Joseph Banks. Patrick O’Brian

pounds a year. This was not quite the “ten thousand a year and a deer-park” that accompanied the ideal husband up until quite recent times, yet it was still a great deal of money; what is more, there were already deer at Revesby, and with high farming and improved drainage coming in the fenland estate was eminently improvable. There is not much point in trying to establish any simple figure by which this six thousand could be multiplied to give the modern equivalent, but a few comparisons may give a certain sense of its value. Philip Miller, the very highly skilled gardener in charge of the Chelsea Physic Garden, a man whom Linnaeus called “not only a prince of gardeners but a prince of botanists”, had fifty pounds a year. Mr Peregrine Langton lived in a handsome country house on two hundred a year, employing two manservants and two maids and keeping a carriage and three horses (he was, it must be admitted, an admirable manager; but there was no meanness, says Boswell, no skimping). Dr Johnson’s three hundred a year kept him in London, together with the blind Mrs Williams and her maid, Francis Barber and his wife Elizabeth and her child, a Mrs White, Miss Carmichael, the widowed Mrs Desmoulins, and at least to some extent Mr Levett, while at the same time he maintained a cousin at Coventry and shared the cost of keeping another relative in a private madhouse. At the same period Lord Shelburne, who lived as splendidly as anyone, told the Doctor “that a man of high rank, who looks into his own affairs, may have all that he ought to have, all that can be of any use, or appear with any advantage, for five thousand pounds a year”, a figure confirmed by Mrs Thrale who speaking of her husband in Thraliana said “If he got but 2/6 by each Barrel [Thrale brewed 80,000 of them] eighty Thousand half crowns are 10,000 pounds and what more would mortal Man desire than an Income of ten Thousand a year – five to spend, & five to lay up.” A farm labourer might earn twenty-five pounds, counting his extra money for harvest and haysel; an ordinary seaman in the Royal Navy had nineteen shillings a month; and Lieutenant James Cook, being in command of the Endeavour, had the unusually large sum of five shillings a day.

      Values and prices, together with the extremes of wealth and poverty, have changed so much in these few generations that one is often puzzled; but in this case there is no sort of doubt that six thousand a year, with no income tax to pay, was a most desirable sum.

      There were of course very much richer men – some of the coal-mining dukes were enormously wealthy^* – just as there were men of very much higher social standing; yet even so, most people would probably have placed Joseph Banks well up among the top five per cent.

      Some young men, after a decent period of mourning, would have borrowed money to be repaid when they came of age, and would have run rather wild. Joseph Banks did not do so: he was in regular residence at Christ Church throughout 1761 and 1762 and for most of 1763. It is usually said that he then went down, but the college records (quoted by Professor Beaglehole in his edition of the Endeavour journal) show him in residence for twenty-one weeks in 1764 and for a little while in 1765.

      Like many of his kind he took no degree, but there is no doubt that he worked hard, if only at botany. Much of this sobriety was owing to his love for plants – for natural philosophy in most of its forms – and for the congenial company at Oxford; but a glance at John Russell’s portrait of Mrs William Banks will convince most people that she had a good deal to do with it.

      Not only does the picture show a strong-minded, determined woman, but we also learn from Banks himself that she was above ordinary weaknesses: in a letter to an unknown correspondent quoted by Bowdler Sharpe¹¹ (who I am afraid improved the writer’s English) he said, “I have from my childhood, in conformity with the precepts of a mother void of all imaginary fear, been in the constant habit of taking toads in my hand, and applying them to my nose and face as it may happen. My motive for doing this very frequently is to inculcate the opinion I have held, since I was told by my mother, that the toad is actually a harmless animal; and to whose manner of life man is certainly under some obligation as its food is chiefly those insects which devour his crops and annoy him in various ways.”

      Strength of mind and the habit of command can, it is said, be found in women of modest means; but money does seem to foster these qualities and it may not be irrelevant to observe that Mrs Banks, together with her sister the Countess of Exeter, was the co-heiress of the wealthy Thomas Chambers of London.

      After her husband’s death she left Revesby for the time being and moved to Chelsea, taking Turret House, an elegant Queen Anne building with an immense arcaded court in Paradise Row, just by the Physic Garden, which in those days, before the embankment, ran right down to the river – indeed, the Society of Apothecaries, to whom the garden belonged, had their bargehouse at the bottom, together with those of the Tallow-Chandlers and the Vintners, the Thames being still an important thoroughfare, crowded with boats, and reasonably full of fish.

      At that time Chelsea was still green with fields; there were market gardeners and nurserymen too, and it was also quite a fashionable suburb. Lord Orford lived close to Turret House – his father, better known as Sir Robert Walpole, had built an immense greenhouse in his garden – and when Lord Sandwich, an old friend and fenland neighbour of the Bankses, returned to office in 1763, he spent much of his time in Chelsea. And apart from friends and acquaintances of this kind, Mrs Banks, who like her daughter Sophia was a deeply religious woman, had the Moravian Brethren half a mile up the river, in the splendid Lindsey House at the far end of Cheyne Walk, beyond what is now Battersea Bridge and what was then a ferry. Lindsey House had belonged to the Lincolnshire Berties, now Dukes of Ancaster, but in 1750 it was bought by Count Zinzendorf for the Moravians, a religious community originating in Bohemia and ultimately deriving from Hus that sent missionaries to the West Indies, Greenland and North America. Some of these missionaries were interested in botany, and they gave Joseph Banks specimens from Labrador that are still to be seen in his herbarium, now housed in the Natural History Museum.

      But there were of course many, many more North American plants in the Physic Garden, just over the way. The man in charge of the establishment was Philip Miller, who succeeded his father in 1722; he was a very able man indeed, and in the forty-eight years of his reign he increased the number of plants from one thousand to five thousand, having correspondents and fellow collectors in many parts of the world. He was a friend of Linnaeus himself, who said of his well-known Gardener’s and Florist’s Dictionary “Non erit lexicon hortulanorum sed botanicorum”, in spite of the fact that Miller, whose mind had been formed by Tournefort and Ray, did not fully adopt the Linnaean system or nomenclature until his eighth edition, in 1768, thirty-two years after their first meeting. (Banks, coming to botany well after the publication of the Systema Naturae, the Fundamenta Botanica and the Genera Plantarum, was a Linnaean from the start; and although he would occasionally use an earlier, much longer name, his taxonomy was entirely based on the sexual system.)

      It appears that in his old age Miller became so positive and froward that the Apothecaries dismissed him, but at the time when the Bankses were living in Chelsea he was a highly respected figure, the head of a famous garden and eventually a Fellow of the Royal Society, sometimes serving on the council: Joseph Banks could not have had a better neighbour and guide; and after Miller’s death (in poverty, alas) Banks bought his herbarium, so that something tangible remained.

      Lord Sandwich was also something of a botanist, but his interest in the sexual system was of a very much wider nature: in earlier days he had been a member of Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club at Medmenham Abbey together with John Wilkes, among others, and he had the reputation of being a sad rake. But in the eighteenth century this would hardly have been held against him to any serious extent; it would certainly not have made him unpopular. Yet unpopular he was, in spite of having been an excellent First Lord of the Admiralty from 1748–51, helping Anson carry through some most important reforms, so that when the Seven Years War broke out in 1756 the Navy was reasonably well equipped to fight it. The trouble was that in 1763 he was made First Lord again and then almost immediately afterwards one of the two principal Secretaries of State, being succeeded at the Admiralty by Lord Egmont (who gave his name to Port Egmont in the Falklands and thence to the Port Egmont hen, Stercorarius antarcticus, the southern skua); and as Secretary of State he was much concerned with the prosecution of Wilkes, his former playmate. Wilkes, an unusually disreputable, unusually charming and learned man and a member of parliament under Pitt’s leadership, was