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 bring any excuse to be heard with Patience Look then with Zoologick Eyes & tell me if you could 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
