Joseph Banks. Patrick O’Brian

to Turkey; he therefore joined the opposition, badgering the ministry in a newspaper called The North Briton. In the forty-fifth number he attacked George Ill’s message to parliament: he was arrested on a general warrant and clapped into the Tower. This was in 1763. The judges held that as a member he was immune from arrest and that in any case general warrants were illegal. Wilkes had the appearance of an oppressed martyr; he was already popular and his victory made him even more so; in his glee he reprinted number forty-five, but at the same time he struck off a few copies of a more or less obscene Essay on Woman, written by his friend Thomas Potter, the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The ministry took proceedings at once: Wilkes was expelled from the House and condemned in the King’s Bench on the charge of publishing an impious libel. And since he was not in court to receive sentence (he was recovering from a wound received in a duel) he was outlawed. A good deal happened after this, but the main point is that he was elected member for Middlesex (a popular constituency with hundreds of voters) again and again, his supporters roaring “Wilkes and liberty”, and again and again the House refused to let him sit. Eventually he did return to Parliament: he also became Lord Mayor of London, one of the few Lord Mayors ever to have edited Catullus and Theophrastus and to have been an outlaw. Throughout the whole affair Sandwich appeared as the enemy of the immensely popular if somewhat demagogic Wilkes: Sandwich was witty, intelligent, and good company, but he was no match for the brilliant Wilkes and his great host of supporters, some of them highly literate and with newspapers and caricaturists at their command – no match, that is to say, in a public controversy of this kind. It was above all held against him that he should have brought the Essay on Woman before the House of Lords, complaining of improper notes attributed to the Bishop of Gloucester, as though he were a Moravian missionary rather than a former member of the Hellfire Club. The idea seemed to be that if a man had once frequented a group of dissolute companions then he must support those companions for ever after, however much their political ideas might have diverged. The prosecution and the persecution of Wilkes were hopelessly mismanaged by a succession of ministries, but nearly all the odium fell on Sandwich. He was nicknamed Jemmy Twitcher, after the character who betrayed his friend Macheath in the Beggar’s Opera; and indeed he was so much disliked that when his amiable mistress Martha Ray was shot dead outside Covent Garden theatre by the Rev. Mr Hackman, a rejected lover, his unpopularity actually increased.

      At Turret House however quite another face of things was seen. Sandwich was not only good company, but like Joseph Banks he was devoted to fishing. They had fished together in the Fens, and now they fished together in the Thames and the Serpentine. In fact Lord Brougham says that they formed a plan for suddenly draining that sheet of water, not for mere fun but in order to learn more about the nature of the fishes – Sandwich had been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1740. This particular plan fell through, but others they made did not, and upon the whole it may be said that Lord Sandwich was a very good friend to Banks.

      In 1764 Joseph Banks came of age and he entered upon his landed estates, which, with agriculture and stock-raising and rural economy, provided one of the great interests of his life. He also established himself in a house of his own in London, and here, where he was entirely his own master, it was much easier for him to invite people, to come and go, and to entertain. Until he adopted a filing system in 1776 he did not keep many letters, or at least few have survived, and the dates of his earliest meeting with some of his friends is necessarily a matter of conjecture; but to this period must belong his introduction to the Bishop of Carlisle, Dr Morton of the British Museum, Dr Watson, Mr West, joint-secretary to the Treasury, and the Rev. Mr Kaye, the gentlemen who proposed him for membership of the Royal Society. He also became acquainted with Thomas Pennant (and later, by means of Pennant, with his much more amiable friend Gilbert White of Seibourne and Gilbert’s brother Benjamin, a publisher and bookseller at the Horace’s Head in Fleet Street), with the Hon. Daines Barrington, John Lightfoot the botanist, and in some ways the most important of all, Daniel Carl Solander.

      Solander,¹² the son of a parson, was born in 1733 at Piteå, an uninviting place in Swedish Lapmark, on the Gulf of Bothnia, about eighty miles south of the Arctic Circle. Linnaeus passed through Piteå on his tour of Lapland the year before Solander was born, and the first thing he saw was two beheaded Finns and one quartered Lapp, exposed after their execution for murder; and speaking of the region in his diary he said “Never can the priest describe Hell, this is much worse; never can the poet describe Styx, as this is much uglier.”

      In 1750, when Solander was seventeen, he was sent to Uppsala university, where his uncle was Professor of Jurisprudence: the eighteenth-century torpor, so usual in European universities, does not appear to have spared Uppsala, but new life had been stirring for some years, and in 1750 Linnaeus had the chair of botany, while Wallerius had that of chemistry and Rosen von Rosenstein that of medicine. Linnaeus was by far the most famous of the three: not only was he a passionate and very highly gifted botanist, but he was working at an unusually favourable time. The Societas Regia Litteraria et Scientiarum (which had financed the Lapland journey of his youth) and the Royal Academy of Science were active and influential; the court was well-inclined (the king and queen both had splendid natural history collections, which Linnaeus catalogued; for although he was famous primarily as a botanist, his investigations covered all the three kingdoms of nature), and there were many people who were willing and even eager to learn about botany, a science less forbidding than chemistry or medicine. Of course botanists had been writing about their subject from the time of Theophrastus on, and quite recently John Ray and Joseph Pitton de Tournefort had produced admirable taxonomies, yet they had been known to few but specialists and now they were swept away by the Linnaean system – so much so that the general opinion, fully shared by Linnaeus though not by all botanists, was that the Systema Naturae and his other publications had brought order out of chaos. Linnaeus classified by stamens and pistils, and by observing their various arrangements one could identify the plant, an absolute prerequisite for any meaningful discussion: the system was artificial in that it ignored natural affinities, but it was accessible and clear; it worked, and it held the field until the days of A.-L. de Jussieu and A.-P. de Candolle, while his binominal nomenclature is with us still. Yet perhaps even more important than his publications was the fact that Linnaeus was an inspired teacher and that he raised both the study and the status of botany to heights unknown before his day. It is said that in ordinary times Uppsala had five hundred undergraduates; when he held the chair of botany the number rose by a thousand. He filled his students with his own passionate love of the subject, and many of them, travelling to remote parts of the world, have had the plants they discovered named after them, so that a botanical catalogue is not unlike a list of Linnaeus’s pupils – Tärnstrom, Kalm, Osbeck, Lagerström, Sparrman, Alströmer, Thunberg at once come to mind, and there are many others. This century, opening wide to science, was the time for immortality; yet it is an odd kind of immortality, too, for one does not always remember that Volta and Ampère were living men, nor that it was Linnaeus and his friends who placed their contemporaries Magnol, Dahl and Alexander Garden in the botanical firmament with an “ia” added to their names.

      It is small wonder then that Solander, having studied classics and law for a while, wished to move over to the scientific side and join Linnaeus’s numerous band of disciples. Linnaeus had stayed with Solander’s parents at Piteå during his Lapland journey and he persuaded them to let the youth make the change and read for a medical degree.

      The great man did not regret his intervention: Solander had a remarkable aptitude for natural philosophy and he soon became one of Linnaeus’s favourites, both as a student and a person. As early as 1752 he helped his master in the cataloguing of the royal collections as well as those of Count Tessin: some time later he made two botanical journeys of his own, the first into the Kjöllen range north-west of Piteå and so over into Norway, and the second in the Torneå basin in Lapland. He also published Caroli Linnaei Elementa Botanica, a shortened version of the system; and he indexed the sumptuous great catalogues and saw them through the press, acting as the professor’s right-hand man. Indeed, the two were so close that Linnaeus, who had four handsome daughters, hoped that in time Solander would become his son-in-law and his successor. Solander was also his choice when his correspondents Peter Collinson and John Ellis asked him to send a student to England. Collinson was a wealthy Quaker merchant trading with North America, an ardent botanist who had brought many American plants to