– believe me replies his Friend I am more afraid than You – for I have the Misfortune to cry loud.”
* Lady Mary Coke says that the Duke of Marlborough had £50,000 a year, even without any coal.
Chapter 2 NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR
MOST PEOPLE would agree that a man can be judged by his friends, by the company he keeps; and it may well be that to see him in the round one needs the indirect light shed upon him by his associates. Joseph Banks was a complex being as well as a sociable one and his many friends ranged from the somewhat rakish Lord Sandwich to the Bishop of Carlisle and to James Lee, the Hammersmith nurseryman. Perhaps the most amiable of them was Constantine John Phipps: he and Banks had been at Eton together and they shared many of the same interests, though Phipps was somewhat more concerned with animals than with plants; but Phipps left school early to go to sea with his uncle, Captain the Hon. A.J. Hervey, then in command of HMS Monmouth, a seventy-gun ship of the line. In her Phipps took part in the blockade of Brest, when Captain Hervey kept the sea, often in appalling weather that blew the rest of the fleet into Torbay or Plymouth Sound, for nearly six months without a break. By 1763, when the Seven Years War came to an end and Phipps was nineteen and a recently promoted lieutenant, he had borne a hand in the taking of Belleisle off the coast of France, in the taking of Martinique and St Lucia in the West Indies, and in the protracted, arduous, bloody siege and eventual storming of the great Moro Castle, which led to the surrender of Havana. It also led to prize-money of about £750,000, which pleased the soldiers and sailors until they found that the general and admiral in charge were to have £122,697 10s 6d each while the private was to be content with £4 1s 8½d and the seaman with £3 14s 9¾d. However, when Captain Hervey, now in the Dragon, 74, was on the way home with Admiral Pocock’s dispatches, he took a French West Indiaman worth £30,000, which must have been some consolation.
Yet although Phipps was no doubt happy to receive his share, which would have been about £2,000 or some thirty years’ pay, he certainly did not need it as much as most junior lieutenants. His father had great estates in Yorkshire that had come into the family by a complicated series of successions from that Duke of Buckingham and Normanby who married an illegitimate daughter of James II, estates which had belonged to the Sheffield earls of Mulgrave, the duke’s ancestors, for a great while, so that when Mr Phipps senior was raised to the peerage in 1767 he too chose Mulgrave for his title, a title that his son Constantine inherited some years later.
In 1766 however Constantine had neither a title nor yet a ship; like so many of his fellows in time of peace he was a half-pay lieutenant, thrown on the beach. But he was a most ardent sailor, and given his zeal, outstanding competence and outstanding connections, it was not surprising to find him entrusted with a naval mission to Newfoundland in that same year. Nor was it surprising that Banks should undertake to go with him, both of them travelling in HMS Niger.
The Treaty of Paris, ending the war in 1763, had transferred Canada, among many other territories, to Great Britain, but it had left France certain fishing rights on the Banks, and in the season very large numbers of French fishermen mingled with the English, Spanish and Portuguese. There was continual disagreement, and serious trouble was prevented only by the presence of a small naval force, based on St John’s. The Niger, a thirty-two gun frigate commanded by Sir Thomas Adams, was part of this force, and she sailed from Plymouth on 22 April 1766, with the wind at east-north-east.
The captain of a man-of-war might carry friends if he chose, so long as he fed them himself – Commodore Keppel, for example, took the young Joshua Reynolds to the Mediterranean in 1749; and many captains had young ladies for company – but Banks was not aboard as the captain’s guest and his presence certainly had a great deal to do with his friendship with Lord Sandwich, who had been First Lord of the Admiralty some time before and who was to be First Lord again some time later, just as his equipment owed much to his acquaintance with Solander, that experienced Lapland naturalist.
The Niger, of course, did not sail as early as might have been wished, but this allowed Banks and Phipps to botanize round Mount Edgcombe, where among other things they found wild madder, Rubia angelica, and stinking gladwin, Iris foetidissima, in peculiar abundance, and deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna, among the rocks; and they observed swallows for the first time that year. They thought they had found the radical leaves of the field eryngo, Eryngium campestre, but were not quite certain. Yet when at last the delays were over and the wind came fair, the Niger set off at a splendid pace, so that by noon the next day they were well out into the Atlantic, twelve leagues beyond the Scillies.
The first few days yielded little but seaweed, a young shark that did not stay to be fished up, and some shoals of porpoises; then the freshening breeze made Banks so ill that he could not write. It does not appear that Phipps was seasick, but whether or no, they were both well and active by the end of April: both, for although Phipps was an ardent sailor, he, like his uncle and so many other naval officers, was no mere seaman. Not only was he a capital astronomer and mathematician, but he was as eager as Banks to haul a jellyfish aboard, identify a sea bird or trail a fine-meshed net for plankton: indeed, it is to the somewhat older Phipps that we owe the first scientific description of the polar bear, Thalarctos maritimus (Phipps) and the ivory gull, Pagophila eburnea (Phipps), both of them encountered in a voyage to the far north in which he was accompanied by the fifteen-year-old Nelson, who also attempted to collect a bear.
Perhaps the best way of dealing with their crossing and with Banks’s journeys in Newfoundland and Labrador is to give large extracts from the journal he kept. A paraphrase might in some ways be clearer and easier to read, but the journal brings one directly into touch with Banks; it also serves as an introduction to his style, which is at first a little disconcerting. Some editors have improved him, making him write more like a Christian, but it seems to me that one should not alter a text and except for the occasional silent correction of an obvious slip of the pen I give Banks unchanged. Yet it must be admitted that printing his manuscript just as he wrote it has disadvantages: cold print differs essentially from a page written by hand, and its inhuman precision makes Banks’s way of writing seem wilder and more outlandish than it really is; for when one reads his papers, particularly his correspondence, one soon grows used to the rather flourishing letters that may or may not be capitals, and one’s eye, helped by vague flecks and dashes of the pen, readily supplies the wanting stops, which is harder to do in the formality of print. The result is that to begin with the printed page gives the impression of someone not very wise nor very highly educated speaking at a breakneck pace, rather like Miss Bates or Flora Finching; but one soon gets accustomed to it; one soon sees the strong good sense beneath the strange exterior; and even if at times one does stumble for a moment, it is at least a genuine Banksian obstacle that interrupts one’s course.
The journal from which I quote is in Adelaide, in the library of the South Australian Branch of the Royal Geographic Society of Australia, and it was edited with the utmost scholarship and with infinite pains by the late Dr Averil Lysaght. She provided a great deal of background material, valuable notes and identification, and when the scientific names of plants or animals have changed she gave the modern versions. With her publishers’ permission I have made the freest use of her splendidly illustrated book Joseph Banks in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1766: His Diary, Manuscripts and Collections, and if I have not also transcribed her scientific names or notes it is because I wish to give the pristine Banks; but the zoologist or botanist concerned with North American fauna or flora must certainly turn to Dr Lysaght and her constellation of expert advisers.
This chapter, then, will be written by Joseph Banks, with short connecting pieces and an occasional footnote on some particular eighteenth-century usage that may not be quite familiar, such as penguin for auk or blubber for jellyfish. It will begin with the first entry for the month of May 1766, and it will be printed as Banks wrote it except that I leave out the numbers
