Joseph Banks. Patrick O’Brian

blame me if I Sacraficed every Consideration to an opportunity of Paying a visit to our Master Linnaeus & Profiting by his Lectures before he dies who is now so old that he cannot Long Last.”¹ [Banks was twenty-four, Linnaeus sixty.]

      The visit to Downing was not in fact put off: Banks went there in the late summer, together with his eminent colleague William Hudson of the Flora Anglica. It is possible that Pennant, who was no great admirer of Linnaeus (“his work too superficial except in botany – little opinion of him as a zoologist”) may have poured cold water on the scheme, but if he did so Banks obviously remained undamped, for in a letter of January 1768, when Banks was travelling from Chester to London, a letter from Pennant spoke of his going “thro all the perils of snow and ice, a good foretaste of your Lapland Journey”.² And other correspondence of the time speaks of it as quite settled.

      From Pennant’s letters it is clear that Banks meant to take Parkinson with him as a draughtsman on his northern journey. But in the event the voyage they made together was one of greater consequence by far.

      Well before 1769 the Royal Society, and particularly Dr Maskelyne, now the Astronomer Royal, had begun to prepare for the coming transit. In 1766 they determined to send observers to various parts of the world and to invite Father Boscowitz of Pavia to be one of them; in 1767 the President, Lord Morton, was in correspondence with the unhelpful Spanish ambassador about the astronomer’s journey to California; in the same year, having discarded California, the Society decided on three places for their observers, Hudson’s Bay, the North Cape, and a suitable island in the Pacific; and probably in the same year they drew up the following undated memorial, the Council approving and signing it on 15 February 1768.

      To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty. The Memorial of the President, Council and Fellows of the Royal Society of London for improving Natural Knowledge Humbly sheweth –

      That the passage of the Planet Venus over the Disc of the Sun, which will happen on the 3rd of June in the year 1769, is a Phaenomenon that must, if the same be accurately observed in proper places, contribute greatly to the improvement of Astronomy on which Navigation so much depends …

      The memorial also showed that apart from the ships needed to carry the observers the expedition would cost four thousand pounds, which the Society did not possess, and it ended:

      The Memorialists, attentive to the true end for which they were founded by your Majesty’s Royal Predecessor, the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, conceive it to be their duty to lay these sentiments before your Majesty with all humility and submit the same to your Majesty’s Royal Consideration.

      The memorial was presented at the right time and to the right monarch. King George III was no more than thirty, and although his political education may have been deplorable, he was full of energy, enterprise, and good intentions; there were certainly unofficial discussions both before and after the formal memorial, but the request was granted, and fully granted, as early as March 1768.

      Once the expedition had been decided upon, the Admiralty moved with surprising speed: Sir Edward Hawke, the admiral who “did bang Mounseer Conflang” in Quiberon Bay in 1759, taking or sinking five of his ships and running more aground, was then First Lord, and he was accustomed to brisk action. In March 1768 the Navy Board was directed to find a suitable vessel; the Royal Society was firmly told that the claims of Mr Dalrymple, a distinguished hydrographer with much experience of the north-western Pacific in the East India Company’s service whom it put forward as principal observer, to direct the voyage were “entirely repugnant to the regulations of the Navy”; and Mr James Cook, the former surveyor of the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador and a master in the Royal Navy, was sent for, commissioned as a lieutenant on 5 May and given the command. (In passing it may be observed that masters in the Royal Navy, a race long since extinct, were responsible for the navigation of the ship: they were relics of a time when sailors did the sailing of a man-of-war and soldiers, commanded by gentlemen, the fighting: although they usually began as midshipmen and although they messed in the wardroom or gunroom, they were only warrant officers, and as masters they had reached the highest point in their career. Lieutenants, on the other hand, were commissioned officers, to whom all masters were subordinate in command, and they might be promoted to commander, to post-captain and thence by seniority to the various grades of admiral. It was quite rare for a master to be given a commission, and the only cases that come readily to mind are those of Mr Bowen, who handled Lord Howe’s flagship so well on the Glorious First of June, and the unfortunate Mr Bligh of the Bounty.)

      The Royal Society bowed to Hawke’s decision: they too knew Cook quite well, for not only had he published admirable sailing directions for the regions he had surveyed but he had also contributed his accurate observations of the 1766 solar eclipse to the Society’s Philosophical Transactions; and since Dalrymple refused to go except in command, thus leaving the main scientific post vacant, they asked Cook to come and see them. After a short interview on 5 May 1768 the Council appointed him the Society’s chief observer of the transit, allowing him £120 a year for victualling himself and the second observer, Charles Green of Greenwich, undertaking to produce “such a gratuity as the Society shall think proper” (it turned out to be a hundred guineas), and to provide two telescopes, a quadrant, a sextant and some other instruments.

      Then on 20 May Captain Wallis brought the Dolphin home from her second voyage round the world, this time with news of Tahiti, which its discoverer, reaching it a few months before Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, had named King George’s Island, and with a song that ended

      Then we plow’d the South Ocean, such land to discover

       As amongst other nations has made such a pother. We found it, my boys, and with joy be it told, For beauty such islands you ne’er did behold. We’ve the pleasure ourselves the tidings to bring As may welcome us home to our country and king. For wood, water, fruit, and provision well stor’d Such an isle as King George’s the world can’t afford. For to each of these islands great Wallis gave name, Which will e’er be recorded in annals of fame. We’d the fortune to find them, and homeward to bring The tidings a tribute to country and king.³

      Since the island was well within the southern zone that Dr Maskelyne had laid down as the best for observing the transit (“any place not exceeding 30 degrees of Southern Latitude and between the 140th & 180th degrees of longitude west of your Majesty’s Royal Observatory in Greenwich park”), the Society wrote to the Admiralty on 9 June asking them to agree that Tahiti should be the place for the observation. The letter continued “Joseph Banks Esq^r, Fellow of the Society, a Gentleman of large fortune, who is well versed in natural history, being Desirous of undertaking the same voyage the Council very earnestly request their Lordships, that in regard to Mr Banks’s great personal merit, and for the Advancement of useful knowledge, He also, together with his Suite, being seven persons more, be received on board of the ship, under command of Captain Cook.”

      The news of Tahiti may possibly have increased Banks’s desire to go on the voyage, but it was quite certainly not the first cause. Just when the Pacific displaced Lapland in his mind is not clear, but the idea was firmly implanted before the Dolphin’s return, and it may have arisen when the memorial was under discussion – when it became apparent that there was a real likelihood of a ship’s being sent to the Great South Sea.

      Their Lordships had no objection to the Society’s request, and on 22 July their secretary directed Cook to receive “Joseph Banks Esq and his Suite consisting of eight Persons with their Baggage, bearing them as Supernumeraries for Victuals only, and Victualling them as Barks Company during their continuance on board.”

      This is the official sequence of events; but there is no doubt that private arrangements preceded the public announcements both with regard to Banks and Cook. Cook had earned golden opinion at the Admiralty, and it is probable that this command, so admirably suited to his talents, was intended for him as soon as it was decided upon; Captain Hugh Palliser, his friend and patron from the beginning, had great influence with the Navy Board (he was Comptroller in 1770) and it is therefore not surprising that a north-country cat, or to be more precise a Whitby collier, the kind of vessel in which Cook had learnt his calling, was chosen for the expedition, perhaps