Joseph Banks. Patrick O’Brian

his spirits for a while they certainly revived quite soon, for in spite of the storm, in spite of his long illness, and in spite of the shortness of his time in Newfoundland and Labrador, he reached home in January 1767 bearing specimens or exact records of at least 340 plants, 91 birds, many fishes and invertebrates, and a few mammals, including the porcupine, that at least began the voyage alive. He possessed the beginnings of a herbarium that was soon to become famous, together with a nascent reputation that was soon to enable him to take part in one of the most interesting voyages ever made by a natural philosopher; and in his absence he had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, a body of men who could appreciate his energy and his disinterested love of science at their true value.

      ^* Black guillemots.

      ^* Englée.

      ^* A snow was a vessel very like a brig but with a third mast (or sometimes a horse) just abaft the mainmast for the trysail.

      ^* The Azores.

¹[Marginalia] Sounding upon the Banks

²[Marginalia] Island of Ice

³[Marginalia] Neighbourhood of St Johns

⁴[Marginalia] Petty Harbour

⁵[Marginalia] Croque

⁶[Marginalia] Inglie

⁷[Marginalia] Curlews came here August 9

⁸[Marginalia] Charadrias Pluvialis

⁹[Marginalia] Nfland Indians

¹⁰[Marginalia] Sam frye

¹¹[Marginalia] Octr 10th

¹²[Marginalia] Octr 28

Chapter 3 THE ROYAL SOCIETY: SOLANDER: THE ENDEAVOUR VOYAGE

      THE ROYAL SOCIETY of which Banks became a fellow in 1766 was a body of some 360 ordinary and 160 foreign members. It had increased greatly in size since the days when Wren, Boyle and a few of their friends discussed “the founding of a Colledge for the promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimentall Learning”, and if it had not increased proportionately in reputation this may be put down to the fact that men like Newton, Hooke and Halley are not to be found in every generation and to the ease with which candidates were elected: a wealthy Englishman was almost sure of success, particularly if he was also a peer, and so was a reasonably well recommended foreigner. Banks himself, though full of zeal for botany, had published nothing; and Lord Sandwich’s scientific zeal was confined to fishing, though indeed he was well disposed towards men of science and he was in a position to support their projects.

      Yet with all its faults the Society was still a most respectable institution – the list of 1768, the first in which Banks’s name appears, does show 46 lords temporal or spiritual, but a peerage does not necessarily make a man a fool and in any case there were 339 other members, including Henry Cavendish, Daines Barrington, Pennant, Priestley, William Hamilton (Nelson’s friend) and perhaps more surprisingly Joshua Reynolds, while among the foreigners appeared such names as d’Alembert, Buffon, Euler, Linnaeus, Montesquieu and Voltaire.

      From the earliest days some part of the public had made game of the Society for weighing air, dissecting fleas and so on, and even in the 1760s many people thought entomology a pursuit unworthy of a grown man; but also from the earliest days the government had taken advantage of that pool of science, asking the Royal Society to supervise the observatory at Greenwich, for example, and to give advice on a great many subjects, such as that change in the calendar which lost us eleven days, never to be recovered; and on being informed somewhat later that Venus would pass over the face of the sun in 1761, so that with due attention the sun’s parallax might be determined, to the great advantage of navigation, the ministry turned to the Society once again.

      The reply was that observations of this rare phenomenon would indeed be of great value, and the Rev. Nevil Maskelyne was sent to St Helena, while Mason and Dixon (the same who traced the line between Maryland and Pennsylvania) went to the Cape of Good Hope. But at the critical moment clouds lay thick over St Helena; the weather was little better at the Cape; and the astronomers were obliged to console themselves with the reflection that there would be other transits in 1769 and 1874.

      Banks, though as ardent a natural philosopher as any of his colleagues, was not much concerned with stars; in his surviving letters of this period there is not the least sign of any interest in transits, past or present. His immense energy was directed to having his specimens from Newfoundland and Labrador painted, to setting up house in New Burlington Street with his sister, Mrs Banks remaining in Chelsea, to travelling about south-western England and Wales, to making new acquaintances and to consolidating older friendships.

      He was particularly fortunate in his painters. Georg Ehret, a friend of Linnaeus, had been brought forward in England by Sir Hans Sloane, Dr Mead and the Duchess of Portland; he was now at the head of his profession and he figured at least twenty-three of Banks’s flowers, most delicately painted on vellum. Many of the animals (animals in the widest sense) were painted by an amiable, conscientious, highly talented young man from Edinburgh, Sydney Parkinson, who was introduced to Banks by James Lee the nurseryman. The others were painted by Peter Paillou: he too was a gifted man, but little seems to be known of him except that he was connected with Thomas Pennant.

      Pennant in his turn was connected with Banks’s journeys in the south and west, since one of them was directed towards Downing, his house in North Wales. Pennant was nearly twenty years older than Banks, and he had published the first part of his British Zoology as early as 1766: it has already been observed that Pennant knew Daines Barrington, the lawyer, antiquary and naturalist, and that both knew Gilbert White, whose enchanting Natural History of Selborne takes the form of letters to them; but it is worth repeating because both White and Banks, who could rarely have been deceived by even a half-seen bird or plant, were at least in some cases incapable of fine discrimination where their friends were concerned. Banks eventually got rid of the invasive, self-seeking Pennant, but there were others he endured all his life.

      A far more important and increasing friendship was that with Solander, who was now firmly established at the British Museum, but who in spite of working hard still had time to survey the Duchess of Portland’s wonderful collections, to attend the meetings of the Royal Society, of which he too was a Fellow, to help Banks catalogue his American plants, to dine out pretty often, and at least to contemplate a visit to Downing.

      There can be little doubt that it was Solander’s growing influence that led Banks to form the plan of going to Uppsala to study under Linnaeus and even to push on and travel in Lapland. After a tour in the west country (where he was “almost bit to death” by gnats at Glastonbury) he wrote Pennant a letter which contained this passage:

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