nowhere seen such Elegant women as those of Otaheite. Such the Grecians were from whose model the Venus of Medicis was copied, undistorted by bandages. Nature has full liberty: the growing form [develops] in whatever direction she pleases. And amply does she repay this indulgence in producing such forms as exist here [in Europe] only in marble or canvas: nay! Such as might even defy the imitation of the chissel of Phidias, or the pencil of Apelles. Nor are these forms a little aided by their Dress: not squeezed as our Women are, by a cincture scarce less tenacious than Iron.’78 ♣
This was perhaps a glimpse of Banks the Tahitian libertine, though it was only circulated privately. The way was now open for Banks to publish his own journal, over 200,000 words in manuscript, together with some of the hundreds of beautiful illustrations and line drawings he had commissioned. A folio volume of 800 plates was planned, together with extensive journal extracts. Solander agreed to help him with the cataloguing and editorial work, and various assistants were hired, including the young Edward Jenner. It was intended as the greatest scientific publication of Banks’s lifetime, his masterpiece.
9
The Pacific voyage, despite its final horrors of sickness and death, had not dampened Banks’s scientific wanderlust. ‘To explore is my Wish,’ he wrote the following spring, ‘but the Place to which I may be sent almost indifferent to me, whether the Sources of the Nile, or the South Pole are to be visited, I am equally ready to embark on the undertaking.’79
In summer 1772 Cook was commissioned by the Admiralty to undertake a second, much larger Pacific expedition, this time with several ships. Banks longed to go on this new adventure, and made extensive preparations and invested thousands of pounds in new botanical equipment. But perhaps celebrity had gone to his head. His plans were increasingly ambitious, and he had summoned an extraordinary range of scientific and artistic talents to accompany him, a sixteen-man team including the chemist and radical Joseph Priestley, the painter Johann Zoffany, and the brilliant young London physician Dr James Lind (later to be Shelley’s extracurricular science teacher at Eton).
Cook was quite prepared to acquiesce to all Banks’s scientific requirements, and had the great cabin in his new ship, the Resolution, redesigned to meet them, with higher ceilings, folding work tables and fitted cabinets. His own tiny captain’s cabin was moved to the rear of the Resolution’s quarterdeck. But the Admiralty regarded Banks’s demands as unacceptably imperious, and, without warning, withdrew its authorisation. Humiliatingly, all Banks’s equipment was offloaded and dumped on the quayside at Sheerness. On 20 June he received a sharp but stately letter of rebuke from his powerful friend Lord Sandwich: ‘Your public spirit in undertaking so dangerous a voyage, your inattention to any expense,…and your extensive knowledge as a naturalist, make it lamented that you are no longer one of the crew of the Resolution. But it may not be improper to set you right in one particular which you possibly may have misunderstood, and that is that you suppose the ships to have been fitted out for your use, which I own I by no means apprehend to be the case.’80
The Admiralty had, in effect, rejected the notion of underwriting another purely scientific voyage, for what Sandwich called ‘improvements in natural knowledge’. From now on Cook’s voyages were to take on more practical and empire-building objectives (though they would include testing the rival chronometers of John Harrison and John Arnold).
Lord Sandwich made it clear that Banks would have to pursue his science on his own: ‘Upon the whole I hope that for the advantage of the curious part of Mankind, your zeal for distant voyages will not yet cease, I heartily wish you success in all your undertakings, but I would advise you in order to ensure success to fit out a ship yourself; that, and only that, can give you the absolute command of the whole Expedition.’81
So Banks commissioned his own brig, the Sir Lawrence, went to the Hebrides and inspected Fingal’s Cave, and then sailed on to Iceland, where he made many friends, admired the geysers and volcanoes, collected lava specimens, but made few original discoveries. Back in London he continued to work with Solander on his Endeavour Journal, and set out his extraordinary collection of specimens at a temporary apartment in New Burlington Street. These began to attract learned visitors. The Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, William Sheffield, wrote a long, astonished description of Banks’s scientific treasures to Gilbert White in Hampshire.
Contrary to expectation, these were far more than just botanical specimens. They formed in effect a complete museum of Pacific culture, combining natural history with ethnology and human artefacts in a quite new way. They were housed in three enormous, overflowing rooms, each with its own theme. The first, the ‘Armoury’, belonged symbolically to the human male, dedicated to weapons, utensils and sailing equipment from all over the South Seas. The second was more female in theme, a huge domestic collection of clothes, headdresses, cloaks, woven cloths, ornaments and jewellery, together with 1,300 new species of plant ‘never seen or heard of before in Europe’. The third room was dedicated simply to Nature in all her diversity. It contained ‘an almost numberless collection of animals; quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibia, reptiles, insects and vermes, preserved in spirits, most of them new and nondescript [unclassified]…Add to these the choicest collection of drawings in Natural History that perhaps enriched any cabinet, public or private: 987 plants drawn and coloured by Parkinson; and 1300 or 1400 more drawn with each of them a flower, a leaf, and a portion of stalk, coloured by the same hand; besides a number of other drawings of animals, birds, fish etc…’
The Oxford Keeper was struck by the beauty and diversity of the whole amazing collection, a glimpse into an entirely new and wonderful world. Banks had found a new role as its guardian and its promoter. ‘Indeed most of these tropical islands, if we can credit our friend’s description of them, are terrestrial paradises.’82
Banks’s early hero Carl Linnaeus had turned collecting and displaying into something approaching a European art form. At Uppsala he planted a clock garden or ‘botanical sundial’, marking each hour by clumps of plants that opened only at one particular time of day (according to the strength of the sun). The time could thus be ‘read’ by the rotating patches of open petals, and even by the release of flower perfumes (such as tobacco plants in the early evening). However, Linnaeus’s genius for taxonomy and display disguised the fact that his natural history was essentially static.♣
Banks was now welcomed into the scientific societies in London: the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Society of Dilettanti. He was summoned more frequently to advise the King at Kew, where from 1773 he was gratified to find himself acting as unofficial director. After the débâcle over Harriet Blosset, he began living with a young woman called Sarah Wells, and set her up in an apartment in Chapel Street, on the other side of St James’s Park. Here he would meet Solander and his other friends, give noisy dinner parties and have plenty of talk of science and adventure. This ménage seemed an extension of his Tahitian liberties, and certainly there was no prospect of conventional betrothal or marriage. Solander refers simply to ‘Mrs Wells’s’ charm, good nature, and delicious supplies of ‘Game & Fish’.83
Indeed, the Town and Country Magazine for September 1773 claimed that ‘Mr B the Circumnavigator’ had an illegitimate child, but perhaps this was more confused botanical satire, as the mother was named as ‘Miss B—N living in Orchard Street’. Nonetheless, one of Banks’s close friends, the zoologist Johann Fabricius, wrote to him in November sending compliments
