbarium, to the practical horticultural experience and knowledge of Kew, all for the benefit of the King and his garden. Banks would continue pushing these projects into new geographic regions, whenever the opportunities arose.

These early collectors, including Masson, were mostly Scots – they were generally better trained and more knowledgeable about botany than their English counterparts. Most of these men sought out Banks rather than the other way round. They expanded their own and Banks’s geographical horizon, collecting plants in parts of the world – the Pacific Northwest, China, southwest Africa and the Coromandel Coast – whose botany was hardly known in Europe.

1
1772: Masson Roams the Atlantic

Joseph Banks did not choose his first collector himself. Francis Masson had been appointed as Kew Garden’s first plant collector by Sir John Pringle. Sir John had been a close friend of the royal family even before 1764 when he was made Physician in Ordinary to Queen Charlotte. Liked and trusted by the King, he had replaced the Earl of Bute as adviser to the royal garden at Kew. Though, as he admitted, ‘I myself am so little a Botanist’, he was very well connected in cosmopolitan scientific circles, and would have acted as the King’s agent in selecting Masson, no doubt taking the advice of the head gardener at Kew, William Aiton.[1]

Masson had been working under Aiton, as a gardener at Kew, and had made a good impression. He was a fellow Scot, born in Aberdeen in 1741, but little is known about his life before Kew.[2] Although Banks took no credit for selecting Masson, saying Pringle did it all, he does seem to have had a hand in deciding where he was sent.[3] According to Masson, writing in 1796, it was Banks who ‘suggested to his Majesty the idea of sending a person, professionally a gardener, to the Cape’.[4]

Aside from recommending the destination, it’s unlikely Banks had anything to do with any instructions for Masson. Banks was busy planning a second voyage to the Pacific with Cook. This, and the intense pressure of classifying the huge botanical collection from the first voyage, and preparing the botanical drawings made on the Endeavour, took up most of his time.[5]

The choice of the Cape as the destination for Kew’s first plant collector, may not seem obvious; it was under Dutch rule for one thing. However, other circumstances did recommend it. Banks and Solander had spent some time there, from 14 March to 16 April in 1771, when the Endeavour made its last substantial stop before returning to England.[6] The plant collecting had not been as productive as they had expected, because, for almost half their stay, Solander had been confined to bed suffering from a fever. Referring to what possible botanical treasures might be found beyond the port, Banks commented ‘I can say but little … not having had an opportunity of making even one excursion owing in great measure to Dr Solanders illness.’[7] Even so, in the vicinity of the ship’s anchorage, they managed to collect more than three hundred varieties of plants, including a gardenia, an acacia and a heather.[8]

Observing the plants being cultivated by Dutch farmers in the fields around, and in the Dutch East India Company’s botanic garden, Banks concluded that though the climate was milder than that of England, the food crops, at least, were pretty much the same. This would have led him to conclude that the Cape area might be ideal for collecting plants that would be easy to grow at Kew, unlike the tropical plants that needed a protective habitat and artificial heat.

This observation would have been confirmed by the fact that Kew was already growing plants from the Cape, many of which had been introduced to the garden in the 1730s by Philip Miller, head gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden.[9] Not only had there been these living plants for Masson to see but Hans Sloane’s herbarium was then at the British Museum, which contained an impressive collection of Cape plants that had come into Sloane’s possession from other collections and collectors.[10] Also, since the early years of the seventeenth century, Cape plants figured in specialised texts, such as the famous Hortus Cliffortianus, compiled by Linnaeus, and many of these publications were at the British Museum or in Banks’s home.[11]

These factors alone recommended the Cape as a collecting destination but also important was the fact that maritime contact between it and Europe was excellent. Table Bay, the Cape’s harbour, was always full of foreign ships, primarily from the Dutch, Swedish and English East India Companies either heading into or returning from the Indian Ocean.[12] When the Endeavour arrived in Table Bay on 14 March 1770, Cook noted that there were already sixteen ships at anchor; over the following month he reported that four British East India Company and seven Dutch East India Company ships left for Europe.[13] With so many ships bound for Europe and with a sailing time of less than three months, living plants would have their best chance of survival at sea if shipped from the Cape.

What may have sealed the decision was that when Banks and Solander were at the Cape, they had met a Swedish soldier, Franz Pehr Oldenburg, who was working for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape and who was very interested in natural history, having already amassed a personal herbarium.[14] Before Banks and Solander left the Cape for England, they had made an agreement with Oldenburg to collect specimens for them after their departure. The specimens arrived in London sometime in 1772.[15] If Oldenburg was still at the Cape when Masson arrived, the benefits would be substantial, since, in addition to his local botanical knowledge, he spoke Dutch, which Masson did not.

It was decided that Masson would travel to the Cape by the beginning of April 1772 at the latest.[16] On 5 May Cook received an order from John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty, informing him that Francis Masson would be joining the ship for a passage to the Cape of Good Hope.[17] He would thus be sailing with Banks for part of the way, but five days after the order from Sandwich, the Resolution was given its first trial for its intended Pacific voyage. At the mouth of the Thames, Robert Cooper, the ship’s first lieutenant, declared to Cook that he would not risk the ship at sea in its present top-heavy state. The Resolution was ordered back to Sheerness, and the superstructure, which Banks had designed and which the Admiralty had built for him, was removed.[18] Learning of this Banks withdrew from the voyage and took his personal, and rather large, entourage with him.

In its new slimmed-down version, the Resolution, in company with HMS Adventure, left Plymouth on 13 July 1772. Masson had new scientific companions – Johann Forster and his son Georg Forster, the two naturalists who were hurriedly assigned to the ship following Banks’s departure. After two short stops, the first at Madeira and the second in the Cape Verde Islands, the ships anchored in Table Bay. Masson stepped into a bustling town at the foot of Table Mountain, a Dutch settlement with a population of around 5000 people, about half of whom were white: the black population was mostly composed of slaves owned by the Dutch East India Company and imported from East Africa and the Indian Ocean region.[19]

What instructions he carried with him we don’t know but within less than two months, on 10 December 1772, Masson headed to the interior, in an easterly direction, accompanied by Franz Pehr Oldenburg, who was still at the Cape, and an unnamed Khoikhoi, who was in charge of the wagon driven by eight oxen.[20]

Masson’s report of his expedition, written to Sir John Pringle, was read to the Fellows of the Royal Society in London. It was short and, apart from providing some information about where the party went, it contained few details. What we do know is that they got as far as the town of Swellendam in the Western Cape, about one hundred and fifty miles to the east of the Cape. (When Cook was at the Cape he reported that the Dutch had settled an area which, at its greatest extent, exceeded 900 miles and 28 days’ journey time.)[21] On 20 January 1773, after a two-day stay in Swellendam, they set off to return to the Cape by the same route they had taken out. Masson mentioned that he had collected and sent seeds of several species of heather back to Kew, which had germinated and been successfully grown there while he was still at the Cape.[22]

On his return to Cape Town, probably in February 1773, Masson was in for an unexpected treat: a fellow plant collector and a trained botanist had arrived in town.[23] Carl Peter Thunberg, who was born in the same year as Banks but in southern Sweden, had studied under Linnaeus at Uppsala University and had taken a medical degree. Like other disciples of Linnaeus, he left Sweden for foreign shores. Thunberg arrived in Amsterdam in August 1770 where he worked on plant collections from other parts of the Dutch Empire. In December 1771, he began his long journey to the East via the Cape where he arrived on 16 April 1772 in order to collect plants and learn Dutch. After acquainting himself with Cape Town and its local botany, including day trips into the surrounding countryside, on 7 September, Thunberg set out with three European companions, two Khoikhois and an oxen-driven cart for the interior: first to the north and then eventually in the direction of Swellendam and beyond. They were back in Cape Town on 2 January 1773.

At some point between February and September 1773, Masson and Thunberg met and decided to travel together on a botanical expedition. On 11 September they set out from Cape Town and headed in a northerly direction for about 100 miles from their point of departure. Masson could see that the decision to go to the Cape to collect was the right one as he looked down on the scene unfolding before him, on the sea coast from St Helena Bay back to the Cape: ‘The whole country’, he wrote, ‘affords a fine field for botany, being enamelled with the greatest number of flowers I ever saw, of exquisite beauty and fragrance.’[24] Having reached their most northerly point, the party turned southeast, heading again to Swellendam, and finally reached the ocean at Mossel Bay on 16 November. There they turned inland and made their way again in a southeasterly direction until they met the ocean for a second time at Algoa Bay (near present-day Port Elizabeth) on 14 December, almost five hundred miles from Cape Town. They had been away for months. They pushed on a little further to the east until they were on the banks of the Sundays River, which flows into Algoa Bay. But the Khoikhoi people they employed refused to go any further. The oxen were sick and the carts near collapse.[25] Reluctantly, they turned back and, retracing their steps, they arrived in Cape Town on 29 January 1774.

Masson referred on many occasions to the beauty of the plants he and Thunberg encountered but, apart from mentioning that he obtained specimens of what he called geraniums, stapelias and ericas near the end of the journey, he failed to specify what else he had collected.[26]

While they were in Cape Town during 1774, Thunberg and Masson met Lady Anne Monson, the highly accomplished botanist and collector, who was on her way from England to Calcutta with her husband, a colonel who was returning to Bengal to serve on the supreme council.[27] She, Thunberg and Masson frequently went botanising together in the surrounding countryside.[28]

After only a few weeks these delightful excursions came to an end. Lady Monson continued her voyage to Calcutta on the Pacific, an East India Company ship. On 29 September 1774, Thunberg and Masson decided to strike out into the interior again. They headed out of town in a northeastern direction to an area they had never visited before. This time they took in mountains and desert, plotting a circular route that took them to a point around three hundred and fifty miles north of Cape Town before swinging to the southeast and eventually to the southwest back to Cape Town, which they reached on 29 December 1774.

Thunberg must have been a real inspiration for Masson: highly educated and one of Linnaeus’s own students – a mine of up-to-date botanical information and an intrepid traveller, not just an accomplished gardener like Aiton. For his education as a travelling botanist, collecting in unfamiliar terrain, Masson could have had no better teacher than Thunberg.

Thunberg’s departure for Batavia, his ultimate destination, on 2 March 1775, may have convinced Masson to leave as well. He left the Cape sometime towards the end of March but before that Masson met Anders Sparrman. Sparrman, born in Sweden in 1748, was another student of Linnaeus’s, who had first arrived at the Cape on 12 April 1772 to study the region’s natural history.[29] His plans, however, were put on hold when he met the Forsters and was invited to join them on the Resolution on its Pacific voyage.[30] The Resolution, having dropped Masson off at the end of October, now collected Sparrman before setting off for the Pacific less than a month later on 22 November 1772. There is no evidence that Masson and Sparrman met at this time.[31] It was only when Sparrman came back to the Cape on 22 March 1775 on the Resolution’s return voyage to England from the Pacific that the pair are known to have met.[32]

Masson was back in London in either July or August 1775.[33] He had been sending seeds and living plants to Kew from the Cape, but now on his return, he had much more to show.[34] Solander was at Kew, where Masson had gone back to live, on Saturday, 26 August and reported to John Ellis, his close friend and fellow botanist, that he had just seen Masson ‘with a great cargo of new plants … a glorious collection’.[35]

Solander did not give many details about the collection but the antiquary Richard Gough alerted his friend and fellow antiquary the Reverend Michael Tyson that Masson had brought home a great variety of new species of plants from the Cape of Good Hope, ‘which grew and blowed at sea’.[36] Tyson, himself, then went to Kew to see Masson and was amazed by what he found: totally new species of heather, protea, geraniums, and an undisclosed number of dried varieties.[37] Tyson spoke of more than two hundred examples of just two species but when Masson wrote to Linnaeus at the end of December 1775, his first letter to ‘the Father of Botany’, introducing himself as having been employed ‘some years past, by the King of great Brittain, in collecting of Plants for the Royal Gardens at Kew’, and remarking that he had made two trips into the interior with his student Thunberg and had met Sparrman, he announced that he had ‘added upwards of 400 new species to his Majesties collection of living plants’.[38]

What no one mentioned was that Masson had also collected a magnificent plant known by its popular name as the bird-of-paradise flower but which, when it arrived at Kew in 1773, was given the name Strelitzia reginae, in honour of Queen Charlotte, Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.[39] It is likely that Thunberg directed him to this plant since he had already come across it on his first journey to the interior.[40] This may have been Banks’s favourite plant:[41] certainly, when, in 1795, it came to putting together a substantial gift of plants for Catherine II, Empress of Russia, among many Cape plants collected by Masson, Strelitzia reginae, which Banks described as ‘one of the most rare, & certainly … one of the most beautiful plants in Europe’, headed the list of plants chosen.[42] Even more remarkable, perhaps, is that Masson collected the first specimen of the cycad Encephalartos altensteinii, which was at Kew in 1775, and which, in 2009, was re-potted: it is believed to be the oldest living pot plant in the world.

Banks, too, was delighted with Masson’s collection, ‘a profusion of Plants unknown till that time to the Botanical gardens in Europe’.[43] In his estimation, ‘by means of these, Kew Gardens has in great measure attained to that acknowlegd superiority which it now holds over every similar Establishment in Europe; some of which, as Trianon, Paris, Upsala, etc., till lately vyed with each other for pre-eminence, without admitting even a competition from any English Garden.’

Masson’s second assignment, also authorised by Sir John Pringle, was to collect for Kew on the Atlantic islands of Madeira, and the Canaries, and in the British West Indies.[44] It is likely that Banks and Solander once again had a hand in deciding where Masson should go: they had both been to Madeira in 1768 on the Endeavour’s outward voyage and, during their stay from 12 to 18 September, had collected many plants that they brought back with them in 1771.[45]

Masson left for Madeira on 19 May and arrived there on 5 June 1776.[46] Around this time, Pringle, who was by now George III’s Physician Extraordinary, in addition to being President of the Royal Society, no longer had time for Kew.[47] Banks took over. He arranged Masson’s finances, sent him instructions and supplies, and, in return, Masson sent Banks plants and seeds and letters.[48]

In what might have been his first letter to Banks, dated 28 July 1776, Masson noted that he hadn’t yet explored very much of the island but he believed he had already found some new plants. He had about fifty plants for Banks and some seeds for Aiton.[49] Apart from that he said little: he remained a man of few words for the next thirty years.

Masson would have arrived well equipped to explore the botany of the Atlantic islands, especially Madeira and the Canaries. The islands’ plants were well represented in Sloane’s herbarium at the British Museum.[50] Both island groups were a common stopover for British ships, both naval and East India Company vessels, on their way into the South Atlantic. It was where they stocked up with wine and fresh fruits for the next part of the voyage. Those who were interested in botany helped themselves to the local flora. There was a good, if small, selection of plants from the area already growing at Kew.[51]

From the summer of 1776 until the summer of 1779, Masson stayed and collected in the Atlantic region – seeds for Aiton and plants for himself and Banks.[52] Madeira was the base where he spent most of his time when he wasn’t travelling. The itinerary he followed during this period began with a stay in Madeira which lasted for almost a year until May 1777; this was followed by a trip to the Azores, not planned originally but which Charles Murray, the British Consul in Funchal, who found Masson very convivial, convinced him he should visit.[53] Masson stayed in the Azores from late May 1777 to early December 1777, during which time he visited the islands of São Miguel and Faial – Johann and Georg Forster had collected on Faial between 14 and 19 July 1775 on the final homeward stretch of Cook’s second voyage, and might have discussed this with Masson – and São Jorge;[54] Masson left the Azores in December for the Canaries, via Madeira, and remained there until early October 1778, and from there he travelled back to Madeira, where he stayed until May 1779.[55]

Because of a lack of plant lists, it is not possible to give a definite account of the shipments, but about one thousand plants, many of them new to European science, would probably be close to the mark. Collecting was not a problem. Masson went well off the beaten track where there was plenty to be found.[56] What was difficult was shipping his collections back to England. The problem, as he said himself, was that while he was in the islands the American revolutionary war was in progress on the other side of the Atlantic. American cruisers were present but not British naval vessels. He had to use whatever shipping was available: a Dutch ship on one occasion; on another a French brig on its way to Dunkirk with a stop at Portsmouth, and even a British privateer making its way back to Plymouth.

However the difficulties of this trip were as nothing when compared to those of his next destination, the West Indies.[57] Masson left Madeira sometime in the early part of 1779 for Barbados. What happened then is unknown, but at some time he went from there to Grenada, where he became embroiled in the war between Britain and France, France by this time fighting on the American side. The French assaulted and captured the island from the British in the early part of July 1779.[58] Masson was, in Banks’s words, ‘call’d upon to bear arms in its defence, which he did, & was taken prisoner’.[59] When he was finally released, he made his way to St Eustatius, a Dutch Leeward Island, between St Kitts and St Martin.

There he found some respite from the conflict and island-hopped, taking in St Kitts and Nevis but found that the people there were unsupportive of his efforts: ‘a philosopher’, he wrote, ‘is [a] monster of nature to the people in this part of the world’.[60] He then headed to Saint Lucia, where rains and an impenetrable forest kept his botanising to a minimum, but he was still able to put together a small collection of thirty plants for Banks. Then things went from bad to worse: in the early days of October 1780, a deadly hurricane hit the island and Masson lost the entire collection he had with him at the time, his clothes and papers, and almost his life.[61]

Masson never gave up. Certainly the hurricane did not stop him. His next port of call was Jamaica. He had already been to six islands. We know that Masson was in Jamaica in March 1781 but not much more than that. He originally planned to try to get into central America from there but was unable to, presumably because of the continuing conflict. Instead, he finally made up his mind to return home and was back in London in November 1781.[62]

Where to go next was always the question for Masson. In December 1778, while he was still in Madeira, Masson had written to Linnaeus’s son, also called Carl (the great Linnaeus had died in early January of the same year) mentioning that he had been in touch with ‘Mr. De Visme’.[63] Indeed, just before he left Madeira for the West Indies, Masson had informed Banks that he was sending the Canary Islands collection to Lisbon to that same De Visme who would then forward it to Banks.[64] So, it is not surprising that in March 1783, Masson went to Lisbon where he met several of Banks’s acquaintances, including Gerard de Visme, who was a central figure in the English merchant community, and whom Banks had met in November 1766 on his way back to England from Newfoundland and Labrador on HMS Niger.[65]

De Visme had a garden in what is now Benfica, a suburb of Lisbon, and it would seem that he invited Masson to write up a catalogue of the plants that were growing there.[66] When he saw the garden, Masson was not particularly impressed by it or its owner – ‘he knows little or nothing of Botany or natural history’, Masson wrote to Banks, ‘but possessed a very great share of vanity and conceit.’[67] Masson declined to do the catalogue. For his part de Visme was very proud of his gardening achievements, reminding Banks that he had seen his garden in its infancy when he visited Lisbon almost twenty years earlier. De Visme claimed to Banks that the reason Masson did not undertake the catalogue was that ‘he has worn himself out with fatigue, in roving over wild grounds, & sands, in search of new productions … I expect he will add one, to ye martyrs of Botany.’[68]

If he was worn out, as de Visme wrote, Masson certainly hadn’t finished travelling for not only did he visit Lisbon, but also southern Spain, Gibraltar, North Africa and Madeira again, though the order is not clear. He was back in London by late 1784 or early 1785.[69]

Whenever he returned, Masson, as we have come to expect, was not one to stay put for very long and so, on 16 October 1785, he boarded the Earl of Talbot in Portsmouth, an East India Company vessel heading to the Cape. He arrived at Table Bay on 10 January 1786.[70] Though his reception does not seem to have been as warm as it had been the first time, and though he expressed a wish to be sent to Madras, where there was a vacancy as the East India Company’s naturalist (see Chapter 5), he remained at the Cape.[71]

Masson had been sent to the Cape a second time, as he told Thunberg, to collect living plants for Kew, as opposed to herbarium samples and seeds, from the mountains in the environs of the Cape.[72] He did not always follow his orders, as he confessed to Thunberg, but ventured further into the interior. Banks knew this as he paid Masson’s bills and though he disapproved of him not fulfilling his instructions, there was little he could do about it.[73] Masson also failed to follow his instructions exactly as to what he collected: he often sent seeds, herbarium plants and bulbs, as well as the living plants he had been sent to get.

It isn’t clear how long Masson intended to remain at the Cape but it appears that no time limit was placed on his stay. On several occasions he complained to Banks that he hadn’t heard from him in almost two years, and he feared that the letters destined for him had ended up in India or Canton as the East India Company convoys often decided to bypass the Cape. Masson carried on as if he had been instructed to stay. He had no problems collecting new and unusual plants – to Thunberg he mentioned heathers, amaryllis and protea, plant varieties he had collected before, but emphasised that he believed he had found more than twenty new species of Stapelia, which he was going to include in a monograph he was planning.[74] The problems that he did encounter were that he couldn’t always find a ship on which to send his plants back to Kew. It wasn’t that there were no ships in harbour but rather that the ones that came in on their way to England, especially from India, were often so crowded with passengers, that there was no room left for plants.

William Aiton, for whom Masson had been working for maybe thirty years, died at the beginning of February 1793 (William Townsend, his son, took over the duties at Kew) and, from this point on, the tone of Masson’s letters to Banks changed. He now began referring increasingly to wanting to return to England and by October 1794, he started settling his affairs in preparation for a return voyage. On 17 March 1795, fearing that he might get caught up in a possible conflict between Britain and the Netherlands, he found passage on a returning East India Company ship, taking his collection of living plants that he had been growing in his garden at the Cape with him, and was back in England in August of the same year.[75]

As far as one can tell from the few references he made to it in his correspondence with Banks, Masson’s botanical haul was substantial – about one half of the number of geraniums growing at Kew by 1795 had been introduced by Masson.[76] It is also clear that of all the plants he collected he was particularly proud of the Stapelia. As he told Thunberg, he intended to publish on this group and during the quiet periods at the Cape, Masson arranged his collection and began to draw the individual plants. He brought this work to fruition in 1796 when his monograph Stapeliae Novae, describing new species of Stapelia, was published in London. The book was dedicated to the King and contained descriptions of forty-one species, all laid out in proper Linnaean fashion, in Latin, and illustrated in colour.

‘Still enjoying, though in the afternoon of life, a reasonable share of health and vigour’ was how Masson described himself, aged mid fifties, in the dedication to his monograph.[77] He also added that he was ‘anxious to recommence my employment as a collector’.

‘I am ready to proceed to any part of the globe, to which your Majesty’s commands shall direct me. Many are the portions of it that have not yet been fully explore by Botanists.’ But where to? He had already been to the Cape twice, the islands of Madeira, the Canaries, the Azores and a number of West Indian islands.

Banks recognised that Masson was not done with travelling yet. ‘Masson … is Fat & Cheerfull’, he wrote to a mutual friend in Lisbon, ‘he has already got his Travelling notions Returned into his head he says he does not mean to Settle yet & if a good climate is Proposed to him will readily undertake a new voyage.’[78]

Banks knew just the place for Masson. It was Buenos Aires and its hinterland in which Banks was very interested. On 10 April 1796, Banks wrote to the Spanish Ambassador in London asking for permission to send Masson to collect seeds for Kew.[79] Masson, Banks emphasised, would keep himself to himself, not enquiring into the local political situation: he had been collecting for the King for near thirty years and he had conducted himself in an exemplary fashion.

There was no such trip, probably because several months later Spain sided with France and declared war on Britain. If Banks had set his sights in a general way on the far side of the Atlantic, any place there associated with Spain was now out of the question.

By the end of July 1797, he had decided to send Masson to North America, particularly Upper Canada. At the time Upper Canada, part of British Canada, consisted of what is now southern Ontario, and land which stretched westward following the shores of Lake Huron and Lake Superior until Lake Nipigon (west and north of here was the territory, called Rupert’s Land, ceded to the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670): its European population, mostly recently arrived, stood at around 25,000.

Banks arranged the necessary paperwork.[80] A set of instructions (now sadly lost) was drafted, and letters of introduction from the Duke of Portland, the then Home Secretary, to the several governors in the British part of North America (Lower Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) were drawn up in case Masson ventured into these jurisdictions. A few days later, Rufus King, the American Ambassador in London, provided letters of introduction for his new country, the United States, giving Masson a clear run to venture wherever his collecting instincts took him, even down the Mississippi River.

The canvas was enormous. Masson decided to start at New York and proceed from there, but the voyage there did not start well.[81] He left Gravesend in September 1797. Somewhere in the Atlantic near the Azores, the ship was intercepted by a French privateer, then shot at by a French pirate ship, which then took and kept the ship: Masson and several crew were put on a ship heading for Baltimore and then transferred to another ship which finally landed them at New Haven, Connecticut.

Masson arrived in New York during the final week of 1797, after a gruelling four months at sea.[82] He spent the winter in New York and then in the spring of 1798, following Banks’s instructions, he worked his way up the Hudson and the Mohawk River until he reached the American settlement of Oswego on the south shore of Lake Ontario. He was heading westward along the southern shore of the lake, for Niagara, in Upper Canada, one of the first places to be settled by those British colonists who had remained loyal to the Crown during the American revolution.[83] Masson arrived at the small town, which had at the beginning of July lost its status as Upper Canada’s capital to the town of York (soon to be renamed Toronto), directly opposite on the north shore of Lake Ontario. He botanised in the area but stayed in nearby Queenstown in the house of a ‘Mr Hamilton’ (Robert Hamilton, merchant and judge) who took him in as his guest because ‘being a new place there was no decent lodging to be got’.[84] Masson wanted to travel to Detroit, at the western end of Lake Erie, but got no further than Fort Erie at its eastern end where he waited in vain for favourable winds to take him down the lake. Summer was quickly drawing to an end. He took the boxes of seeds he had collected and made his way across Lake Ontario to York and from there eastward to the much larger, older and more-established town of Montreal, in Lower Canada, where he arrived on 16 October 1798.[85]

Within a day or so of arriving, Masson learned that a vessel was ready to sail to Quebec, further down the St Lawrence River and, from there, he hoped to find another one scheduled to cross the Atlantic to Europe. It was probably his last chance to send samples of his collecting activities before winter set in and the ports froze. Masson sent a box of plants and a bag of ‘Zizania’, wild rice, especially for Banks.[86]

For the next few years, Montreal was Masson’s base. It was a good choice. Not only did it send shipping to England either directly or by way of Quebec, but it was the headquarters of the North West Company, a fur trading business founded some fifteen years before Masson’s arrival by a group of enterprising Scots living in Montreal.[87] Each year some of the partners fanned out into what is now western Canada from their wintering base at Grand Portage (now in northern Minnesota), on Lake Superior, in search of beaver, and then in July they would return to their base where the partners from Montreal would be waiting for them to freight the cargo of furs back to the St Lawrence River.[88] Masson hoped to take advantage of this arrangement for his botanical purposes.

His hopes were realised.[89] During the summer of 1799, he travelled with the Montreal partners through southern Ontario to Georgian Bay, Lake Huron and finally Lake Superior to Grand Portage, Upper Canada, where the two sets of partners met. Here and on his travels Masson collected more than one hundred different varieties of seed. For his return trip to Montreal, he went back to Niagara where he collected examples of living plants, in order to send them to Banks from Quebec before winter closed in again.

In the following summer, Masson wanted to travel to Pittsburgh by way of Lake Erie but for some reason this did not happen.[90] Instead he returned to the northern Great Lakes and came back with another collection of living plants, including purple trillium.[91]

From what we can gather, Banks appeared to have been pleased with the collections he had received from Masson since his arrival in North America.[92] But then, two years later, Banks’s attitude to Masson appeared to have changed significantly. On 2 February 1802, Banks wrote to him saying that his collections had become disappointing, and that he was not venturing far enough to find new species. Banks had by then already received several hundred specimens, but many of them were not new.[93]

Then there is a three-year gap in the surviving records. It seems there must have been some discussion of Masson returning to London but he was intent on staying, remarking that he was in very good health and was hoping to travel further down the Gulf of St Lawrence to collect.[94] This was in May 1805.

By the end of the summer, Masson was clear that he was being recalled and though he continued collecting, including living plants during the summer, he did not seem to be disappointed to be leaving.[95] He intended to spend the winter in Montreal and then make his way home via New York in the following spring.

In the event, Masson did not come home. He died in Montreal on 23 December 1805 aged sixty-four. According to John Gray, a friend who was a Montreal attorney and merchant, with very close ties to the North West Company, Masson left few possessions: clothing, especially for the winter months, two maps, two journals, a few drawings, a tea pot and caddy. Gray specifically noted that alongside a small number of authoritative, Linnaean, botanical texts, was a copy, no doubt well-thumbed and annotated, of William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis, published sixteen years before, which told Masson precisely which plants were growing in the royal gardens.[96]

Masson went further and collected more, and over a longer period of time (thirty years) than any other collector associated with Banks. Much of what he did was on his own initiative. Banks described him as ‘indefatigable’: no one who met Masson had a bad word to say about him.

2
1779: Return to Botany Bay by Way of Southwest Africa

As Banks sifted through the vast collections made during the Endeavour’s Pacific voyage, several thousand specimens in all, he would have been reminded of the time he had spent in New Holland, at Botany Bay, and on the Endeavour River, in the period from late April to early August 1770, but few other people were interested. New Holland hardly got a mention in the press and when it did it was described as a hostile place, unlike Tahiti, which was described as paradise.[1]

More information about New Holland became available at the end of September 1771, a little over two months after the return of the Endeavour, when an anonymous publication, A Journal of a Voyage Around the World, appeared in London, and told the story of Cook’s three-year voyage. In it New Holland came across as a very disagreeable place.[2] John Hawkesworth’s officially sanctioned publication in 1773, of what he called ‘Lieutenants Cook’s Voyage Round the World’, devoted many more pages to New Holland than the earlier publication: it painted a much more attractive picture of the country’s resources, but, it, too, had little positive to say of its inhabitants.[3] Two days later, the journal of Sydney Parkinson, the Endeavour’s artist, who had died on 26 January 1771 (as the ship was making its way back from Batavia to the Cape of Good Hope), was published – and it confirmed most of the previous descriptions.[4]

After that New Holland disappeared from the scene.

Seven years went by.

On 30 November 1778, following the resignation of Sir John Pringle, Banks, aged thirty-five, was elected, almost unanimously, President of the Royal Society.[5] In the early part of 1779, a few months after his election, Banks received an invitation from Sir Charles Bunbury, MP for Suffolk and Steward of the Jockey Club, to appear before his House of Commons committee to give expert evidence. This was Bunbury’s second committee investigating the general issue of crime and punishment in England.

The first, which convened on 23 March 1778, was set up to assess the effectiveness of an Act of Parliament, which was given Royal Assent on 23 May 1776 and which authorised for the first time the use of hulks, disused naval warships and other vessels, to house prisoners on the River Thames.[6] The Act, the result of desperate government action on a very serious and growing problem of where to house prisoners, and discussed by prison reformers such as John Howard, parliamentarians and religious leaders alike, was passed as a temporary measure and would be in force for two years in the first instance.

Why the desperation and why was it temporary? In 1718, Parliament had passed the Transportation Act which authorised foreign banishment, specifically to the American colonies, as a punishment for serious crime, the term length, depending on the kind of crime, being either seven or fourteen years.[7] Between 1718 and the outbreak of the American War of Independence in 1776, about 50,000, men, women and children had already been disposed of in this way, ending up, for the most part, working on tobacco plantations in Virginia and Maryland.[8] But now, with war raging in the American colonies, there was nowhere to transport the prisoners. Hulks were considered a reasonable solution, especially as they provided the opportunity for hard labour, preparing ballast for ships; and the two years that the Act ran was viewed as a trial period. They interviewed several witnesses. These included Duncan Campbell, who ran the government contract for hulks, and Daniel Solander, who had paid an unannounced visit to the Justitia, a retired East India Company ship and the first ship supplied by Campbell as a prison, to inspect the accommodation. Bunbury’s committee concluded that the system was working well and should continue.[9] Once again the Act was passed and Royal Assent was granted on 22 May 1778.[10]

Not everyone in Parliament and among the public was satisfied with this conclusion – hulks were only absorbing a small proportion of the prison population and many believed the conditions on board, often fatal, were worse than those in the prisons. In response, on 16 December 1778, Bunbury was asked to convene a second committee to seek more detailed information on the number and condition of prisoners convicted of serious crimes in London and the southern English counties jails; to provide more information concerning conditions on the hulks; and, finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, to provide ‘A short Account of the Acts relating to Transportation, and of the Proposals which have been stated to your Committee, for recurring in some Degree to that Mode of Punishment’.[11]

Transportation was back on the agenda. Duncan Campbell was called again, this time to talk about transportation. For twenty years he had been taking British prisoners to Virginia and Maryland. He was asked for his opinion as to where he would send prisoners now. He answered that Georgia and Florida would be suitable but not for large numbers.[12]

On hearing this, the Committee ‘thought proper, therefore, to examine how far, Transportation might be practicable to other Parts of the World’.

It was time to call Banks. He was no expert on transportation but he was one of the few people in London who could speak authoritatively on another part of the world that might be suitable as a destination for those whose punishment, in the eyes of the Judiciary, was transportation.[13]

The report of Banks’s appearance began thus: ‘Joseph Banks, [was] requested, in case it should be thought expedient to establish a colony of convicted Felons in any distant Part of the Globe, from whence their escape might be difficult, and where, from the Fertility of the soil, they might be able to maintain themselves, after the First Year, with little or no aid from the Mother Country, to give his Opinion What Place would be most eligible for such Settlement?’ Banks answered straight away that that place was ‘Botany Bay, on the Coast of New Holland, in the Indian Ocean, which was about Seven Months Voyage from England’.[14]

Then Banks explained his choice further. He spoke glowingly of Botany Bay. The climate was right – like Toulouse, he said – though he admitted he had only been there for a week when the weather was ‘mild and moderate’; the soil would be able to support large numbers of settlers, and sheep and cattle would thrive – there were no predators; fishing was good, water plentiful, and there was an abundance of timber. The inhabitants, he added, were few in number – no more than fifty in the neighbourhood he reckoned; they were willing to share their land (but not their produce). There were no Europeans anywhere nearby – ‘escape would be very difficult’. A settlement would begin to maintain itself after the first year, he asserted, though for the first year the settlers would need to bring all of their necessary provisions with them from England. Would the Mother Country reap benefit from this settlement, the Committee asked? Banks replied confidently that ‘if the People formed among themselves a Civil Government’, the population would grow, they would demand more European goods and, with a land mass exceeding that of the European continent, they ‘would furnish Matter of Advantageous Return’.[15] Banks made no mention of the Endeavour River area where he had spent seven weeks, considerably longer than at Botany Bay.[16]

This was probably the first time that Banks spoke publicly about Botany Bay. He was certainly an illustrious witness but one suspects that what he said made little impression. The real focus of attention, as an alternative to the American colonies, was a place much closer to home and with connections that went back more than a century – West Africa. Bunbury had invited six witnesses to speak about their experiences in this part of the world. Between them they had more than thirty years’ experience living and working on the coast. One of the witnesses, John Roberts, who had been in command of the West African trading and slaving forts for nine years, advocated an African penal colony – his preferred choice was a port, 400 miles upriver from the mouth of the Gambia River. He produced figures to back up his case that the overall cost of this penal colony would be less than the corresponding costs to keep prisoners on hulks. Two other witnesses were in broad agreement with Roberts while the three remaining witnesses were not in favour, citing especially the horrible mortality rates among Europeans. Transportation was not intended to be a death sentence.[17]

After taking expert evidence, Bunbury’s recommendation was that the laws governing transportation, which specified the American colonies as the destination, should be altered to include ‘any other Part of the Globe that may be found expedient’.[18]

As the revolutionary war across the Atlantic progressed, North America became increasingly closed as a destination for transportation: some convicts were sent to West Africa, typically to be enlisted there in the military, but there were few of them. Suggestions of where convicts should be sent were made from all quarters. Possible destinations included Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in Canada, the West Indies, British Honduras, Gibraltar, Menorca and St Helena, but none of these came to anything.[19] It may have been that the government was hoping that the war would be won and that transportation to the American colonies could resume as before.

Nothing more was heard of Botany Bay.

Four years later, the subject of New South Wales, as it was now generally referred to, suddenly reappeared in Banks’s life.

On 28 July 1783, from an address off Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair, James Matra wrote a letter to Joseph Banks. This was not the first time Matra had written to Banks but the subject of this letter was out of the ordinary, very different from his former concerns. He was very agitated.

Matra, or Magra, his birth name (he changed it in 1775), met Banks in 1768 on HMS Endeavour. Born in New York in 1746, one of three sons of a wealthy Corsican couple who had come to New York by way of Ireland, James Matra was drawn to the sea and served on several British ships during the Seven Years War (1756–63). A few more naval appointments followed on ships that took him to Chatham, Dublin and finally London. There, on 25 July 1768, he signed on as Able Seaman on HMS Endeavour. One month later, the ship left Plymouth for the Pacific.[20]

Matra, who was promoted to full midshipman just before the ship arrived back in England, is hardly mentioned in the surviving journals. In his own journal, Banks acknowledges his presence but does not record his name, referring to him instead as ‘one of our Midshipmen an American’.[21]

Less than a month following the return of the Endeavour, Matra was promoted but he chose not to pursue a naval career.[22] Instead he remained in London, probably spending some of the time in the company of Banks, Solander and those in their circle.[23] Six months later, though, a new career opportunity opened when he was appointed British Consul to the Canary Islands, based in Tenerife. He remained in this post until March 1775 when he returned to London, where, towards the end of the year he petitioned the King to have his name changed to Matra.[24] A short trip to New York followed and then in mid 1778, he accepted a return to consular life when he agreed to be Secretary to Sir Robert Ainslie, British Ambassador in Constantinople.[25]

Not particularly happy in this situation, Matra was back in London in July 1781. And it was here, as an exiled American Loyalist, a British subject who had remained loyal to the Crown during the revolutionary war, that he formed his grand design, the essence of which he shared with Banks in July 1783.

In his letter, Matra, who had been corresponding with Banks for several years, asked about rumours he had heard that there were plans being considered to settle New South Wales.[26] Matra had learned, he continued, that Banks was the guiding hand in one of these plans and added, as he had ‘frequently revolved similar Plans’, that he would ‘prefer embarking in such a Scheme’.[27]

There is no surviving evidence that Banks was involved; but Matra was probably correct that there was a plan afoot, which he attributed to Sir George Young, a senior naval officer, and Sir George Jackson, Second Secretary to the Admiralty.[28] One month after writing to Banks, Matra offered his own proposal to the government to settle New South Wales with American Loyalists and other free settlers, ‘an Object … which may in time, atone for the loss of our American colonies’.[29]

Matra’s proposal was wide-ranging and covered all aspects of how the settlement would be provided for and what its future would hold. The key point is that it would pay for itself, as it could grow the same economically useful plants that were already growing nearby in the islands of the East Indies to the benefit of other European nations – sugar, coffee, tea, indigo and cotton received special mention. Matra also pointed out, and in some detail, the strategic role, both political and economic, that New South Wales could play in a new Pacific region. He had the backing of ‘some of the most intelligent, & candid Americans’ for whom this proposal held out their best opportunity of re-establishing their lives. And what’s more, Matra had Banks’s full support.[30]

No sooner had Matra laid his ideas before the government than matters took an unexpected turn. Lord Sydney, the Home Secretary, met with Matra and laid before him the idea that was brewing in the Cabinet that New South Wales might be suitable for convicts punished with transportation. With negotiations completed leading to the signing of the Treaty of Paris between Britain and the newly established United States, the government had to look for a new destination for transportation. Matra was very enthusiastic about Sydney’s idea. ‘I believe’, he wrote in April 1784, ‘that it will be found, that in this Idea, good Policy & Humanity are united.’[31]

Events moved ahead very swiftly, because the number of people convicted of crimes in England was growing rapidly.[32] This was not the time to be concerned with a free settlement. Pressure on local prisons was becoming intolerable and the chorus demanding the government resume transportation was increasing in volume.[33]

Even though, with Banks’s backing, Matra spoke glowingly of New South Wales, it was not at this time the government’s favoured option. North America was being reconsidered. On two occasions in 1783 and 1784, transportation was resumed clandestinely to Maryland but the experiment failed.[34] And then, at the end of 1784, West Africa, which had been discussed at the Bunbury Committee, became the government’s favourite choice, though it did not publicise the fact.[35]

When word got out that the government was seriously considering West Africa, opposition to the idea, especially from Edmund Burke, gained momentum – he and other Members of Parliament were convinced that West Africa was a graveyard for white people. Transportation, they reiterated, was a punishment, not a death sentence. The government paused and agreed with the idea put forth by Francis Seymour Conway, Lord Beauchamp, MP for Orford, that a committee should evaluate the government’s recommendation. Chaired by Beauchamp, the committee sought expert testimony on the suitability of West Africa as a penal colony. The government was looking for support to establish a settlement on Lemaine Island, four hundred miles from the mouth of the Gambia River. The specific legislation, the Transportation Act of 1784, was already in place. Unlike its earlier 1718 version, which specified the American colonies as the destination for transportation, this Act left it up to the government to decide on a suitable place of banishment. If everything went according to plan, then all the government would need to do would be to raise an Order-in-Council to specify Lemaine Island as the convict destination.

As it turned out, nothing went according to plan. In its first stage of hearings, held between 26 April and 3 May 1785, the Beauchamp Committee heard one witness after the other pour scorn on the idea of transportation to West Africa.[36] In its first report, on 9 May, Beauchamp’s Committee confirmed that West Africa was unsuitable.[37]

In the second stage of its hearings, beginning on 9 May, the Committee widened its questioning beyond West Africa. One of the first to appear was James Matra. There was nothing surprising in this. Since he had proposed New South Wales as a settlement in August 1783, other influential people had added their voices to his, including Sir George Young, a prominent naval officer, and his brother-in-law Sir John Call, a military engineer and wealthy MP with wide experience in Indian affairs.[38] Matra appeared twice and repeated many of the claims he had been making for the past two years.[39]

Banks, too, was invited to give his opinion. It was a Q and A. ‘This Committee’, Beauchamp began, ‘would be glad to know where in your Voyage with Captain Cook it occurred to you that there were any places in the newly discovered Islands to which persons of such Description might be sent in a Situation where they might be able by Labour to support themselves?’[40]

Banks could have suggested a number of places where he had been: Tahiti, New Zealand, Endeavour River and Botany Bay. From this list of possibilities, he chose Botany Bay, in which he had spent the least amount of time. Why Botany Bay over the others? Banks never explained this. He may not have recommended New Zealand because the reception of the Endeavour by the local people was hardly friendly; he may have thought Tahiti too small and densely populated; and ruled out Endeavour River because its climate was too warm and too humid for the British constitution. In his answers to the committee’s questions, Banks spoke very highly of Botany Bay in much the same way as he had six years earlier in front of the Bunbury Committee. He reiterated his key observations: the land was fertile and there was fresh water; the climate was similar to that of Europe; the natives were not hostile, and in any case they were armed only with spears made of fish bones; they would make way for the newcomers. When asked about the provision of women for the male convicts, Banks answered that he did not foresee a problem: ‘I have no doubt’, he said, ‘that they might be obtained from the South Sea Islands at no other Expence than the Charge of fetching them.’[41]

Banks repeated his observation that there were no ‘wild Beasts’ – or predators – and that though he had seen quadrupeds, they were unlikely to be a food source, unlike the plentiful supply of birds. Banks summed up his opinion succinctly: ‘From the Fertility of the Soil the timid Disposition of the Inhabitants and the Climate being so analogous to that of Europe I give this place the preference to all that I have seen.’[42]

Matra and Banks made their case eloquently and with conviction. After all, they had actually been there. The Committee at this point were sufficiently convinced to ask for costings from other witnesses. When these were put before the Committee, it was clear that settling Botany Bay would be no more expensive than keeping convicts in hulks.[43] On the second to last day of the hearings, Matra was called back again – his third appearance – and this time the conversation turned to issues of procuring livestock for the fledgling settlement, and the competing claims to the territory from other European powers. Matra assured the Committee that livestock could easily be purchased from the Indonesian islands to the north and that Britain was alone in claiming the land.

Everything seemed to point to Botany Bay.[44] But then on 25 May 1785, the very last day of the proceedings, Sir John Call, who had previously authored a proposal to settle New South Wales, drew the Committee’s attention to a part of the world no one had yet considered – Das Voltas Bay in present-day Namibia.[45] Call, an MP and member of the Committee, had previously given evidence in the first stage of the hearings. Based on his acquaintance with the West African coast going back to the 1750s, he categorically dismissed the area as being suitable for transportation. But now, and at the last moment, he offered a new suggestion.

Within government circles, the idea of the southwestern coast of Africa as a convict destination was not entirely new. Commodore Edward Thompson, who was in command of the Africa station of the Royal Navy, had advocated it almost two years earlier, in July 1783, and then again just before the Committee’s proceedings began.[46]

The Committee never called anyone to testify on the suitability of this part of the world and the hearings came to an end as scheduled. Two months later, on 28 July 1785, the Committee reported its findings and recommendation to the House of Commons. Not a single word was devoted to Botany Bay. It is as though Banks’s and Matra’s exhaustive testimony had never taken place. Instead, the report concluded that on the basis of the evidence laid before them only Das Voltas Bay was suitable as a destination and eventually a settlement. As the report argued, both convicts and American Loyalists could be accommodated; the area had not been claimed by anyone else and lay in a good geopolitical space, with the Portuguese to the north and the Dutch to the south; Brazil, and its offshore whaling areas, was not far away; and the sailing time to England was reasonable.[47]

Why did the Das Voltas scheme trump that of Botany Bay? The documentary record is unfortunately silent on this question. Speculations have taken the place of solid facts but these need not detain us here.[48] What matters is that less than a month after the report was made, on 22 August 1785, Lord Sydney, the Home Secretary, asked the Admiralty to send a naval vessel to the area, to judge its suitability for settlement and to find the most likely location for it.[49]

It fell naturally to Edward Thompson to sail there and report back. Under the cover of a regular visit to inspect the British West African slaving stations, Thompson prepared to set sail in two ships. He carried secret orders that at an appropriate time he should send HMS Nautilus, the smaller of his two ships, southward towards Das Voltas Bay to survey the area.[50]

Banks was back in the picture, now advising the government about the new African destination. The government, Banks told William Aiton at Kew, in a letter dated 29 August 1785, wanted a naturalist to accompany Thompson to the coast of Africa, to a part ‘unknown to us in the Article of Natural History’.[51] This man, Banks explained, should be an enthusiastic gardener; he should know some botany; he should know how to collect and dry specimens; and he should be able to distinguish between different kinds of soils. But most of all, he should be a keen observer and recorder. In Banks’s own words: ‘He should be ready to write down his opinion of every thing which occurs in his department & to enable him to do so I shall draw up full instructions of the things he is expected to notice.’

Banks had clearly been drawn into the government’s confidence and he told Aiton not to waste a moment choosing ‘the best who offers’. But there was more to this than satisfying the government’s request. The voyage, Banks emphasised, would also result in entirely new specimens for him and seeds for Kew. He pressed Aiton. ‘If it can be done well we have future opportunities … for God’s sake be active and do not let such an opportunity slip you.’ Banks was loath to lose any opportunity to collect for the royal garden at Kew.

As it was summer, the time of the year that Banks habitually spent at Revesby Abbey to tend to estate matters, he left it to Jonas Dryander, his Swedish librarian and a trained botanist, and to Dr Charles Blagden, his close friend and Secretary of the Royal Society, to make the final choice of best candidate. Aiton did not have a name at hand, but, fortunately, Johann Graefer, a German gardener working in London, went to see Blagden and brought with him a young Pole, a Mr Au, who was then working at Kew.[52] At some point Au had worked at a nursery garden in Islington owned partly by Graefer and this was how the two men had met.[53] Banks, apparently, also knew Au, having recommended him to Aiton at some point, and was pleased with the suggestion of his appointment.[54] There was no one else, but there was a problem that made Banks anxious.[55] Evan Nepean, Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, had raised an objection to having a ‘foreigner’ entrusted with such a sensitive mission.[56] Nepean asked Au to attend an interview.[57] It was getting tense.

Several days passed and letters from Blagden, Dryander and Banks crisscrossed but finally, thanks to Blagden’s personal intervention and Banks’s arguments in Au’s favour, Nepean withdrew his objection and Au was given the go-ahead on 15 September 1785 to join Thompson’s convoy to Africa.[58]

Blagden seemed to know instinctively that he had got the right man. As he told Banks: ‘He is literally the only person that offered; & yet fortunately much superior to any one we could have expected.’ Almost without pause Blagden listed his attributes: ‘his education has been far beyond his present situation in life,’ he had an excellent writing style, could draw, knew many languages and several sciences, ‘attended the hospitals in London’, knew surgery, ‘is bold, active & animated with the most laudable ambition of being distinguished’.[59] Fine words, indeed.

Blagden spoke with Thompson who expected Au in Portsmouth – ‘everything seems well settled,’ Blagden assured Banks.[60] Banks now drew up his promised ‘Instructions’. The document detailed every aspect of Au’s substantial task: if he found signs of agriculture, he was to report on the nature of the soil, the tools and manure used, and the crops harvested; he was to collect specimens of everything that was cultivated; he was to describe the topography, the water quality, the forests, and take samples of every living botanical specimen, flowers, fruits, roots and seeds. And, without detracting from this objective, he was ‘to collect such seeds as he shall find ripe or bulbous roots as he may dig up which on his return home may furnish the Royal Gardens at Kew with something valuable to that magnificent collection’.[61] There is no doubt that Banks had high hopes for this mission. The settlement of convicts was not his aim – that was the government’s business: appropriating the natural history of somewhere new was, and he relished the anticipated results.

HMS Grampus and HMS Nautilus sailed for Africa on 28 September 1785. Au was on board but not under that name. Both the instructions drawn up for him and his entry in the ship’s muster announced a change of name: the man whose education, according to Blagden, far surpassed his station in life was now known as Antoni, and then Anthony Pantaleon Howe – it wouldn’t be the last time he changed his name.[62]

By the turn of the year the two ships were nearing the point where they would separate. Then disaster struck. On 16 January 1786, Commodore Thompson suddenly became very ill and died the very next day. George Tripp, the second-in-command, took over the Grampus and with it charge of the Africa station. The command of HMS Nautilus fell to the nineteen-year-old Thomas Boulden Thompson, the late Commodore’s ‘nephew’ and heir.[63]

On 2 February, the two ships parted as planned. The voyage to southwest Africa now began and it proved to be long and dull but, finally, on 21 March 1786, the ship arrived in St Helena Bay, about 150 kilometres to the north of Cape Town. The plan was to survey the coast northward from this point, including finding Das Voltas Bay, whose precise location was disputed.

It didn’t begin well and it continued badly. On 11 April they found Das Voltas Bay but the soil looked barren and dry. On 27 April they entered Walvis Bay and met four local people whose homes, located some way inland, looked poverty-stricken, more like huts than houses: they resembled, Thompson remarked, ‘the halves of bee hives, with the backs to the wind’.[64] It was all too depressing and on 17 May, Thompson decided that he had seen enough and took the Nautilus to the west heading for the island of St Helena, leaving the African coast for good. His terse comments in his journal on that day said it all: ‘completed the Survey of the Coast from Lat 32.47.47 S. to 16.0.0 S. without finding a Drop of fresh Water or seeing a Tree’.[65]

HMS Nautilus was back in Spithead on 23 July 1786. Immediately Thompson went to London to see Lord Sydney. Over a period of three weeks, the two men discussed the voyage and Thompson’s conclusions.[66] Sydney would have found the disappointing news painful. The government had invested so much in the hope of a settlement in southwest Africa and now it was over.[67]

A settlement at Das Voltas was deemed impossible and a substitute place was desperately needed. There were at least 1300 felons on hulks who had been sentenced to transportation and they needed to be moved.[68] On 18 August, Lord Sydney wrote a letter to the Treasury. The report of the officers of the Nautilus, he remarked, concluded that ‘the coast [was] sandy and barren, and from other Causes unfit for a settlement.’ He then went on: ‘His Majesty has thought it advisable to fix on Botany Bay situated on the coast of New South Wales.’[69] Banks was not mentioned by name as recommending the destination, but, incorrectly, Cook was.

There was no need for a survey. Cook had already done that when the Endeavour was on the coast. Events moved very quickly. By the end of the month Lord Sydney had informed the Admiralty of the decision and of the King’s command that a warship and a tender should be prepared to accompany a fleet of ships carrying 750 convicts to Botany Bay. A month after that, the Admiralty confirmed that they had ordered two ships to be fitted and that the lead ship, HMS Sirius, would be under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip.[70]

The newspapers were soon on to the story.[71] Botany Bay and transportation became inseparably linked.[72] The Europeanisation of Australia would now begin.

Anthony Pantaleon Howe had returned with a collection of seeds from some of the places HMS Nautilus anchored.[73] They went to Kew. Though it was not a voluminous collection, Banks was pleased with the way Howe had conducted himself.

Howe would soon be sent on another, and much more, daring mission.

3
1780: The First Circumnavigation of Archibald Menzies

A little before Banks became involved in the potential location of penal colonies, he had been focusing on the Pacific Northwest. It began with the fur trade, in particular the pelt of the sea otter, but, as usual, Banks saw an opportunity for collecting plants.

On 7 October 1780, the Resolution and the Discovery, the ships of Cook’s third Pacific voyage, anchored in Deptford, after a four-year voyage to find a passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The trip had been a disaster: no passage was found, Cook was killed in a skirmish on Hawaii on 14 February 1779, and his successor, Charles Clerke, had died on the return voyage.

The tragic news of Cook’s death had travelled overland across Russia to reach London many months before the return of the ships.[1] John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty, was nominally responsible both for the expedition and for the publication of its narrative. Whatever enthusiasm he may have had for the expedition, he lacked any for the publication and, no sooner had the ships docked, than he was in touch with Banks hoping for help. Montagu had all the journals of the voyage to hand but, as he told Banks, ‘I had so much trouble about the publication of the last two voyages, that I am cautious or rather unwilling to take upon me to decide in what manner & for whose emolument the work shall be undertaken.’[2] Banks immediately came to his aid and wrote to James King, who had taken command of HMS Discovery after Clerke died, asking him to write the narrative. King was delighted to accept and thereby came under the patronage of Banks, someone he admired and whom he referred to as ‘the common Center of we discoverers’.[3]

Until the ships returned, no one in London had any detailed knowledge of the expedition’s proceedings. It was all in the logs and journals, which had only arrived with the ships and would now be put at King’s disposal and, by extension, at that of Banks, who was in overall charge of the publishing project.

At some point during the writing of the narrative Banks must have learned, either by reading it in draft form or hearing of it from King, that during April 1778, while the Resolution and the Discovery lay at anchor in Nootka Sound (the indigenous name which Cook renamed King George’s Sound), Vancouver Island, the ships’ company, officers and crew alike, were treated to an unusual sight. Cook noted in his journal that no sooner had they entered the bay than they were surrounded by canoes filled with furs of various animals but, in particular, those of what Cook called the ‘sea beaver’ (but which we know as the sea otter). The indigenous people were there to trade and seemed to know what they were about and what they wanted. ‘For these things’, Cook remarked, ‘they took in exchange, Knives, chisels, pieces of iron & Tin, nails, Buttons, or any kind of metal. Beads they were not fond of and cloth of all kinds they rejected.’[4]

Banks would not have been surprised to learn this. Though he had never been to this part of the world he knew a lot about it. He would have known that the Russians, beginning with Vitus Bering’s expedition to the North Pacific in 1741, had discovered the fur-bearing mammals in the area and, soon afterwards, began trading them to the Chinese. He would have known that Georg Steller, the expedition’s naturalist, produced the first description of the sea otter and, particularly its pelt, the gloss of which, he reported, ‘surpasses the blackest velvet’.[5] Banks would also have been familiar with Peter Simon Pallas’s published account of his travels in Russia, which provided a detailed account of the trade in furs from Russia to China at the Siberian–Chinese border trading post of Kyakhta.[6] William Coxe’s 1780 publication, Account of the Russian Discoveries Between Asia and America, the first of its kind in English, also spoke glowingly of the trade in furs, and was only the latest in the long line of publications that discussed the Pacific fur trade.[7] Banks would have concluded from all this information that there was no reason why the British could not follow the Russians into this lucrative space.

The possibilities of a British-controlled Pacific fur trade had, in fact, already been advocated by both James Matra and Banks when their proposal for settling Australia, dated 23 August 1783, was put before the government.[8] The plan, it will be recalled, proposed a community of free settlers with the addition of American Loyalists who would produce for export to Britain and re-export to Europe a number of crops suited to the climate and which could be imported for cultivation from India, the nearby Spice Islands, New Zealand and elsewhere. Because Matra and Banks were imagining a settlement that would not be an expense to Britain, but rather increase its wealth, they proposed that commerce should be opened between New South Wales and the fur-rich Pacific coast which Cook had surveyed. The conclusive element, Matra and Banks emphasised, was the fantastic return on investment that the fur trade guaranteed. ‘The skins which they procured’, Matra and Banks wrote referring to Cook’s third voyage, ‘then sold in China at 400 hard Dollars each, though for the few they brought home, of the same quality, they only received about Ten Pounds each.’ And there was more. ‘As our situation in New South Wales, would enable us to carry on this Trade with the utmost facility, we should no longer be under the necessity of sending such immense quantities of Silver for the different Articles we import from the Chinese Empire’.

The government, as seen in a previous chapter, did not take up Matra’s proposal for settling Australia with free settlers and American Loyalists, and the commercial possibilities of a Pacific fur connection were not pursued. But the idea of British ships plying a trade between Nootka Sound and China remained attractive.

It got a tremendous boost when James King’s authoritative telling of Cook’s final voyage was published on 4 June 1784. King laid it out simply and starkly in a chapter in volume three which described the journey of the Resolution and the Discovery from Macao, the Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River in southern China, to the main port city of Canton, almost 100 kilometres further up river. The whole stock of sea otter pelts that were sold in Canton fetched just under £2000. Considering that by the time the ships got to Canton, some of the pelts had already been sold on the Kamchatka Peninsula and others had been spoiled, this figure represented an enormous profit margin.[9] King also mentioned that some of the ship’s company were so obsessed by the potential wealth they were on the point of mutiny, intending to force the ships to return to the Pacific coast of America. Indeed, as it turned out, while they were in Canton two seamen from the Resolution commandeered the ship’s cutter. A search was made but to no avail. ‘It was supposed’, King wrote, ‘that these people had been seduced by the prevailing notion of making a fortune, by returning to the fur islands.’[10]

King remarked that the British fur trade should be an extension of the East India Company’s trade in Canton and, with two ships making the return voyage to Nootka Sound from Canton annually, they could bring as many sea-otter skins as possible to this lucrative market. At the time the East India Company held a monopoly of all British trade in most of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. King added that in order to have something with which to trade at Nootka Sound, each ship would need to carry five tons of unwrought iron, ‘a forge, and an expert smith, with a journeyman and apprentice, who might be ready to forge such tools, as it should appear the Indians were most desirous of … iron is the only sure commodity for their market.’[11]

At a price of just under £5, King’s three-volume account of Cook’s last voyage was not cheap. The entire print run, however, sold out in three days and a contemporary reviewer commented that second-hand sets were changing hands for more than twice the original price.[12] No doubt much of the attraction was the account of Cook’s death but some readers must have been keen to learn about the fur bonanza that was the Pacific Northwest.

Richard Cadman Etches was just the sort of person to be intrigued by the promise of the fur trade. Born in Derbyshire, Etches came to London in 1779, the same year as Cook died, and seems to have established himself quickly in the City’s tea and wine business, going into partnership with Robert Hanning Brooks.[13] Details about his activities are at best sketchy but on 13 March 1785, Etches met with Banks to discuss his proposal: to send two ships to the Pacific Northwest to obtain furs for trade in Canton as King had recommended.

Banks thought that Etches should be more ambitious. Japan, for example, should be included as a possible market.[14] Banks had been led to think about Japan as a commercial possibility probably as early as 1774 when John Blankett, a British naval officer, wrote a report to Lord Sandwich at the Admiralty on the potential of Japan and the nearby islands as a market.[15] But what impressed Banks the most was most likely the visit to Soho Square by Carl Peter Thunberg, who had been with Francis Masson collecting plants at the Cape, and who had been at the Dutch East India Company settlement in the Bay of Nagasaki for more than a year in 1775 and 1776. Thunberg had stayed at Banks’s home in late 1778 and early 1779 on his way back to Sweden from Japan, and while he was there he had spoken to Banks about the potential of Japan as a market.[16]

Banks agreed to write to Thunberg, who by then was in Uppsala, asking him to expand on the Japanese market and, specifically, his opinion of the likelihood of British ships being allowed to trade in the ‘northern Provinces’, something which Thunberg had said was possible.[17]

Banks also suggested that Etches should think bigger in terms of how he wanted to finance the venture. Etches agreed with him and, in addition to the £20,000 subscription he had arranged to fit out the two ships, he would try to increase the nominal capital to £200,000 if the first venture were a success – which he didn’t doubt it would be.[18]

Not long after the meeting with Banks, Etches floated his new business, which he appropriately called ‘The King George’s Sound Company’. It had nine partners: Richard Cadman Etches, his brother John, a number of other merchants, and two naval officers from Cook’s third voyage, George Dixon, who served as an armourer on HMS Resolution, and Nathaniel Portlock, who was appointed on HMS Discovery as master’s mate and then transferred to HMS Resolution following Cook’s death.

Portlock may already have worked for Etches but apparently he didn’t know Dixon. Banks, however, did know him. Dixon had been in contact with him in late August 1784 to propose an expedition across America starting in Quebec. Dixon wanted it to be as much a scientific expedition as a commercial one. He volunteered to undertake the astronomical work and to assign David Nelson, whom he knew from the Resolution, to be responsible for natural history. As Banks had recommended Nelson to be the naturalist on the Resolution, he would have been pleased with this suggestion.[19] All the other personnel, thirty or forty men, Dixon thought he could get in Quebec where there was a greater likelihood of finding men who knew the trade and even some indigenous languages.[20] In his reply Banks welcomed the idea but thought the time was not right, since a new nation, the United States, had just been declared on that continent.[21]

As a consolation, Banks may have suggested to Dixon that he should attach himself to a commercial venture to the Pacific, and it is very likely that it was Banks who told Dixon about Etches.[22] However the connections were made, what was important was that by including two veterans of Cook’s final voyage, Etches was drawing a line directly from Cook to himself, coupling London, again, to Nootka Sound.

Thunberg’s reply to Banks has not survived, but it is highly likely that he repeated his positive opinion of Japan. In Etches’ proposal to the East India Company to allow him to trade at Canton, he referred to his having received ‘the most flattering encouragement from conversation of Gentlemen of the greatest eminence and abilities (for knowledge of Japan)’.[23] The East India Company granted approval in the early part of May for the venture to proceed and to open up commercial relations with Japan.[24]

Etches then bought two ships and began fitting them out for the voyage. By the beginning of June the ships were being provisioned and then a problem was discovered. Etches also needed the permission of the South Sea Company, whose charter included the Northwest Coast of the Pacific, to trade. Negotiations, conducted by George Rose, Secretary to the Treasury, were quickly begun and by 4 August, all the paperwork was in order.[25]

On 29 August, a distinguished party assembled at Deptford to inspect the ships. In the group were George Rose and Joseph Banks; his schoolfriend Constantine Phipps, now Baron Mulgrave, a member of the Board of Control for India and the Board of Trade; and Sir John Dick, British Consul at Leghorn from 1754 to 1776, a civil servant who had taken an early and keen interest in the venture.[26] Though the ships were ready they had still not been named. George Rose named the larger of the two the King George, and Banks, charged with naming the smaller ship, christened it Queen Charlotte.[27]

And so, on 31 August 1785, the first two ships of the King George’s Sound Company left Gravesend, but it took two more weeks, until 16 September, before they could clear the English coast for the long voyage to the Pacific Northwest by way of Cape Horn and the Hawaii Islands. Portlock was in overall command of the expedition, and captained the King George, while Dixon took responsibility for the Queen Charlotte.[28]

Too impatient to wait for news of the first expedition, which was somewhere in the Pacific, Etches began to plan a second.[29] He found another veteran of Cook’s voyages to command it – James Colnett, who had served as a midshipman for three and a half years under Cook on HMS Resolution on his second voyage to the Pacific.[30]

In the summer of 1786, Colnett, now a first lieutenant, took leave from the Royal Navy (it was peacetime and many naval officers were on half-pay), and, in his own words: ‘Having been recommended to a Company of Merchants trading to the NW side of America, the beginning of July 1786 I receiv’d a Letter from their Secretary offering me the command of a Cutter to perform a Voyage to KING GEORGE’S or NOOTKA SOUND …’[31] That ship was named the Prince of Wales. Its tender was the Princess Royal, under the command of Charles Duncan, a naval man like Colnett.

Preparations for the voyage were quick and even though they missed their sailing date of early August, on 23 September 1786 the ships left Deptford for the Pacific. The second Etches expedition was on its way and this time Banks had a botanical collector on board – Archibald Menzies.

Menzies had first written to Banks at the end of May 1784, when he sent him a letter and a small parcel of seeds from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Menzies explained that he was doing this ‘at the request of Dr. Hope, Professor of Botany at Edinburgh’.[32] While Banks did not know Menzies, he certainly knew John Hope well, having been corresponding with him since 1766 at least.[33] Hope, a physician and an early and ardent supporter of the Linnaean system, had been Regius Professor of Botany in the University of Edinburgh since 1768 and in charge of the Royal Gardens (forerunner of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh).[34] Menzies had been born in Weem near Aberfeldy, Perthshire in 1754, the son of a tenant farmer. He had attended Hope’s botany lectures while studying medicine at the university. He also worked for Hope as a gardener between 1775 and 1778.[35]

Menzies never got his medical degree but may have been granted a licence to practise surgery. This would have been enough for him to apply as a surgeon’s mate in the navy, which he did in 1782, and joined HMS Nonsuch that year.[36] A year later he was on HMS Assistance as assistant surgeon and, when he wrote to Banks, he was stationed in Halifax, the base of the North American Station of the Royal Navy, on the same ship.

In 1784, Menzies, now thirty years old, returned to Halifax from cruising the waters of the Caribbean, as part of the duties of the British naval presence in the region.[37] The parcel for Banks contained seeds from where the ship had called: Barbados, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies, and Sandy Hook, near New York. For those plants he could examine, Menzies remarked, he included their Linnaean names.[38] Menzies ended his letter by telling Banks that the land around Halifax promised excellent botanising and that he would ‘wholly devote [his] vacant hours to natural history … I have no doubt that I shall be enabled to send you another parcel early in the autumn.’[39]

He was as good as his word. On 2 November 1784, Menzies sent Banks a second parcel – the first one he knew had arrived safely and was much appreciated – of seeds from Nova Scotia, several of which he could not find mentioned in the edition of Linnaeus he had with him.[40]

Over the next two years Menzies continued to remain in contact with Banks and sent him seeds, including some from the Bahamas. Unfortunately, as Menzies had to admit, he had been unable to find the species of plants that Banks had specifically asked for.[41]

Still, Banks must have been very pleased. Not only did he have specimens of plants from Nova Scotia but he was now in touch with a professional collector who might just be called a botanist – Menzies’s command of the Linnaean system qualified him for that appellation.

On 12 July 1786, a day before the East India Company gave Etches permission to trade in the Pacific Northwest, Banks got a letter from Menzies that he would soon be in England.[42] A little over five weeks later, 21 August 1786, Menzies wrote to Banks from Chatham to announce his arrival. He said that he was forwarding another parcel of seeds to him and expected to be in London himself in a matter of a few days. He added that he had heard that ‘there is a Ship, a private adventurer, now fitting out at Deptford to go round the World – Should I be so happy as to be appointed Surgeon of her, it will at least gratify one of my greatest earthly ambitions, & afford one of the best opportunities of collecting seeds & other objects of Natural History for you …’[43]

What happened next is unclear but, on 7 September, Menzies told Banks that he had been appointed surgeon to the expedition and was expecting to sail soon.[44] Menzies was the perfect candidate: he had served on naval vessels, had studied with John Hope, knew his plants and the Linnaean system well. He even had a highly glowing reference from his old teacher.[45]

Did Banks recommend him or was it Hope? Menzies’s letter to Banks, unfortunately, reveals nothing.[46] All we can be certain of is that Menzies did ask Banks to intervene with Etches to allow him more freedom to collect on the voyage and that Etches agreed; and that Menzies visited Soho Square on 27 September while Banks was at Revesby to offer some more plants from Halifax (including an orchid, which Jonas Dryander, Banks’s librarian, thought superb) and presumably to acquaint himself with Banks’s Pacific collection.[47]

Though Menzies kept predicting an early departure, in fact, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal did not leave the English coast until 16 October 1786.[48] On 16 November, when the ships were in the Cape Verde Islands, Menzies wrote his first letter to Banks. He thanked him for writing to Etches to give him more freedom to collect than was originally stated because ‘the west coast of N. America presents to me a new & an extensive field for Botanical researches … & I can assure you that I shall lose no Opportunity in collecting whatever is new, rare or useful.’[49] Menzies emphasised that his confidence was supported by experience: before he had left for the voyage, William Aiton at Kew had shown him a specimen of Houstonia caerulea (popular name little or azure bluet) which he had raised from seed sent to him from Nova Scotia, the implication being that if he could do it once he could do it again and again.[50]

The ships would be heading for Cape Horn before entering the Pacific. Colnett had planned to stop at what was then called Staten Island, but which now has the name of Isla de los Estados, and which lies about twenty miles off the southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego. His instructions were to land Samuel Marshall, a naval lieutenant, and the son of Captain Samuel Marshall, whom Colnett had befriended in Cowes, with a party of fifteen men, to establish a sealing settlement.[51] Menzies was going to take this opportunity to collect specimens of Drymis winteri (then referred to as Wintera aromatica and popularly known as Winter’s bark), from which an anti-scurvy medicament could be prepared – its properties were first noted by Captain John Winter, after whom the plant is named, in 1578, and reiterated forcefully by Hans Sloane in 1693. (Banks, who had seen the plant when he was in Tierra del Fuego on the Endeavour, had specifically asked for it to be collected.)[52]

On 17 November, the day after Menzies wrote his letter, the ships continued their voyage, passing from the hot and humid tropics to the squally and snowy South Atlantic. On 26 January 1787, the ships anchored in New Years Harbour, Staten Island, almost in the exact same spot as the Resolution when it was there – with Colnett – in 1775. While the main task – landing the sealing party – was proceeding, Menzies lost no time botanising.

As the ships were about to depart, Menzies wrote to Banks. The weather had not been kind ‘in this wild and inhospitable clime’ but he had managed to make several excursions and find many plants that were not listed in Linnaeus. Of equal, if not greater importance, Menzies was delighted to have found the Wintera aromatica growing everywhere and in flower – ‘This beautiful tree … loads the circumambient Air with a most pleasing aromatic Odor.’[53] Menzies had collected and potted some twenty young plants and, as he had no possibility of keeping them alive during his voyage, he was assured by Lieutenant Marshall that he would take them back to England on the relief ship that was to be sent from London for the party, together with seeds which he would collect for Menzies.[54]

Menzies carefully told Banks that though the plants were addressed to him, he was to send some of them to John Hope in Edinburgh. Menzies did not know that two days before he arrived in Cape Verde, Hope had died in Edinburgh – when Menzies did finally learn of Hope’s death, he referred to him as ‘my best and only friend’.[55] The plants fared just as badly, as it turned out. The Duke of York, the relief ship owned by Etches, left on 21 April 1787 for Staten Island but, on 11 September, while at New Years Harbour it went down. The crew and the sealing party were all saved as they managed to leave in boats, but the plants went down with the ship.[56]

Though the intention was to sail to Hawaii, which Cook had visited in January 1778, Colnett decided to go straight for Nootka Sound.[57] The decision certainly meant that Colnett would be arriving at his destination sooner than anticipated but, on the other hand, the long sea voyage was bringing on scurvy. Everyone was thankful that on 5 July 1787, after about five months at sea, the coastline of Vancouver Island was sighted: the next day they were visited by several canoes bearing a few furs.[58]

From now on the season and the weather would dictate the expedition’s plans. The general idea was to begin at Nootka Sound and move northward along the coast, trading as much as possible. But progress turned out to be slow as the ships were in poor shape. After sailing along Vancouver Island, they set course for the Queen Charlotte Islands where they anchored for two weeks during the second half of August 1787. Colnett, fearing more damage to the ships, sailed across the strait – Hecate Strait – that separated the islands from the coast, and he made base on an island which Menzies named for his London patron – Banks Island. There they remained for almost three months to repair the damage, by which time, as Colnett remarked, winter had definitely closed in: ‘the Country half cover’d from the summits of its hills to the water’s Edge with snow’. On 19 November, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal departed the Pacific Northwest to spend the winter in Hawaii.[59]

However, the time there did not go well: violent confrontations soured relations and trade. Colnett must have been anxious to leave and, on 13 March 1788, full of provisions and now with three Hawaiians on board, who wished to join the voyage, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal headed back to the Pacific Northwest.[60] They arrived safely in April.

For the next three or four months both ships traded, one southward and the other northward with the intention of meeting at any one of several predetermined points. This never happened, but thanks to the information that was left in letters in the safe-keeping of Haida chiefs on the coast, Colnett knew that Charles Duncan, in command of the Princess Royal, was safe. Within a day of each other, on 17 and 18 August 1788, both ships left the coast for Hawaii with their cargo of pelts, the Princess Royal having out-performed the Prince of Wales.[61]

All along, Menzies had been botanising whenever he could and had found many plants that were new to western science, including a variety of penstemon with large lavender to purple flowers, that was named in his honour.[62] He continued to collect specimens, whenever he could, some of them which were new to Europe such as the trailing raspberry (Rubus pedatus), and Sanguisorba menziesii, a plant with grey-green leaves and red flowers, in the shape of bottlebrushes.[63]

The first part of the expedition was now over. It was time to realise the proceeds of the venture, to sell the pelts in Canton during the trading season which would begin in October.

On 12 September, the two ships met at a familiar anchorage in Moloka’i. Once provisioning for the next leg of the voyage was completed, the ships left Hawaii on 30 September and arrived in Macao on 12 November 1788, a little over two years since leaving England.[64]

The furs, almost two thousand of them, did not sell as well in Canton as Colnett had predicted, but the return, at just over £20,000, nevertheless justified the outlay.[65] Colnett did better than any of his predecessors in the Pacific Northwest, so much so that the original plans were altered substantially.[66] John Etches, Richard Cadman Etches’s brother, and the Prince of Wales supercargo, the merchant responsible for the sale of the ship’s cargo, decided to join forces with another fur-trading scheme headed by a group of private traders in Canton. The decision was taken that the Princess Royal would remain behind in Canton and join three other ships for the next season and that the Prince of Wales would return to England.[67]

Now under the command of James Johnstone, previously the ship’s chief mate and a close friend of Menzies’s (they had been together on HMS Assistance in the eastern Atlantic), the Prince of Wales set sail for England from Macao on 1 February 1789 – Charles Duncan having relinquished command of the Princess Royal because of ill health was returning home as a passenger, as was Menzies. After stopping briefly at Sumatra, where Menzies collected some fine plants, and St Helena, the Prince of Wales anchored off the Isle of Wight on 14 July 1789 and was back on the Thames several days later.[68]

What had Menzies accomplished? Without a plant list to consult, it is impossible to be precise, but it has been estimated that Menzies collected in the region of one hundred plants.[69] This may not seem a lot, but given that many of the specimens were new to European botany the figure is much more impressive than it sounds. Banks was, of course, a recipient of both dried plants and seeds, but so were other renowned botanists.[70] Professor Daniel Rutherford, John Hope’s successor at Edinburgh, got seeds and dried plants from the ship’s major calling places; as did James Edward Smith, the President of the newly founded Linnean Society of London.[71]

When he returned to London, Menzies spent a lot of time at Soho Square to try to make sense of his collection, comparing the specimens with those in Banks’s herbarium and supported by the vast textual and illustrative material in the library.[72]

With the return of Menzies from his circumnavigation, Banks’s interest in the Pacific fur trade faded. His relationship with Menzies, however, would soon enter a new and more extensive phase: a second and longer circumnavigation.

While it was a minor part of the Pacific Northwest story from Banks’s point of view, during the time Menzies was in the Pacific, China moved centre stage into Banks’s life.

4
1782: The Brothers Duncan in Canton

Banks had been thinking about China for some time. The country’s botany was of enormous interest to the West. With a population of 300 million and a landmass the size of the European continent, China had a storehouse of botanical riches hardly known in Europe. By the mid eighteenth century, Chinese plants were growing in several royal and private gardens across Europe, but the numbers and varieties were insignificant when compared to what Europeans believed remained beyond their reach.[1]

As Banks knew, Europeans were not free to go where and when they wanted in China. The Qianlong Emperor, who ascended the throne in 1735, was responsible for many of the restrictions, especially as they applied to Europeans wishing to trade. In 1757, the so-called Canton System came into force, whereby most European merchants became confined to Canton.[2] They were allowed to remain there for only part of the year, known as the trading season, normally from October through to March – during the break between the end of the southwest monsoon and the beginning of the northeast monsoon.[3] In Canton, the European merchants, better known as supercargoes, traded under the umbrella of their respective national East India Companies, and lived in factories, buildings that were rented out to them by the resident Hong (Chinese) merchants.[4] More than thirteen such factories, sited on the banks of the Pearl River and separated from the rest of Canton, were allocated to the foreign merchants.[5] The Europeans and the Hong, who generally did not speak each other’s languages, were obliged to do business with the help of a corps of Chinese middlemen, known as the linguists, who spoke a kind of pidgin English.[6] No women were allowed in the factories. When the trading season was over, the supercargoes typically moved to Macao, often joining their families, where they awaited the beginning of the next cycle.[7]

Restrictions on movement had a direct bearing on what Europeans knew of Chinese natural history. Banks was well aware of this. When, for example, in 1768, he was preparing for the epic voyage on HMS Endeavour, Thomas Falconer, a classical scholar who knew an impressive amount of natural history, warned him that he would learn hardly anything about Chinese botany in Canton. ‘The Europeans’, Falconer commented, ‘have but little communication with the Natives, & none beyond the suburbs of Canton. You will have a better yield at Batavia if you stop there, as our China Ships sometimes do.’[8]

Banks’s knowledge of Chinese natural history, especially its botany, was second to none.[9] In his own library he had virtually everything written by Europeans about China’s natural history, much of it contained in compilations of letters sent home from Jesuit missionaries based at the imperial court in Peking.[10] The titles spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from Michael Boym’s early Flora Sinensis; through to the thirty-four-volume Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, compiled and published between 1703 and 1776 by Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, a French Jesuit historian, the contents of which provided the most comprehensive European understanding of China in the eighteenth century; and finally to the Mémoires concernant l’histoire, etc. des Chinois, a multi-volume work, a collaboration between French academicians, missionaries and two Chinese students who lived in France where they studied western science.[11] Banks particularly valued this compendium, especially its third volume, published in 1778, which contained the section on Chinese plants and trees.

Though highly esteemed, these compilations had one very important limiting factor: the information they contained was derived from secondary sources. But this was not true of Banks’s primary source on far-eastern botany, Engelbert Kaempfer’s Amœnitatum exoticarum (Exotic Pleasures), published in 1712, a first-hand botanical treatise of the oriental world by a European botanist. Kaempfer trained as both a physician and a naturalist. After several years travelling to Russia and modern-day Iran he joined the Dutch East India Company as physician, and, in 1690, he was posted to the Company’s factory in Nagasaki, Japan, and began applying his training to the field of Japanese natural history.

For two years Kaempfer administered to his Dutch patients, finding as much time as possible to botanise locally: as a physician he was allowed on the mainland where he continued his botanical researches. When, in 1695, he returned to Europe, he settled down in his Westphalian hometown to organise his herbarium and his botanical notes from all of his travels. The result of the latter exercise was the publication in 1712 of the illustrated Amœnitatum exoticarum. Kaempfer died four years later.[12]

Banks’s copy in the British Library still bears the annotations of Daniel Solander in which he noted the ‘new’ Linnaean names for Kaempfer’s plants.[13] The fifth part of the book is dedicated to Japanese plants and Kaempfer describes each plant in a manner that would have warmed Banks’s botanical heart: Kaempfer ‘placed the various parts of the plant under the botanist’s knife’, beginning with the root and following through eventually to the seed.[14] While Kaempfer covered a wide range of plants – those bearing fruit and nuts and those valued for their flowers – he singled out four plants for special mention and attention: the paper mulberry tree, the musk seed, a creeper and, most importantly, Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. The plants in this section of Kaempfer’s book, though Japanese, were indigenous to China and their names were written out in Chinese characters.

Besides printed books about Chinese natural history, Banks also had a vast stock of illustrated material. Some of it accompanied texts, such as Boym’s, Kaempfer’s and Pierre Joseph Buc’hoz’s recently published Herbier, a collection of Chinese medicinal plants that were growing in China and in European gardens.[15] In addition Banks also had manuscript drawings of Chinese plants, without textual information, especially a collection made in Canton in the early 1770s by a Chinese artist working in collaboration with John Bradby Blake, one of the East India Company’s supercargoes, and his English-speaking Chinese assistant, Whang at Tong.[16]

If, by the time Banks had finished poring over his books and drawings, he still wanted to know more Chinese botany, he could leave his library in Soho Square and stroll over to the British Museum in Bloomsbury, where, as President of the Royal Society, he held the office of Trustee. In this privileged position he could examine yet another and earlier collection of texts and images of Chinese and Japanese plants that had formerly belonged to Sir Hans Sloane.

Sloane, who was President of the Royal Society from 1727 to 1741, was an avid collector of natural history objects, books and manuscripts. When he died in 1752, he donated his vast collection, which also included the Chinese plant specimens in James Petiver’s herbarium, and Kaempfer’s entire natural history collection, to the British nation.[17] In the following year, Sloane’s bequest became the first collection to form the British Museum.

When Banks had finally reached the limit of experiencing Chinese plants through text and image, in his own and Sloane’s collection, he could always go to the royal gardens in Kew and see thriving examples of the real thing. Plants from China had been arriving in London from the 1720s, sometimes ending up in private gardens and nurseries and sometimes at the Chelsea Physic Garden. By 1789 when William Aiton, the head gardener at Kew, published his Hortus Kewensis, as many as one hundred different plants from China were growing there.

As he approached the gardens, Banks’s mind would have been focused on China as soon as the 163-foot Pagoda slowly came into view. Built by the architect Sir William Chambers between 1761 and 1762 – Chambers also built Somerset House, where the Royal Society was housed from 1780 – it was designed both to be looked at and to be looked out from: ‘from the top you command a very extensive view on all sides in some directions upwards of some forty miles distance, over a rich and variegated country.’[18]

All this was well and good. London’s institutions and Banks’s library and herbarium were exceptional when it came to information about China’s natural history, but it was no substitute for collecting living plants from their natural habitat. How to do this was not obvious: only the East India Company, with limited personnel, had access to Canton. And then, out of the blue, a possibility appeared.

John Duncan was born in Brechin, Scotland in 1751 and after completing his medical studies he began working as a surgeon on board East India Company ships sailing to India and China. In late winter 1782, he was returning to China, this time as the East India Company’s resident surgeon in Canton. Accompanying him on board the Morse, was William Henry Pigou, who was going back as the East India Company’s Chief of the Council of Supercargoes.[19] Their destination was Canton, where the English were the major presence among the foreign traders.[20] It is not clear which of the two men knew Banks but they jointly wrote a letter to him from Rio de Janeiro dated 31 May 1782, en route to Canton. In it they informed Banks that they were sending him a few specimens of plants, birds, insects and other examples of natural history from Rio de Janeiro, where they had been since late April; and that once they got to Canton, for where they were leaving the following day, they would be happy to collect there on his behalf. Both Pigou and Duncan excused themselves for not being ‘sufficiently acquainted with the Study of Botany’ and, therefore, could do little more than collect.[21]

Banks wrote back to Pigou and Duncan on 10 August 1782 to thank both men for their collections. He was pleased with them and took up their offer of collecting for him in Canton.

Pigou and Duncan were in Canton in early October 1783 and began collecting immediately when they read Banks’s letter. In early December, as the Morse was preparing to leave for England, they sent Banks a box of shells, some fish from Macao in a jar, a Chinese magnolia in a pot; and a ‘Wanghee’, a species of bamboo, which they told Captain Henry Wilson, who was returning on the ship as a passenger, that he should deliver ‘Dead or Alive’.[22] Other plant specimens, including another Chinese magnolia in a pot, were despatched on the Northumberland, another East India Company ship leaving Canton around the same time.[23]

Duncan settled easily into Canton, even going into business with the Hong merchants.[24] Banks seemed to warm to him very quickly and lobbied successfully on his behalf with the directors of the East India Company to raise his salary by £200 per year. In return, Duncan did what he could to find the plants that Banks wanted sent to England. Some were easy to get – the Yu Lan, or Chinese magnolia, and water lilies, for example. Most likely Duncan got the specimens from one of the city’s nursery gardens, three miles upstream from where the European and American trading companies had their factories. The nursery mostly supplied the local Chinese market but it also sold flowering plants in pots, fruit trees and seeds to foreign buyers.[25] A later visitor to the nursery left a vivid description of its layout and colours. ‘Camellia with double white red & variegated flower, also a single variety with a rose Colord flower … Yulan, a species of Magnolia with White Red & variegated Flowers, the two last not [seen]; Azalea indica, Daphne indica … Chrysanthemum indicum double red, white, flesh Colord, & orange Colord. This plant is used by the Chinese Ladies as an ornament for the head.’ There were also pots with fruit trees and pots planted with dwarf trees.[26]

Whether Duncan found anything new when he visited the nursery was a matter of luck. One of the plants which was on Banks’s most wanted list – ‘among our greatest desiderata’ – the mountain or tree peony, Mu dan in Chinese, Paeonia suffruticosa, as it is known in western botany, both men knew had to be obtained through personal contacts, specifically among the Hong merchants, since the plant grew to the north of Canton where the climate was more like England.[27] On 4 April 1787, Duncan wrote to Banks to say that he had managed to get an example of it ‘from a Merchant as a present’.[28]

Duncan didn’t say which merchant but it is most likely to have been one of the Hong merchants. Duncan had good connections with these men, including Puankhequa I, the city’s chief merchant, as he had had business dealings with them.[29] The Mu dan that Duncan had received was, he remarked, the true Mu dan: highly prized, very expensive and ‘so difficult to procure’ – only Hong merchants would have had access to these plants; they grew far to the north.[30] As it turned out, the Mu dan example survived the voyage to England, but succumbed to its first English winter in Kew.[31]

Duncan continued to collect for Banks and managed to get two more specimens of the Yu lan. These he sent with John Kincaid, a surgeon with the East India Company at Madras, who was returning home as a passenger via Canton.[32] When, at the end of June 1788, Kincaid was safely back in London, he had to tell Banks the sad news that the two plants had not survived the voyage; but that two fans, which Duncan was sending as presents to Dorothea and Sarah Sophia Banks, were as good as new.[33]

John Duncan’s health was deteriorating and on 14 January 1788, less than a month after sending his final consignment to Banks with Kincaid, he was granted sick leave to return to London.[34] By then, Alexander Duncan, his younger brother, was already in Canton having been given permission to leave Calcutta, where he was serving in the East India Company’s medical establishment, to visit his ailing brother. Alexander immediately completed his brother’s outstanding consignment of more Yu lans, and promised to fulfil the remaining instructions.[35]

John Duncan was back in London several months later and contacted Banks at the earliest opportunity. He told him about his having had to leave Canton and that his brother, Alexander, was now acting as the factory’s surgeon, the supercargoes there having insisted that he stay on. Banks agreed to use his influence with the East India Company to make Alexander’s position a permanent one. Banks wrote to Thomas Morton, the Secretary to the Court of Directors of the East India Company, asking him ‘to confer a favor of no small matter’.[36] This was not how appointments were normally made – the medical service in Calcutta decided on who would be the surgeon at Canton – but though the process was delayed, in the end, John Duncan and Joseph Banks got their way and Alexander Duncan got the appointment.[37]

Duncan started collecting directly for Banks in late 1788 and continued to do so for about eight years. In his very first letter to Banks, dated 6 December 1788, Duncan proudly told Banks that he had more Yu lans – the last ones he had sent he was sure would not have made it – and seeds of the red and white water lily. All of the specimens were in good shape but to give them the best chance of surviving the voyage back he entrusted the consignments to two passengers, one of them probably Henry Lane, a supercargo, who was returning to London on the Talbot; and another, a Mr Turnly who was to be on the Minerva. Duncan was taking the precaution of spreading the risk and enhancing the chances of survival by trusting passengers to care for the plants, and using two different ships. In all of his attention to plants, Duncan did not forget a present – a ‘Box of Souchon, called here Powchong Tea’ – for Lady Banks.[38]

When he read the letter, Banks might well have concluded that Alexander Duncan was going to be more enterprising in collecting plants than his brother had been. He and another ‘Gentleman’ (a Mr Mieron), Duncan told Banks, had already ‘engaged a Chinese’ to bring him specimens of the much-sought-after lacquer tree from the interior. Banks would have been right in his assessment. In the next trading season, Banks learned that Duncan had befriended Consequa, one of the Hong merchants and a nephew of Puankhequa I, and had discussed aspects of Chinese botany with him.[39] Like many other Hong merchants, Consequa had a garden in Henan (Honam), the island on the other side of the Pearl River from the East India Company factories, but Consequa’s would become one of the most elaborate in Canton.[40] With his connections both inside and outside Canton, Consequa would be the vital and desperately sought-for link to the Chinese countryside.

In all his dealings with John Duncan, Banks, though grateful for what he had collected and sent, must have been frustrated that he could not convey specific requests to him. Duncan had already excused himself for not knowing much botany and therefore would not have been able to identify any particular plant Banks might have wanted. It is for this reason that Duncan’s consignments consisted of the easily obtainable magnolia, peony and water lily. Banks had a very clear idea of the kind of plants he wanted from China – those that were not already growing in Kew or anywhere else in England.

Even though Alexander Duncan was no better at botany than his brother, this ceased to matter so much because by the end of 1789 he had received from Banks a remarkable quarto, ‘The Book of Chinese Plants’.[41]

The person responsible for it was Banks’s old friend James Lind, with whom he had last travelled to Iceland in 1772 and who was now physician-in-ordinary to the royal household in Windsor.[42] Lind, like many medically trained men of the time, practised his profession on East India Company ships and, beginning in 1766, he went to Canton. He was back in Canton in late 1779 or early 1780.[43] By then, apparently, he had learned enough Chinese to able to write characters and to translate some words.[44] He also collected Chinese books.[45]

In 1789, Lind was visiting Soho Square and at some point began work on an extraordinary project, what he called ‘A Catalogue of such Chinese and Japonese [sic] plants whose Chinese characters are known and are botanically described’ and ‘to shew which of them have been introduced into His Majesty’s botanic Garden at Kew’.[46]

Lind had worked out that he could cross-reference the Chinese plants mentioned in Kaempfer’s Amœnitatum exoticarum and in the Bencao gangmu, China’s most important compendium of materia medica (Banks owned a copy), with the Chinese drawings in his library (probably those that came from John Bradby Blake) and the Chinese plants actually growing in Kew, which he would know thanks to William Aiton’s newly published Hortus Kewensis.[47] The result of this exercise was an inventory of precisely those plants that were not growing in Kew and for which Lind, with the help of his sources, could supply Chinese characters and possibly even a drawing. Lind could identify around one hundred and fifty plants that fell into this category.

‘The Book of Chinese Plants’ that Duncan received from Banks in late 1789 was compiled from Lind’s inventory. Each page had a coloured illustration of a Chinese plant that was not then growing in England together with its Chinese characters. In the corner of each page there were several crosses added to convey how much Banks wanted an individual plant: four, the highest number, signified that the plant was unknown in the West and was a must: one, the lowest number, signified that the plant was known but had never been seen in its living state.[48] The purpose of the Book was to make plant collecting in Canton more focused and efficient. It took the guesswork out of collecting and did not require the collector to know Chinese: the plant’s Chinese name could be shown to its provider for identification; and the illustration would be used for verification.

Duncan immediately put the Book to work. The characters were not always accurate, but the drawings made all the difference.[49] In his next couple of letters to Banks, Duncan prided himself on getting seventeen plants, which appeared in the Book, including the Chinese flat peach.[50]

It didn’t matter now that Duncan did not know Linnaean nomenclature because this book dispensed with it. Once he had a specimen, he simply described it in a letter, using Banks’s own words, and then referred to it by its romanised Chinese name and its corresponding Chinese characters, which were inserted into the letter by someone who could write Chinese. One such plant, which Duncan called Tsu-lung-tsow and which he described as having ‘Leaves in form of Tancard with a lid’, was the pitcher plant, Nepenthes mirabilis.[51] Duncan entrusted it to the ship’s commander Captain Brodie Hepworth, who had previously brought Banks botanical specimens from China and whom he recommended as someone who cared for plants. Duncan told Hepworth that even though it might look to him as though the plant was dead on arrival, it could be pruned and might revive. The plant survived the voyage and was one of the first carnivorous plants to grow at Kew.[52]

Banks had asked Duncan to return the book to him but Duncan insisted that he still needed it. On 23 January 1790, Duncan placed ten new plants, which he had found from the book, on the General Elliott, about to leave Canton for London. Robert Drummond, the ship’s captain, was known to pay plants the attention they deserved and Duncan was hopeful that they would survive the voyage.

The book, Duncan told Banks, had done its magic. Twelve more plants from the book and a box containing flat peach trees, which Banks had especially wanted, were ready for shipment. This time, Duncan had entrusted part of the consignment to Captain Edward Cumming of the Britannia, because, as he put it, ‘he always keeps his Plants in the Balcony’, a safer place than most on a ship.[53]

Captain Cumming was also returning the book to Banks. No sooner had it left, than Duncan asked Banks to send it back to him so that he could continue collecting from it. By the time the trading season opened in the autumn of 1792, it was back in Canton.[54] It would leave Canton again in March 1794. Up to this point, the book had crossed from London to Canton and back four times, a total distance of nearly one hundred thousand miles and about one and a half years at sea. But its voyages were not yet over.

Duncan was not a botanist, as he himself admitted; he didn’t know the Linnaean system and it was Banks’s book of Chinese plants that made any kind of sensible collecting possible in China.[55] Even so, the activity of collecting remained difficult. Though Alexander Duncan knew most of the Hong merchants, did business with them, visited their gardens and took botanical advice from them, he felt very much at their mercy. He often remarked to Banks that they did not deal with him squarely, that they delayed in getting the plants he asked for. He also accused them of ‘chicanery’, and of deliberately frustrating his collecting activities. The lacquer tree was a case in point. In early February 1790 Duncan wrote to Banks expressing his frustration that he would probably never get a specimen of it. As he remarked: ‘Whether its from the policy of the Country, or other causes, I cannot find out, but we are always disappointed, by flattering evasive answers.’[56] Duncan’s own explanation of the paucity of botanical specimens and information was that it was down to ‘the jealous nature of the Chinese’.[57]

The interaction between the Chinese and Duncan may not have been easy or always fruitful but these problems were nothing compared to the anxiety he must have felt when the returning East India Company ships brought Banks’s yearly letter. It would only be at this point, many months after the plants were sent, that Duncan would learn of their fate. He wouldn’t have been any too hopeful when he opened Banks’s letter. Duncan did everything he could to increase the plants’ chances of survival: he tried to contract with sympathetic captains, those who knew some botany, or some, like Captain Cumming, who kept the plants in protected spaces; he used ship’s surgeons as often as he could and even passengers; and he tried to spread the risk by dividing his collections among several ships. Even so, Duncan estimated that nine out of the ten plants sent from Canton died on the returning voyage.[58]

The sea was not kind to plants. They needed the right amount of light and water to survive anywhere, ships included. But on ships, where space was at a premium, there was no satisfactory place to keep them. In respect of access to light and the absence of sea spray – salt was the plant’s real killer – the main deck was the best place. But this was also where the ship’s animals roamed – dogs, cats, goats, sheep and rats – who particularly enjoyed digging up soil. Plants needed to be in special containers to protect them from these destructive visitors. Then there was the issue of water. This was the ship’s scarcest resource and the quantity available was monitored to the last drop. It would take a courageous captain to water the plants before watering the crew. The plants, therefore, depended on rain water, not too much, not too little and at the right time.[59]

Added to this was the fact that the shipping routes in the Canton trade were some of the longest in the commercial world – six months from Canton to London was not unusual; and the ships passed through several climatic zones – temperature, rainfall, pressure and wind speed varying tremendously – as they worked their way from the South China Sea to the North Atlantic.

When, at the other end of the chain, Banks received bad news from an East India Company ship’s captain, freshly returned from Canton, he would not have been surprised, but very frustrated. As a case in point, James Glegg, the surgeon of the East India Company ship, the Earl of Mansfield, to whom John Duncan entrusted two pots, one containing the ‘Canton Mou dan’ and another containing a water lily, explained to Banks what had gone wrong on the return voyage. On 4 December 1787, when he arrived in Portsmouth, Glegg wrote to Banks with the sad news that the water lily, which he had kept in his cabin, had died because water had been rationed to half a pint of water per day. The other plant, ‘a beautiful shrub I had in my own Cabbin, and by begging and borrowing water, I persevered well, when it spread its Branches in a vine like manner, and with the Flowers on it was very pleasing; but alas! When off the Cape of Good Hope, a heavy Sea broke into the port of my Cabbin and entirely filled the jar in which your plant was, from which it faded fast.’[60] Glegg pointed out that the plant under the care of the ship’s commander also died, even though it was well watered.[61] The sad truth was that most plants did not survive the voyage.

One of Duncan’s largest and one of his last shipments to Banks came in March 1794. The plants were very beautiful, Duncan excitedly told Banks, and he hoped that the ‘tedious passage does not destroy’ them. For this shipment, he took the usual precautions, and in addition he put the finest plants in charge of James Main, who was returning home on the Triton ship. Main had been in Canton since the Triton arrived in December 1793 collecting for Gilbert Slater, a wealthy gentleman, with strong East India Company connections, and with a great desire to provide Chinese plants for his large garden near Leyton, to the east of London.[62] Slater had already introduced several Chinese plants to England, including a semi-double crimson rose and the white-petalled Camellia japonica.

Duncan had managed to get four tree peonies from Henry Browne, chief of the East India Company supercargoes, from northern China. Main was now in charge not only of Slater’s collection but also of two of the four tree peonies from northern China: Duncan was excited by the prospect of its arrival in London – ‘I am in great hopes, the Moutan (tree paeony) will honor you, with some of its beautiful Flowers the ensuing season,’ adding that, ‘It is astonishing as any thing I have ever met, to see how that King of Plants, delights in a Cold Air – and on the contrary how it droops by the heat.’[63]

Though Main’s track record in sending plants back to Slater was not unlike Duncan’s own, Duncan felt, nevertheless, that having Main travel with the plants would lead to the very best outcome. It was not to be.

On 23 September 1794, Main was back in London, now working for Archibald Thomson’s nursery in Mile End. He didn’t go into details at this stage but simply reported that the news was not good.[64] Three of the four plants in his charge had died. Most of the damage, Main later explained to Banks, happened before the voyage was half over. He didn’t know why. He had had ten years’ experience as a gardener and had even taken with him a set of instructions about how to care for plants at sea that Banks had drawn up for a different voyage. As Main put it: ‘Transporting plants from China, is Attended by difficulties, not generally thought of …’[65] The final coup de grâce, as far as the plants were concerned, was delivered in the Channel when the Triton was run down by a British naval ship. The ensuing crash, when the mast toppled onto the deck, flattened most of the plants that had survived the climatic ordeals.[66]

Miraculously one of the tree peonies did survive it all, though only just. It had been kept in the ship’s stern gallery. As soon as possible, it was taken to Kew, becoming the first ‘Moutan’ in the King’s Garden.[67] Duncan had tried to get this plant to Banks for some time and at last it was accomplished.

During the trading season of 1794/95, Duncan had no live plants to send but instead, and in the way of compensation, he managed to lay his hands on what he described as ‘the most beautiful piece of workmanship I have ever sent home’. It was a present for Lady Banks – ‘an elegant Ivory Fan, with a Moutan painted in the centre, and a red and white water Lily, on the sides’.[68]

Captain Andrew Patton of the East India Company ship, Ocean, was entrusted with this singularly valuable cargo and it arrived back in London in late July 1795. In what could be one of the last letters that Banks wrote to Duncan, on 29 May 1796, Lady Banks insisted that her thanks to Duncan should take precedence over everything else. As Banks wrote, it was ‘the most beautifull Fan she has ever seen probably the most beautifull one that ever reached England at least it has been hitherto unrivalled wherever Lady Banks has exhibited it & that I can assure you was in as many places as she has visited’.[69]

In what reads like a farewell letter, Banks also assured Duncan of his great service to Kew – ‘we have since you have favored us with your assistance gaind many very elegant additions to the collection’. The ‘Moutan’, Banks wrote, was doing well. ‘We have I hope possessed ourselves of the proper mode of cultivating the Moutan … [it] has been kept cool all the winter & has this spring pushd out a head of leaves full two feet in diameter … the whole appearance of the Plant is far more healthy than it was when received.’[70] Knowing all about the problems of transporting plants by sea, Banks promised Duncan that in time for the next trading season he would send him a Kew-trained gardener to return with the plants he had collected. Banks commented that Main was over-confident and ‘took very few instructions’. The gardeners at Kew, on the other hand, were beginning to understand how to care for plants aboard ship.[71]

The Kew gardener never went to Canton. At the end of October 1796, Duncan may have performed his final botanical act when he collected plants, both economic and ornamental, for the East India Company’s botanic garden in Calcutta. He had still not learned the Linnaean system but he had learned about observing plants. His description of the plants he was sending was full and detailed.[72] Soon after, Duncan wound up his business affairs and left Canton, never to return.[73] In 1799 he bought a property near Arbroath, Scotland, but before that his services to botany were recognised when he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society on 19 April 1798.[74]

With Duncan’s departure, Banks was left without anyone to collect Chinese plants for him. A few years later, however, he did find someone who knew botany to go to Canton; and by that time, he had also devised an ingenious solution to the problem of moving living plants across vast ocean distances.

5
1786: The Madras Naturalists and Dreams of Oaxaca

In May 1787, Banks received a letter from India that amazed and excited him. It was from James Anderson, Physician General to the East India Company’s establishment in Madras. It told of a remarkable discovery he had made, which could substantially impact Britain’s trade with the rest of the world.

This is the first surviving letter from Anderson to Banks, but it is unlikely it was the first he sent, as it is entirely lacking the rather formal protocols used in introductory letters at that time. It is likely that someone else in Madras had previously introduced them.

Banks was already acquainted with most of the important European naturalists based on India’s Coromandel Coast, many of whom were sending him plant specimens. There was a flourishing natural-history network in the area, but the most likely candidate for making the connection was Johan Gerhard Koenig, who had become very close to Banks.

Koenig was born in what is now Latvia to German parents and trained as an apothecary in Riga. In 1748, at the age of twenty, he went to Denmark where he worked in several provincial pharmacies.[1] Though he learned something about plants during the time he studied materia medica in Riga, his serious education in botany began when he attended university in Uppsala during the years 1757–9, where he became a student of the already famous Carl Linnaeus. It was here that Koenig met and befriended Daniel Solander who had himself come under the spell of Linnaeus shortly after he had enrolled as a student in the university in Uppsala in 1750.[2]

In 1759, Koenig returned to Copenhagen where he took up an appointment as a hospital pharmacist.[3] Soon his career blossomed: he went on two botanical expeditions, the one to Iceland in 1764 being especially important; and he also obtained a medical degree.[4] No sooner had he earned his medical credentials in 1767, than Koenig’s life took another and dramatic turn when he was appointed to be the next doctor and botanical collector for the Lutheran Danish-Halle mission station based in Tranquebar, on the Coromandel Coast, nearly 300 kilometres south of Madras, where he arrived in early July 1768. The Danish East India Company was established there in 1620 and continued, though now trading under the name of the Asiatic Company, to use the town as its base. The missionaries, mostly Germans from Halle an der Saale, first arrived in Tranquebar in 1706, under the patronage of Frederick IV, the King of Denmark and Norway.[5]

Though the Tranquebar mission valued natural history very highly, Koenig didn’t get along with the missionaries: he found them too controlling and restrictive – for example, he was not allowed to send specimens anywhere other than Copenhagen.[6] Also, his salary was too low for him to travel much beyond Tranquebar and this obviously affected the range and quality of his botanical collections.

It seemed he was trapped but in 1774, and probably through the intervention of the Linnaean-minded community of naturalists in Copenhagen, he was able to leave Tranquebar and travel to Madras, the headquarters of the British East India Company on this stretch of the southeastern coast.

Madras was the Company’s second trading post in India and in 1640, with the building of Fort St George, it became an increasingly powerful commercial and political force in the region.[7] When Koenig arrived there he found that there were several British residents and visitors interested in natural history, among them Lady Anne Monson, who knew Solander and who we’ve already heard of when she met another one of Linnaeus’s students, Carl Peter Thunberg, at the Cape on her way to India.[8] At that time, Koenig could not have chosen a better place to pursue his interests in Indian botany.

One of the first things Koenig did, once free of the restrictions of the mission station, was to write a letter to Solander in which he included a sample of seeds he had collected between Tranquebar and Madras. Koenig had previously written to Solander without any botanical enclosures. Now he promised Solander that he could expect ‘beautiful and better examples’ in the future.[9]

In 1774, Solander, after returning from the voyage to Iceland with Banks, resumed his duties as the ‘Keeper of Natural and Artificial Productions’ at the British Museum. He was also busily working with Banks cataloguing the Endeavour’s natural-history collection and looking after his herbarium.[10] Koenig’s seeds would find their home in this collection.

In this same letter in which he promised seeds, Koenig made it known that he wanted help from Solander and Banks in getting him an appointment with the East India Company and, in return, he offered his services to the two men – ‘the approval of the Professor and Mr. Banks is desired and for this I offer my most beseeching prayers, and to gain this will be my chief effort.’[11]

In fact, Koenig did not go to work for the East India Company, but instead, in February 1775, the Nawab of Arcot, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah, the local Indian ruler who had a strong interest in natural history and who had already had a European as his personal physician, offered Koenig a job as a naturalist.[12]

Though he was freer to pursue his interests than he had been with the Tranquebarians, Koenig was financially no better off working for the Nawab, because it seems that the latter was in very serious debt to his creditors in the East India Company and could hardly manage to pay his naturalist at all. Koenig was naturally desperate to leave this situation, and the Nawab discharged Koenig from his employ at the end of 1777.[13] Relying entirely on the good will of friends and contacts back in England, Koenig continued collecting, but time was running out. In July 1778, he wrote to the East India Company begging them to hire him as their naturalist; or, as he put it, their ‘Natural Historian’ with a view to ‘compile a Natural History of this Country’ on Linnaean principles.[14]

Koenig’s appeal was successful. It was the first time that the East India Company had hired a naturalist. Probably, unknown to Koenig, on the other side of the world, Banks, just recently elected President of the Royal Society, recommended his appointment.[15]

Koenig now had financial security and, even better, the opportunity to travel. Over the next few years, he visited present-day Thailand, the Spice Islands, Sri Lanka, Calcutta and Tranquebar. Throughout this whole period, he collected plant specimens and sent them to his many correspondents in Europe, particularly Solander and Banks.[16]

In early 1785, Koenig was transferred to Calcutta, the main site of the East India Company’s interests in Bengal, a major upward step in his career, but while collecting his possessions from Tranquebar and Madras to take to his new destination, he began feeling unwell and, on 26 June, he died from dysentery in Kakinada, between Madras and Calcutta. On 6 June, knowing he was dying, Koenig drew up his will: he bequeathed all his papers and specimens to Banks.[17]

Koenig had been a key person in Banks’s botanical world, the first to send him specimens from India, but there were others in Banks’s inner circle of naturalists. One of these was Patrick Russell who had spent more than twenty years in Aleppo, mostly working for the Levant Company as its physician.[18] Bringing with him a large consignment of specimens from Syria, Russell arrived in London sometime after 1772 and soon after became acquainted with both Solander and Banks, who studied his collection with great interest. Early in 1782, Russell headed for India and in August, he arrived in Vizagapatam, north of Madras, accompanying his younger brother who had been appointed to the East India Company as a chief administrator. Earlier in June of the same year, as they were making their way up the coast of India, Russell had met Koenig in Tranquebar and they immediately became fast friends.[19] Not long after Koenig’s death, Russell was offered and accepted the post of Company Naturalist in his place.[20]

Another naturalist was William Roxburgh. Born in 1751, Roxburgh had studied medicine and botany in Edinburgh.[21] His medical career began on East India Company ships but in early January 1776 he decided on a different path. After several months of travel, he arrived in Madras and at the end of May 1776, he was appointed assistant surgeon at Fort St George. At some point after this, certainly before early 1779, Roxburgh met Koenig in Madras and they, too, became close, closer even than Russell and Koenig.[22] Through Koenig, Roxburgh came indirectly under the influence of Linnaeus and he and Koenig botanised together whenever they could over the next few years. In fact, it was while visiting Roxburgh that Koenig died.

It is very likely that Koenig introduced Roxburgh to Banks for it was Banks who wrote to Roxburgh first asking him to collect plant specimens for him.[23] This letter initiated a long correspondence between Banks and Roxburgh which lasted almost thirty years, during which time Roxburgh kept Banks fully informed of the increasing European knowledge of Indian botany.

When, in July 1778, Koenig petitioned the Madras Council of the East India Company to appoint him as their first naturalist, he referred them to the two surgeons, Gilbert Pasley and James Anderson, of the Madras Medical Board, who ‘from their own extensive knowledge are able to form a proper Judgement of my capacity’.[24]

Anderson was the junior of the two men. Born in Long Hermiston, Scotland, in 1738 and educated in medicine at the University of Edinburgh, Anderson, like so many other Scots, began his medical career serving on East India Company ships. He arrived in Madras in 1765 where he joined the Madras Medical Board as the Company’s assistant surgeon.[25] He rose through the ranks and at the time of Koenig’s petition he was in the post of Surgeon General.[26] He had also just begun work on a botanical garden on a piece of waste land that the Company had granted him.[27]

Anderson’s career continued to blossom, and in April 1786 he reached the highest rank, that of Physician General. In the same year, on 3 December, he wrote to Joseph Banks from Madras, the letter which Banks received in May 1778, the receipt of which we learned of at the beginning of the chapter.[28]

Anderson was reporting that he had found cochineal insects attached to a grass which, in this part of India, was fed to horses. He had examined the insect with the help of a magnifying glass and it was consistent with its description in the scientific literature: Anderson was referring to the publications of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, famous for his development of the microscope and the first to investigate the structure of the insect using the instrument; to Hans Sloane and the Abbé Guillaume Raynal, both of whom had written on cochineal; and especially to René Antoine de Réaumur, whose magisterial, encyclopaedic natural history of insects contained a definitive account of cochineal.[29]

Anderson claimed that he had observed the insects and noted that ‘multitudes of the young are daily issuing forth of a red colour with six legs and two Antennae: some have wings and are said to be males’: and that he had ‘macerated them in water and spirits of Wine, and find it communicates to both a colour equal to the Cochineal of Mexico’.

Banks may not have been particularly interested in cochineal at that time but he would have instantly recognised the importance of Anderson’s find.

Cochineal is a scale insect which, when crushed and treated, produces a brilliant red liquid. It had been used in Mexico and Peru as a dyestuff for almost two thousand years.[30] It first arrived in Spain in the 1520s as a consequence of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and by the end of the sixteenth century it was the most sought-after red dyestuff in Europe.[31] Producing a startlingly beautiful and vibrant colour never seen before, cochineal was worth its weight in gold and anyone who knew anything about it knew its value.[32]

Anderson impressed Banks even more when he revealed that not only had he planted a small piece of ground with the grass but that he had set out ‘1000 Opuntia Plants for the purpose of cultivating them in the Mexico way’.

This was an important point because it was well known, especially from Réaumur’s extensive discussion of it, that in Mexico the female cochineal insect, which produced the red dye, fed and lived its entire life on a variety of Opuntia, a genus in the cactus family and commonly called prickly pear or nopal.[33] Réaumur wrote about how the Mexicans had domesticated the cochineal insect and were harvesting them from the nopal (cactus) plants which were grown in plantations, called nopalries. The work was intensive and strictly regulated by the seasons. The resulting dye was far superior to and more intense than the one derived from wild cochineal.[34]

Anderson ended his letter to Banks by saying that he would be sending him a sample of the dyestuff he derived from the insects. He feared that the sample he had sent was too damp and that he would take more care in drying the dyestuff in future.[35]

Anderson admitted that this was not going to be easy. He was not certain that what he had been calling cochineal was what Linnaeus had described – looking at it under the microscope, he was inclined to give the insect a new name – and the dyestuff was not so blood-red as he had hoped. Added to that, the cactus that grew in this part of India was much spinier than the one in Mexico: he was not sure he would be able to induce enough insects to live on it?

Banks received the first two of Anderson’s letters sometime in May 1787 and replied to him, agreeing with his main points.[36] The insect was probably not cochineal but another species, so far undescribed in European sources; and it did not give a very good red. It was more like the dye that came from a scale insect species called Polish cochineal, which was now little used. Banks tried out the dye himself and concluded it did not give a good colour, and the results from two professional scarlet dyers, whom he had asked to test it, were so poor that he thought Anderson should abandon the whole project.

However, as Banks put it: ‘Every evil in life has its accompanying benefit.’ Had Anderson not brought the subject of the cochineal to his attention, he admitted, it would never have occurred to him that there was a real opportunity to break the Spanish monopoly on cochineal. India, he argued, had a climate in which the Mexican cochineal could survive, in which spikeless cactus could be cultivated, and an abundant enough labour force to make a success of the project. Banks was certain that the price of Indian cochineal would undercut Spanish sources and, by extension, make Britain if not self-sufficient then at least less dependent on Spain.[37] Anderson would be the perfect person to put the plan into action. ‘If I find the great men at the India House inclined to hear reason on the subject, I shall not fail to propose it to them before the next ships sail,’ Banks wrote.

Before 1785, Banks does not appear to have had any direct contact with the East India Company, despite knowing several of the naturalists associated with it. This changed in April 1785 when Banks received a letter from Thomas Morton, the Secretary to the Court of Directors of the Company, asking him to look over a sample of Chinese hemp that had come his way and to distribute it to those most qualified to judge its properties, in the hope that it might, in future, be grown in Britain.[38] Though nothing much came of this, it did signal that, in the wake of the loss of the American colonies following the War of Independence (1776–83), the East India Company and the government were looking for alternative and more secure sources of raw materials. This entailed the use of naturalists to make proper scientific assessment of the natural resources available.[39]

Banks now found himself being consulted by the Company on several issues and becoming friendly with its leading figures, and those in the government closely involved in its policies: men such as Sir George Yonge, the Secretary for War, Henry Dundas, the chief figure on the government’s Board of Control (which sought to impose restrictions on the Company’s expansionary territorial tendencies); and the Directors of the Company.[40] Banks was consulted, for example, on the plans to begin a Company botanic garden in Calcutta; and on the introduction of tea to India.[41] So when Banks told Anderson that he would share his ideas with the Company, he knew that he would receive a sympathetic hearing.

In 1787 a remarkable book published on the French island of St Domingue (now Haiti) told the story of Thiery de Menonville’s daring journey in 1777 to Oaxaca in central Mexico where he procured a quantity of domesticated cochineals and their nopal habitat, and successfully brought back both the insect and the plant to the island.[42] It was no secret that the local people of Oaxaca and the surrounding area were cultivating cochineal and nopals on a large scale – in the first volume of his major work, A Voyage to the Islands …, 1707, Hans Sloane had a full-size engraving of a Oaxacan nopalry.[43]

Banks had a copy of de Menonville’s book in his library and studied its contents very closely.[44] It wasn’t so much de Menonville’s travel narrative that would have caught his attention but his meticulous description, in the second volume of the book, on how to rear cochineal and cultivate nopal. It was the first published account of the details of cultivation of both insect and plant and, importantly, it was based on first-hand observation rather than hearsay.[45] So taken was Banks by the book that he shared it with Thomas Morton at the East India Company.[46] Anderson also had a copy of it in Madras.[47]

William Petrie, who worked for the East India Company in Madras and who had established the Company’s first observatory there, was in Madras when Anderson began writing to Banks. In a letter to Banks, mostly concerned with the natural history of snakes, Petrie informed Banks that he knew Anderson was working on a cochineal project and added a few words about his character: ‘His application is intense,’ he wrote, ‘Sparing neither fatigue of the Body or Mind, & a perseverance which no difficulties can check. In addition to this, he is a man of great humanity.’[48] Banks had never met Anderson but Petrie’s description of him was certainly borne out by the intensive correspondence reaching Soho Square from Madras. Over a period of thirteen months Banks received more than one long letter per month from Anderson on the subject of cochineal.

However, Petrie’s letter revealed something that Banks found extremely disturbing. Anderson, Petrie remarked, had published the first six letters he had written to Banks in the Madras Courier, the town’s first newspaper, which had only begun publication two years earlier – and the same letters were promptly republished by the Company’s own press – and Anderson had continued sending his letters to the press until fourteen letters were published by early 1788.[49]

Banks was furious. The last thing he wanted was publicity for the project – he’d hoped to keep it secret from the Spanish and the Mexicans in particular. As soon as he learned that the letters had been published, Banks stopped writing to Anderson: ‘I persevered in declining to answer your letters during the time you were printing your Correspondence … from a firm persuasion that no benefit could accrue, either to the company or to you, from that undertaking’, Banks wrote.[50] That was a polite way of putting his displeasure. Anderson, despite Banks’s objection, continued to make public what Banks thought should be kept secret. When, on one occasion, Banks learned that Anderson had printed a set of instructions based on Banks’s advice, he was beside himself with anger.[51] To Thomas Morton at the East India Company in London, with whom he had by now become well acquainted, Banks referred to Anderson’s ‘incredible imprudence’ and to him being ‘actuated by a degree of absurdity wholly above comprehension’.[52]

Banks not only stopped writing to Anderson but, more importantly, stopped working with him on the cochineal project, bypassing him and dealing directly with the East India Company instead. Anderson was not deterred by Banks’s decision and continued to work on his nopalry, which was being supervised by Dr Andrew Berry, his nephew.[53] As Petrie had observed, Anderson was tireless and he did get some yield of cochineal which was shipped back to England.[54] The quantities were modest but the real problem was that the Madras dye was less effective than the one from Oaxaca.[55]

Anderson seems not to have concerned himself too much about which species of insect produced the red dye; nor whether wild varieties of cochineal were inferior to the domesticated ones in the quality of the dye they produced. Banks, however, was bothered by this. Without the real cochineal being raised in India there would be no chance of undercutting the Spanish. Banks knew it had been domesticated in Oaxaca but could this be reproduced elsewhere? He embraced the texts that consistently spoke about the superiority of the domesticated cochineal; and he interrogated every text he could lay his hands on which included observations of dye-producing scale insects, concluding, finally, that these were all wild varieties.[56] Oaxaca was the only certain source of the real domesticated cochineal.

During the first wave of an interest in cochineal in 1788, Banks did what he could to help the East India Company develop a cochineal industry. One of the first things he did was to send samples of Mexican cactus from Kew to the Calcutta Botanic Garden where they were successfully cultivated and from where they were successfully distributed to other parts of India.[57] At the same time and inspired by the epic story of de Menonville’s travels to and from Oaxaca, he suggested that the Company should send someone to Mexico to get the real cochineal. Banks even found someone who was prepared to do this. At the time, however, the Company was not interested in spending money on this venture and when they learned that the wild cochineal and the cactus were plentiful and there for the taking in Rio de Janeiro, they decided to follow that route.[58] Though Banks disagreed with them he continued to advise them and produced instructions for managing the insects and plants on a long sea voyage.[59]

The idea of a direct ‘procurement’ surfaced again in the Court of Directors in 1790 and Banks, again, reiterated his original plan.[60] Banks reminded them that when this issue was last raised, he had found someone living on the Gulf of Honduras who would be prepared to undertake the risky venture. His brief was to get the cochineal and the cactus and deliver them to England for which he was to receive the sum of £1000 (near £100,000 in today’s value). Banks would ask this person to accompany the precious cargo together with some local people who knew how to cultivate the insect and plant and could be induced to settle in India. Banks added that he would take care of all the details concerning the transport and care of the insect and plant.

Nothing happened. Banks was frustrated.[61] Then, in mid 1792, Francis Baring, the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, head of Baring and Co., one of the most important banking concerns in the world, and a man who knew a bit about cochineal, got in touch with Banks about reviving the idea of sending someone to Oaxaca once again.[62] Banks indicated that he was not willing to put any more effort into this scheme – ‘[I] Cannot but seriously Lament the time [I have] spent in Promoting it – unless the Company could guarantee that this time they were serious.’[63]

Baring’s reply offered Banks the guarantee he sought but then towards the end of his letter he raised the old topic of getting wild cochineal from Brazil. Banks was clearly upset and irritated. ‘I have reported against Sylvester being brought from Brasil,’ he noted in exasperation and in his own hand at the end of Baring’s letter.[64] Six weeks later, Baring and several of his directors finally got Banks’s point about going to Oaxaca, doubled the premium to £2000 and told Banks that he should go ahead with his plan.[65]

Banks did not at first warm to the idea but soon changed his mind – ‘it is a Favorite Plan of Mine,’ he admitted.[66] Two years had, however, been wasted since he last pursued this and he was ‘ignorant whether or not the Person on whom I meant to rely for the first attempt towards putting it into Execution is still alive or if he is Whether he still resides as he did’.[67]

The person Banks had in mind was James Bartlet. Banks had heard from Bartlet when he wrote from Honduras on 21 July 1791, telling Banks that a botanical tour of the area would prove very rewarding.[68] Bartlet was the brother of Alexander Bartlet who, in company with two others, ran a trading company between London and the West Indies and owned plantations on several islands.[69]

On 14 January 1793, Banks wrote to Bartlet. He could not hide his irritation at the Company’s neglect of his plan to supply India with the true cochineal – four years in the making, he remarked – but the main thrust of the letter was to assure him that the East India Company now meant business and that the original plan stood. Banks noted that ‘a Frenchman’ [de Menonville] had proved that both the cochineal and the nopal tolerated a sea voyage well but that, in any case, once the cargo arrived in London, Banks would put the cochineal in his hothouse where he was already growing nopal.[70]

It all sounded promising but, in the event, it soon unravelled, as Banks explained to Hugh Inglis, the Deputy-Chairman to the Company’s Court of Directors.[71] Banks had no reply from Bartlet; it had now been three and a half years since Banks had written to him.[72] Even if someone could be found to take Bartlet’s place, Banks remarked, he doubted if the venture would be successful now because of Anderson’s foolhardy decision to print and distribute Banks’s directions for transporting cochineal and nopal by sea, including sending them to a botanist working for the King of Spain. This and the publication of de Menonville’s book, Banks argued, meant that the Spanish were more vigilant than ever and the venture was now ‘more likely to End in the Loss of Liberty or Even of Life, than the final attainment of the Object in Question’.

For these reasons Banks was bowing out of the plan which he had been enthusiastic about years before. Besides which, with Britain now at war with France, and rumours rife of a secret treaty between France and Spain, it would be foolhardy to try to enter Mexico in secret and steal the plants and insects.

Even though Banks said that he was no longer willing to be involved with the cochineal project, he did leave a little room for manoeuvre and ended the letter to Inglis with the promise that if something did come up, he ‘would not decline to Proceed’.

Sure enough something did occur. On 23 June 1802, Banks received a letter from Robert Sproat, a Scottish physician.[73] The letter, dated 5 March 1802 and sent from present-day Honduras near the town of Palacios on the coast, reminded Banks that they had been introduced in 1794 when Sproat was temporarily in London. Sproat also told Banks that he had, as agreed, sent him part of a collection of plants in 1796, but, unfortunately, the ship carrying them was intercepted and ended up in New Orleans, then under Spanish control, where none of the contents survived; the other part of the collection, which remained with him, was destroyed during an attack by the local people. What Banks made of all this we don’t know but a passage in the letter a little further on would have jumped off the page. It reads: ‘I also had the Opuntia sent me from the city of Comayagua & having transplanted it in an adjoining plantation it flourished exceedingly. I was even flattered with the full hopes of getting in to my possession the Cochineal Insect, for conceiving it to be one of your especial desiderata, I used my utmost influence to obtain it from the interior of Guatemala; I at last received the Insect but to my great astonishment found that either through ignorance or design in the sender they were all bruised to death! A circumstance I relate not Sir to claim any merit for the exertions I made, but for your information respecting the existence of the Insect in that country.’ Sproat concluded this part of his letter by commenting that with more care the operation might have succeeded and been sent to England – ‘without trial it is but conjecture at best, which affords no satisfaction.’

In his 27 August 1802 reply, Banks confirmed that Sproat’s remarks on cochineal gave him ‘particular pleasure’ because it seemed very likely that the real cochineal and the cactus could be procured from Guatemala and sent to India.[74] If Sproat was ‘inclined to undertake this patriotic task’ – which looked possible without ‘any hazard of loss to yourself’ – Banks would make him a generous settlement: £500 on receipt of the cactus plants in London; £1000 for the delivery of healthy cochineal; and a further £1000 for the delivery of both insect and plant to India. Banks provided Sproat with a condensed version of his instructions on how to keep the cochineal and the cactus alive on a sea voyage, with the added incentive of a gratuity for the ship’s captain ‘proportioned to the state of health in which either Plants or Insects arrive’. Finally, it was up to Sproat to try and entice one or two local people skilled in nopalry and cochineal cultivation to care for both all the way to India and then to stay or be sent home if they so wished.

The letter to Sproat showed Banks at his most excited. ‘I need only add’, he remarked towards the end of the letter, ‘that as I who am constantly employed in the execution of projects of this nature without ever having accepted remuneration in any shape have not the slightest view to advantage in this.’

As it turned out, nothing further seems to have happened. Did Sproat receive Banks’s letter? Was he alive? Did he decline the offer? We don’t know. All we do know is that the East India Company kept offering a £2000 reward for the ‘importation of the cochineal insect from South America’, but there were no takers.

As time went on the Company lost interest, and the dream of Oaxacan cochineal in India died.[75]

PART II

Preface

By 1786 Joseph Banks had been President of the Royal Society for eight years – he would continue being elected annually until his death in 1820. It was a position which gave Banks enormous prestige not only in Britain’s scientific community but also further afield. Over the following five years, Banks became a member of at least fifteen other scientific societies, some of them modelled on the Royal Society, some new, some well established, and stretching from Philadelphia to St Petersburg. Banks was now in touch with many of the world’s scientific practitioners, not only those interested in natural history, but ranging over all fields of scientific enquiry. His correspondence files grew accordingly.

Enlightening as it was, and satisfying as it must have been to be fêted by so many scientific institutions, it was Banks’s botanical projects which continued to dominate his attention. By 1786, his first collectors were either in the field or on their way. Francis Masson was at the Cape, on his second visit there, collecting living plants for Kew; Anthony Pantaleon Howe was in southwest Africa on HMS Nautilus; Archibald Menzies was on his way to the Pacific Northwest; John Duncan was already sending plants to Banks and presents to his wife Dorothea from Canton; and on the Coromandel Coast, James Anderson had written his first letter to Banks about his discovery of cochineal.

The tables and other surfaces in the library at Soho Square must have been covered with all the available texts, drawings and maps of the places where his collectors were, as Banks envisioned what they may have been experiencing. And, all the time, plant specimens were arriving, sometime at Soho Square, if, as seeds, they were in envelopes addressed to Banks; and, other times, at Customs House, if they were bulbs or living plants, needing clearance before being sent to Kew.

The geographic scope of these collections was already wide but over the next few years they spread out even further. Howe (now called Hove), who had returned from southwest Africa, was sent to western India on a secret mission; and Menzies, who had left Canton for London, would soon be on his way back to the Pacific as part of a naval convoy, commanded by George Vancouver, who had been on both Cook’s second and third voyage, to keep the delicate recently negotiated peace between Britain and Spain and to continue Cook’s survey of the Pacific coast. Menzies was mainly collecting living plants for Kew, but he also collected botanical specimens and planted seeds given to him in England and at the Cape whenever and wherever he could.

In addition to all this, Banks became involved with three other government-initiated projects before 1791. The first focused on establishing and sustaining Britain’s new penal colony in New South Wales. The second and third projects were concerned with transplanting the breadfruit tree from Tahiti to the British West Indies on specially converted naval vessels.

Banks’s experiences on the Endeavour, now more than a quarter of a century in the past, were still being called upon, and he took all the opportunities that the government projects presented him with to further his own personal project of supplying Kew with living plants from all over the world, on an unprecedented scale.

6
1786: The First and Second Fleet

The extremely disappointing report from HMS Nautilus put paid to the idea of forming a convict settlement on the southwest coast of Africa and paved the way for Botany Bay as the only feasible alternative. Banks, who had so far merely recommended it as a suitable spot for a colony, soon found himself involved in planning the practical details of its day-to-day existence. This was not through the government, but because of Banks’s relationship with yet another of his acquaintances who was interested in natural history, Arthur Phillip. This was Captain Arthur Phillip who was to be the first Governor of New South Wales. He was born in 1738, and so five years older than Banks, and had been at sea since he was nine. First in merchant ships, and then in the Royal Navy, he rose quickly through the ranks. Early in the 1770s, Phillip went on half-pay, and spent some time in France, possibly spying for the British.[1] By 1774 he was back in London, but not for long. Soon he was sent to Lisbon. By mid January 1775 he was a captain in the Portuguese Navy for service in Brazilian waters. The Portuguese had asked the British for naval assistance and Phillip had been recommended. He was described to the Portuguese authorities as highly intelligent, an astute and accurate observer, with extensive naval and military expertise, fluent in French, and other European languages. Phillip was the perfect man for the job.[2]

He was. He stayed with the Portuguese Navy for three years. During this time in Brazil, he was surprised to learn that a colony of cochineal insects had been found living on cactus plants on the Brazilian island of Santa Catarina, the southern naval base between the towns of Santos and Porto Alegre; and the Viceroy of Brazil, the Marquis de Lavradio, had ordered production to be expanded to the point at which Brazilian cochineal could be exported and compete with the Spanish monopoly.[3]

Phillip already knew something about the making of cloth – his wife’s first husband had been a very prosperous cloth merchant and Phillip himself had spent several years in and around the cloth cities of northern France.[4] The valuable cochineal naturally attracted his attention and he became very interested in understanding the insect’s behaviour. While stationed at the island, he actually bred the insects in his cabin and observed their life cycle. Unfortunately, while on patrol in the River Plate, much colder than on Santa Catarina, all the insects died. Nevertheless, Phillip had learned enough about their behaviour to be confident that the insect and the cactus could be transplanted to one of the British islands in the West Indies where the tropical climate would provide the right conditions: and the insect could be ‘bred to the great advantage of the Nation, as well as to the very great profit of the Planter.’[5] Phillip’s cochineal experience would come in very useful later on.

In 1778 Phillip returned to his naval career in Britain and was eventually made Captain of his own Royal Navy ship. He apparently continued to spy on the French, reporting directly to Evan Nepean, Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office.[6]

It seems likely that it was Nepean who recommended Phillip to be Commander of the First Fleet. Not only had he employed him previously, but the two men had become close friends. He would have known Phillip’s service record and maritime experience, which included sailing in both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.[7]

If Nepean did recommend Phillip to the Home Office, it seems the Admiralty were not too keen on appointing him, but eventually they gave way. On 3 September 1786, Lord Howe, the First Lord of the Admiralty, told Lord Sydney, the Home Secretary, that he was satisfied as to Phillip’s abilities, and that the Admiralty would not object further.[8] Phillip was on his way, as Commander of the First Fleet, to be Governor of the first penal colony in New South Wales.[9]

Although there is no record of Phillip meeting with Banks during the seven months of preparation for the voyage to New South Wales, Phillip would undoubtedly have consulted him. Phillip and the government intended that the colony should become self-sufficient in time.[10] Banks’s unique knowledge and experience of the area would have been invaluable in achieving that end. However they collaborated, Banks did not just give advice in planning the agricultural future of the colony. He provided a generous array of cuttings of fruit trees and vegetables, including apples, pears, peaches, nectarines, oranges, lemons and soft fruits; artichokes, garlic and horseradish; and a number of herbs. But this was nothing when compared to what Banks supplied in seed: every conceivable vegetable; wheat, barley, rye and oats. Banks was taking no chances; many of the seeds were duplicated, even triplicated, and distributed over HMS Sirius and HMS Supply, the two naval vessels chosen for the voyage to New South Wales, and over two of the store ships as well.[11] For Banks, this was not just an opportunity to discover which European plants would grow in the southern latitudes: in Phillip, who he knew was interested in natural history, Banks now had a willing collector in a place which, apart from his own brief visit, was hardly known to natural history in the West.

The First Fleet – two naval vessels, three store ships and six convict ships – left Portsmouth on 13 May 1787. Just over two weeks later, on 3 June, it anchored in the harbour of Santa Cruz, the main town of Tenerife. It was from here that Phillip replied to the letter Banks had sent him at Portsmouth. In it Banks had asked him to collect specific plants and seeds from Rio de Janeiro. Phillip sent his letter of agreement in a packet ship that was returning to London.

From Rio de Janeiro, Phillip wrote to Banks that he had managed to get hold of four different types of ipecacuanha. Known in Europe since the middle of the seventeenth century as native to Brazil, ipecacuanha featured as an important element in European materia medica.[12] It was the root of this flowering plant that, when dried and ground into a powder, was used to treat a number of medical conditions. In small doses, ipecacuanha encouraged sweating and coughing; in larger doses, the plant acted as an emetic and cathartic and was used to treat forms of dysentery.[13]

Getting hold of the dried roots of ipecacuanha in Britain was not a problem and it featured in the apothecary’s list of remedies. However, Banks was interested in seeing the whole plant which was, as he must have told Phillip, hardly known in Europe.[14] He sent Banks preserved in rum one of the specimens, which Phillip had been led to believe by a local surgeon to be the best.

In Rio de Janeiro Phillip loaded up with those plants that Banks had been unable to supply him with in London. Many of them were tropical – indigo, cotton, coffee, bananas, tamarind and cacao – (Banks believed that the climate of Botany Bay was similar to that of southern France), but he managed to get some vines and tobacco as well. He also took three ipecacuanha plants potted in earth for cultivation in Botany Bay. In addition to these plants, ‘I have procured every Seed I think likely to grow in NSW,’ he told Banks. Now back in Rio de Janeiro after more than a decade, Phillip did not forget his experience with cochineal when he had successfully reared the insects in his cabin. If only he could keep them alive en route to New South Wales, he thought that they might thrive in their new habitat.[15]

Cape Town was the next destination, which the fleet reached on 13 October 1787. There to welcome Phillip was Francis Masson, Kew’s first dedicated collector, who was collecting for Banks in the Cape, on his second trip there in fifteen years. Phillip loaded his ship with local plants – figs, sugar, apples, oranges and lemons – flour, wheat, barley and bread.[16] On 13 November, the day after the Fleet’s departure, Masson wrote to Banks saying that he had seen Phillip and that his ‘Cabbin was like a Small Green House with plants from Brazil’.[17] Phillip also wrote to Banks assuring him, not for the first time, that he would be sending him seeds and plants from New South Wales.[18]

The ships, each ‘like another Noah’s Ark’, left Cape Town on 11 November.[19] Botany Bay was the fleet’s next and final destination.

Carrying in the region of 1300 people between them, the ships of the First Fleet arrived there between 18 and 20 January 1788. The cold of the southern ocean, disease and accidents had killed off many plants, though some of those that had been put on board at Rio de Janeiro not only survived but began to bloom as the ships approached warmer habitats.[20]

Almost immediately, Phillip decided that it was a mistake to attempt a settlement in Botany Bay: the area was very swampy and there was hardly any fresh water. After quickly investigating Port Jackson, the next bay northward along the coast, which Cook had seen but had not entered, and finding it would meet all of their requirements, Phillip ordered the fleet to remove from Botany Bay and harbour in Sydney Cove. Here, on 26 January 1788, Phillip formally took possession of New South Wales, which was defined as ‘extending from the northern cape or extremity of the coast called Cape York, in the latitude of 10°37’ south, to the southern extremity of the … South Cape, in the latitude of 43°39’ south, and all of the country inland to the westward as far as the one hundred and thirty–fifth degree of longitude’.[21]

On 15 May, Phillip wrote his first despatch to Lord Sydney, in which he recounted his proceedings from the Cape to the Australian coast and explained why he had decamped from Botany Bay. He also sent his first observations of the country around the new settlement; and of the indigenous people. This report, Phillip remarked, was put together over a period of time. He didn’t know when he would get a chance to write such a long letter again, seeing, as he put it, that ‘the canvas house I am under [is] neither wind nor water proof.’[22]

Two months later, on 2 July 1788, Phillip wrote his first letter from New South Wales to Banks. The information about Botany Bay was completely at odds with what Banks had given in evidence to both the Bunbury and the Beauchamp Committees. Phillip didn’t bother going into any detail about why he had abandoned Botany Bay so quickly – he referred him to Evan Nepean, the under-secretary to Lord Sydney, the Home Secretary, for the reasons.

What he wanted Banks to know was that life was not going to be as easy in the settlement as Banks had suggested; that the ‘natives’ were far more numerous and not as welcoming as Banks had found them – three convicts had already been killed; and that food, particularly fish, was not as abundant as Banks had thought. The indigenous people, Phillip added, were having a hard time and there was little he could do to help them.

On the plus side, however, Phillip could now send Banks the first consignment of seeds; and he also threw in a stuffed kangaroo and reported that ‘these Animals are very numerous, but after being fired at grow very shy’.[23]

Though Phillip’s first duty was to the settlement, he did as much as he could to collect seeds and plants for Banks. He knew that this had to be done before the convict ships and the transports left Port Jackson for London. The first ships began to leave in May 1788, but Phillip had nothing for Banks by then and it would take him until the last ships sailed, the convict ship Alexander and the store ships Fishburn and Golden Grove, in November, before the collections were ready. What exactly was sent is not known but some of the ‘Tubs of Plants’ and seeds must have made it because several were introduced into Kew around the time that the ships returned – the consignment included several species of Banksia, orchids and a ‘Kangaroo vine’.[24]

It shows how indebted Phillip felt to Banks that he tried so hard to get him the botanical specimens he’d asked for. Conditions were not good in the fledgling colony. While quite a few of the plants Phillip had brought from Rio de Janeiro and the Cape – including the cochineal insect on its prickly pear cactus – were doing well, these were what Phillip referred to as the luxuries; the basics, especially wheat, were doing very poorly. Added to that, most of the cattle that Phillip had bought at the Cape had not survived or had wandered off into the bush. In his despatches to Lord Sydney and Evan Nepean at the Home Office, and Philip Stephens at the Admiralty, Phillip pleaded that the next convict ships should bring provisions, food, clothing and medicines that would last at least two years.[25]

In the meantime, the colony was facing starvation. To save it, Phillip sent HMS Sirius to Cape Town for vital supplies. The ship left in early October 1788. Because of the winds at that time of the year, it had to go by way of Cape Horn. It didn’t reach Cape Town until 2 January 1789. After filling its hold with enough supplies for a whole year, the Sirius arrived back in New South Wales on 8 May 1789.[26] The ship’s supplies were only just in time to avert disaster.

By then, in London, the Second Fleet, taking more convicts and supplies to New South Wales, was preparing, and Sydney had received Phillip’s letter begging him for more supplies.[27] He wrote to the Admiralty formally instructing that they should get a naval ship ready to sail to New South Wales, though it is clear that, informally, the preparations were already under way.[28]

The ship in question, HMS Guardian, was virtually new, having been no further than the Channel since 1784, when it was completed. Most of the guns were removed in order to make more room for supplies. The 26-year-old Lieutenant Edward Riou received his commission to command the ship on 21 April 1789.[29]

Riou had been a midshipman in 1776 on HMS Discovery, one of two ships on Cook’s third voyage. When the ship returned from its intensive exploration of the Pacific in October 1780, Riou was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. For the next several years he was stationed in the West Indies, in the Channel and, finally, for two years, he was in Newfoundland as second lieutenant to Captain Erasmus Gower (who will crop up again in a later chapter).

Riou thus had experience in the world’s main oceans and though he had not landed in Australia, he came very nearly in sight of Van Diemen’s Land, having sailed across the Southern Ocean from the Cape towards New Zealand.

Within days of Riou’s commission, Banks was involved in preparing the voyage. It seems that Banks saw the Guardian as a suitable vehicle for sending new and interesting plants back from New South Wales for Kew. Banks wrote to Nepean at the Home Office on this exact point less than a week after Riou’s commission. Banks suggested that the area at the stern of the ship bounded by a rail – the taffrail – could be adapted as a storage unit for plants in pots and should be glazed over.[30]

At some point in the next few weeks, plans for the Guardian began to change quite radically. Collecting for Kew in New South Wales remained an objective, but the scope of the ship as a plant carrier was substantially increased. Banks had been in conversation with William Grenville, the new Home Secretary, who had succeeded Lord Sydney, as well as other members of the government and the Admiralty. The upshot of these meetings was the decision that the Guardian should now take to New South Wales ‘such trees and plants as are useful in food or physic, and cannot conveniently be propagated by seed in potts of earth’.[31]

The original idea of using the taffrail was now defunct. A much larger space was needed. On Lieutenant Riou’s invitation, Banks visited the Guardian and had a look.[32] Riou had intended to be there to show Banks around, but, for some reason, the two men missed each other.[33]

Banks began his inspection with the commander’s cabin. It was far too small for what Banks intended; and the volume of supplies the ship was intending to carry meant that there was little spare room below deck. Botanists like John Ellis in Britain and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau in France had recommended that the best method for transporting living plants across oceans was for them to be packed in organic matter, such as moss and earth, and placed in specially designed containers which would allow air to circulate and which could be moved around the ship to take advantage of the best conditions.[34]

This method worked well for small numbers of plants but the volume that Banks envisioned being moved meant that this time-honoured technique wasn’t appropriate. He needed a radically new solution and he had one in mind. As he told Grenville, he, with the assistance of the ship’s master and a shipbuilder, ‘caused the form of a small coach to be chalked upon the deck in such a manner as they both agreed would not be at all in the way of working the ship’.[35] Coach was the technical term for such a construction but Banks liked to call it an apartment because it was his intention that it would also house a gardener and his equipment. Its dimensions were 16 feet by 12 feet and 5 feet high, and it could be constructed, Banks stated confidently, in little more than one week.[36] It would house 93 pots of plants. Flexibility was built into the design of the coach so that it could respond easily to changing conditions. It had sliding shutters and a canvas cover to be used when the weather was fine but direct sunlight was to be avoided. In cold weather, glazed units in fitted frames took the place of the open gratings and a stove with chimney was provided for even colder weather.[37] Banks knew a lot about greenhouses – he saw them at Kew and he had several of them in his own property at Spring Grove.[38]

On the day he completed his inspection of the ship, Banks left a letter on board for Riou seeking his agreement to the idea of a coach so that an order for construction could be submitted. In addition to laying out the coach’s dimensions and the materials from which it would be made, Banks emphasised that the coach would also serve as a home for the plants Riou would be bringing back from New South Wales for the King.[39]

By return of post, Riou, not surprisingly, agreed to Banks’s plans, both to the construction of the coach and to returning home with plants from New South Wales.[40]

Once that was done, Banks turned his attention to the gardeners who would accompany the plants. James Smith and George Austin had worked at Kew, were experienced and up to the task. They would be going to New South Wales as Superintendent of Convicts, in which capacity they would be supervising convicts in gardening and agricultural work in general with the ultimate aim of passing on their specific expertise to the colony.[41] Smith was going to stay on in New South Wales for three years and would be collecting seeds and plants for Kew whenever he could.[42]

Banks issued two sets of instructions concerning the transport of plants and the duties of the gardeners. The first, to Lieutenant Riou, outlining what he would need to do to accommodate the responsibilities of the gardeners and the health of the plants, both on the outward and return voyages. James Smith, Banks told Riou, was to be given overall charge of the coach and that was where he should live, ready, at a moment’s notice, to open or close windows as necessary; and Riou was to give every possible assistance to Smith in collecting rain water whenever possible on the understanding that in hot conditions, the plants would need plenty of watering. Riou was also told to choose one of the ship’s company to shadow Smith, and to learn from him how to care for plants so that he would become the gardener on the homeward voyage looking after the plants for the King, which would be stowed in the coach in the same manner as the plants on the outward voyage.[43]

The instructions to Smith dealt with the details of how best to keep plants healthy on their outward voyage; how much air and water to allow them and when; how to collect, keep and apportion water; and how to avoid, and to do so at all costs, sea water settling on the plants’ leaves, a situation, which if not remedied immediately, would lead to the plant’s death. As for the coach, Banks continued, ‘plants on board a Ship, like cucumbers in February, require a constant attendance’. Circumstances at sea changed often and abruptly and the gardener had to be prepared to open and shut the coach several times a day. In order to keep a watchful eye and act quickly and decisively, Banks warned him to ‘beware of Liquer, as one drunken bout may render the whole of your Care during the Course of the voyage useless & Put your Character in a very Questionable situation’.[44] Finally, as far as the voyage was concerned, Smith was to be constantly vigilant that shipboard animals – cats, dogs, mice and rats – and cockroaches did not get into the coach. Cat and dogs, Banks commented, could ‘destroy the whole garden in half an hour’. Vermin, like mice and cockroaches, could be dealt with by keeping the coach perfectly clean. As for monkeys and goats, Banks hoped these would not be allowed on board at all.[45]

Banks repeated that in New South Wales Smith should collect plants for the King’s Garden, and these he was to place in the same pots he went out with, and send them back with the Guardian, whenever the ship was ready to sail. For himself, he wanted Smith to look out for and collect seeds and dried specimens, with flowers and fruit, to dry them and place them between paper sewn into a book. Smith was asked to share all these instructions with George Austin, the other gardener.

On 15 July, Riou took Smith and Austin’s instructions to the ship, which was waiting in Portsmouth. He told Banks that as far as he was concerned, the coach was the King’s property and that he would be treating it as such.[46]

The plants, fruit trees, herbs and vines, many of them from Kew, some from Banks’s own garden and some from the nursery of Ronalds in Brentford, began to be loaded onto the Guardian in early July and continued in anticipation of an early sailing date.[47] At the same time, all of the other non-perishable supplies for the colony – clothes, hats, shoes, needle and thread, cloths and blankets, sugar, currants, pearl barley and sundry medicines – were placed on board. ‘We are excessively deep, nay too deep I fear to carry a Single Cow for the Cape,’ Riou commented.[48]

On 7 September Smith wrote to Banks assuring him that all the plants were on board and in good shape but that Austin, who was suffering from a swelling in his legs, was not. The sailing date had been announced as the next day. Riou had assured Smith that he was taking the business of the plants as seriously as he did the ship itself. Banks heard from Riou that he was very pleased with Smith: ‘he behaves in ye most attentive quiet, & but best manner, I wish only that all of the Superintendants [sic] had been men of his disposition.’[49]

It was looking good. As planned, on 8 September 1789, the Guardian left the anchorage in Spithead and headed towards the Cape. There were 124 people on board: 88 men in the ship’s company, 9 Superintendents of Convicts, including Smith and Austin, who were travelling to New South Wales to fill various posts in the colony, 2 other passengers, and 25 convicts with sentences varying from 7 years to life and who had been selected because they had special practical skills.[50]

After a short stop at Tenerife, where Riou bought about 2000 gallons of wine for the colony, the Guardian anchored in Table Bay at the Cape, on 24 November. Riou had previously reported to Banks from Tenerife that despite the fact that most of the plants had already spent almost three months on board, they were doing well. Now, in the Cape, Riou asked Smith to prepare a report on how the plants had fared on the Atlantic part of the voyage. Despite the most attentive of care, almost 20 per cent of the botanical cargo had either perished or was expected to do so.[51] The herbs fared worst – ‘the death of the herbs’, Smith told Banks, ‘is owing to the heat we had in crossing the line, as we was a week nearly becalm’d, and then it was exceeding hot, on the 13th of Octr the Thermometer ran to 104 degrees high, which was too hot for any English herbs to live in.’[52]

Riou, following Banks’s orders in case of disaster, asked Smith to replace as many of the plants as he could and add to the list any plants which he could only get in Table Bay and which he thought would do well in New South Wales. Smith turned immediately for advice to Francis Masson, Banks’s collector who was still at the Cape. Plants were bought and seeds too, mostly from the garden of Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon, commander of the Dutch garrison and an excellent botanist and gardener; and Riou went on his own spending spree for live animals – bulls, cows, stallions, fowl of all kinds, rams, ewes, boars and rabbits.[53] To accommodate this menagerie, Riou dismounted almost all of the guns and built stalls on both sides of the main deck and coops for all the fowl on the quarter deck. ‘With [the livestock] and an addition to all culinary Fruits of this Country amounting to about 150 Trees in number we were in a situation to be a most comfortable sight to Governor Phillip,’ Riou jotted down in his notebook.[54]

On 11 December 1789, the Guardian sailed out of Table Bay for the final leg of its voyage to Port Jackson.

Almost a fortnight later, by which time the Guardian had sailed more than 2000 kilometres to the southeast of the Cape, Riou spotted a large iceberg. Two boats were despatched from the ship to collect ice to supplement the fresh water taken on at the Cape. The animals were in need of hydration. The boats had hardly returned when a thick fog set in and the ship continued its course believing that the iceberg was being left behind. Instead, buffeted by winds from all directions, they were heading straight for it. Suddenly, out of the fog, Riou saw ‘a body of ice full twice as high as our masthead, showing itself through the thickest fog I ever witnessed’. The ship seemed to stick to the ice and then the rudder tore away. Riou ordered the decks to be cleared of cattle, guns and gun-carriages; the spare anchors and everything else from below that could be thrown overboard were jettisoned. It was in vain. The water kept flooding the ship and the pumps were overwhelmed. Riou offered those on board the chance to take to the launch and four smaller boats to save themselves.[55] Forty men, including four convicts, went in the boats and fifteen others, led by Thomas Clements, the Guardian’s master, went in the launch.

Riou, the remaining crew, the five Superintendents of Convicts, and twenty convicts, sixty-one people in total, or about half of the total number who had sailed on the Guardian from England, stayed with the ship. Miraculously, they managed to keep it afloat and steer whatever was left of it northwest. Almost two months to the day after the Guardian hit the iceberg, a floating mass of timbers was spotted in the sea outside Table Bay. Whalers were sent out to help the wreck to safety.

Those who stayed with the Guardian were lucky to be alive.[56] The convicts, Riou told the Admiralty, had behaved so helpfully, working the pumps day and night, and so he had promised them he would do whatever was in his power to pardon them.[57] William Grenville, the Home Secretary, who had the power to do this, agreed with Riou. The twenty convicts were put on the Neptune and the Scarborough, two of the convict transport ships of the Second Fleet that arrived at the Cape on 13 April 1790. Six either died on the voyage to New South Wales or shortly after. Governor Arthur Phillip pardoned the remaining fourteen convicts – though they had to remain within the confines of the settlement until their sentences had expired, they were free men.[58]

Those who went on the launch, fifteen in total, also survived. A French merchant ship from Mauritius chanced upon the boat in the middle of the ocean on 3 January, and took the castaways to the Cape.[59] Some of the survivors went back to London taking passage on East India Company ships that were returning from China, and it was with their arrival in London on 23 April 1790 that the news of what had happened in the Southern Ocean on Christmas Eve was first made public.[60]

Smith and Austin were both on one of the smaller boats. They and their thirty-eight compatriots didn’t survive. Nor did the ninety-three pots of plants.

Captain George Tripp had commanded HMS Grampus on the voyage along the African coast to search for a suitable site for a new penal colony with HMS Nautilus. He was instructed by the Admiralty on 8 October 1790 to sail HMS Sphinx as quickly as possible to the Cape.[61] He was ordered to pick up Riou and bring him back home, and what remained of HMS Guardian that had not been sold off. By 15 May 1791 Riou was back in London. In addition to bringing the ship’s figurehead and some guns and shot, Riou had been given a consignment of plants from Francis Masson for Banks.[62] There were two boxes of seeds and bulbs and ‘a large growing plant of Strelitzia alba’, all for Kew.[63] Named after Augusta, Princess of Wales and mother of King George III, the person most responsible for bringing Kew into the Georgian era, this Strelitzia was the second species of this genus introduced by Masson, the first, in 1773, being the Strelitzia reginae. Banks was very pleased to hear of Riou and his courage, and thanked him for the plants, especially the Strelitzia alba.[64]

Though Riou’s voyage was a disaster there was one piece of good news. The plant cabin Banks had had built for the Guardian had worked. Almost all of the fruit trees and plants, Riou told him, were still alive when the ship came to grief. This information encouraged Banks to believe that he had solved the problem of moving live plants across the globe.[65]

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