Planting the World

Wallis knew nothing about the Royal Society’s interest in tracking Venus and the Admiralty had not expected him to arrive back in London for at least a year, that is sometime in 1769. As it happened, because of widespread illness among his crew, his own weakness and serious doubts that his ship could stand any more wear and tear, Wallis had decided to abandon a part of his surveying objectives and hurry home by way of the Cape of Good Hope (in spite of his instructions to return by way of Cape Horn).[21] History would have been very different had he carried out his instructions to the letter.

Wallis’s discovery of the island and of an excellent anchorage in the very north of the island, at a place he named Port Royal, or Matavai Bay in Tahitian, where he had anchored on 23 June 1767, could not have been better news for the Royal Society. The vague destination of the Marquesas and Tonga was now replaced by a firm, precise and, therefore, perfectly findable location. The predicted date of the transit was almost the same as the date of Wallis’s anchorage so that what he described then, especially the weather, would equally apply to the Endeavour’s stay. On 9 June 1768, a fortnight after Cook had officially taken charge of the Endeavour, the Council of the Royal Society endorsed the choice of the island discovered by Wallis as the expedition’s destination.[22] In the following month, the Admiralty reaffirmed the Society’s decision of where to observe the track of Venus when they presented their instructions to James Cook, who had, in the meantime, been promoted to the rank of lieutenant.[23] To guide him to Tahiti, the Admiralty presented Cook with copies of ‘such Surveys, plans and Views of the Island and Harbour as were taken by Capt Wallis, and the Officers of the Dolphin when she was there’.[24]

The Royal Society Council meeting minute of 9 June 1768 recorded the important decisions that had been taken since the ‘Memorial’ of mid February: the observers, Cook and Green, had been chosen and their salaries agreed; the ship and its commander had been commissioned; and the location pinpointed in Maskelyne’s rectangle of southern sea.

At this point, the scientific aspects of Cook’s expedition to the Pacific were astronomical and geographic. The minute of the Royal Society’s Council meeting, which recorded Cook and Green’s appointment, also had a small note to the effect that the Society’s secretary would be asking the Admiralty that ‘Joseph Banks … being desirous of undertaking the same voyage … for the Advancement of useful knowledge … He … together with his Suite … be received on board of the Ship, under the Command of Captain Cook.’[25]

Banks attended his first meeting at the Royal Society on 12 February 1767 shortly after his return from Newfoundland and Labrador.[26] Though he was not in London when, in November 1767, the Committee of the Transit recorded its decisions about how the Society wished to have Venus’s track observed, it is very possible that he knew about it shortly afterwards, and certainly by the time of the ‘Memorial’ to the King on 15 February 1768, Banks had made up his mind to try and join the expedition.[27] Over the next few months, by dint of careful negotiations and relationships, especially with Philip Stephens, the First Secretary of the Admiralty, whom he had met at the British Museum, Banks convinced those in authority that he should go to the Pacific.[28] The Royal Society Council minute of 7 June 1768, requested the Admiralty to accept Banks, accompanied by seven others, including two artists (Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan), a secretary (Herman Spöring) and four assistants and servants (James Roberts, Peter Briscoe, Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton), all paid for by him, to join the ship.[29]

More than a month later, on 22 July, the Admiralty informed Cook that the Royal Society’s request had been accepted. Instead of seven in Banks’s accompanying suite, they now stipulated that eight, in addition to Banks, would be going.[30] The eighth person was Daniel Solander, probably the most important person in Banks’s intellectual life since Israel Lyons.

Solander was Linnaeus’s best and most favourite student, and had been invited to England from Sweden, especially by the botanist John Ellis, to expound his teacher’s new system of classification. Since 1763 he had been busily working on cataloguing the Museum’s natural-history collections, primarily those that Hans Sloane had bequeathed. In the following year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.[31]

Solander, ten years Banks’s senior, probably met Banks when he first used the British Museum’s Reading Room, and soon after this meeting he took over Banks’s botanical education where Lyons had left off. He had prepared Banks for his Newfoundland voyage and, on his return, helped him catalogue the plants that had been collected.[32] It is not surprising then that Banks confided in Solander that he was planning to join the Endeavour. Solander was ‘very excited by my plans, and immediately offered to furnish me with information on every part of natural history which might be encountered on such an ambitious and unparalleled mission’. Banks later explained that several days later, when they were dining at the home of a mutual friend, the topic of the Endeavour came up. Solander jumped to his feet and asked Banks if he wanted a companion to join him. Banks replied, ‘Someone like you would be a constant benefit and pleasure to me!’ Solander did not hesitate. ‘I want to go with you,’ he exclaimed.[33]

On 24 June 1768 Solander wrote to the Trustees of the British Museum to tell them about Banks’s offer, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had the power to grant leaves of absence, had agreed he should go. Solander added that this unique opportunity would allow him to collect for the museum.[34] Banks may have been well known in the Royal Society, especially its exclusive dining club, which he frequented increasingly after the ‘Memorial’ had been sent to the King, and in the British Museum’s Reading Room, but in the world of botany, it was Solander who was the more famous. He was a great addition to the voyage.

This was now quite a different expedition from what had been planned by the Royal Society when they petitioned the King for financial help. It wasn’t just advances in astronomy and geography that they hoped would gain from the expedition. Now natural history, and botany in particular, had a leading role. There were also two Fellows of the Royal Society on board.

John Ellis, who had known Banks since 1764, wrote to Linnaeus excitedly, telling him about the forthcoming voyage.[35] Ellis’s main news for Linnaeus was that his student, Daniel Solander, was accompanying Joseph Banks, whom he described as a ‘very wealthy man’, to the Pacific. Ellis added that they were very well-equipped, with a fine library and all of the tools necessary to collect and preserve natural history specimens; or, in Ellis’s own words: ‘No people ever went to Sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly.’ What Ellis did not mention was the huge quantity of cases and book shelving that Banks was taking on board – ‘such a Collection … as almost frighten me’, Banks remarked.[36]

Banks and his suite were given rooms next to Cook’s. The ‘scientific gentlemen’ would be sharing his great cabin: specimens in bottles and in presses, nets and hooks, and sheets of drawing paper were jammed up next to maps and mathematical instruments.[37] Deferentially, Ellis concluded his letter to Linnaeus by saying that ‘All this is owing to you and your writings’.

On 30 July 1768, Cook received his instructions. He was to take the ship to Port Royal Harbour by way of Cape Horn. On the way, the Lords of the Admiralty remarked, ‘You are at Liberty to touch upon the Coast of Brazil, or at Port Egmont in Falkland Isles, or at both in your way thither.’ The first stop though was Madeira, where Cook was ordered to ‘take on board such a Quantity of Wine as you can Conveniently stow for the use of the [Ship’s] company’.[38]

So, on 25 August, the Endeavour, with almost one hundred men on board, ten of whom had already been to the Pacific on the two previous voyages of HMS Dolphin, left Plymouth for the Pacific Ocean.

Following his instructions, Cook took the Endeavour to Madeira where he stocked up with 14,000 litres of wine. Banks and Solander had been collecting specimens from the sea as the Endeavour made its way south, but Madeira now gave them the first opportunity to try out their methods for collecting on land and for recording and drawing botanical specimens, in the ship’s great cabin.[39] With the generous assistance of the English Consul and the resident English physician (himself a naturalist) and despite it not being the best time of the year for botanising, by the end of their five days’ stay, over three hundred species of plants had been collected – Solander reported to Linnaeus that of these fifty or sixty were new species.[40]

On 18 September, Cook set sail for Rio de Janeiro on the other side of the Atlantic. The stay in the city, from 14 November until 7 December, was generally a frustrating time for Banks and his entourage. Their welcome from the authorities was frosty, and they were not given permission to land. It was a bitter disappointment, especially when compared to their warm reception in Madeira. Surreptitiously evading the restrictions, Banks and Solander managed a few precious hours on shore and, in the end, either by their own means or by bribing locals to bring plants to the ship, they managed to collect about three hundred specimens: Parkinson drew about 10 per cent of them. The ship’s company hurriedly wrote letters home as they did not know when they would get another chance to send them. Soon they would be entering a part of the Pacific where there would be no passing European ships to which they could entrust their letters. They did not even know at this stage by what route they would be returning home, or when.

For about five weeks, the Endeavour made its way south through the Atlantic until 14 January 1769, when the ship anchored in a sheltered bay near the tip of Tierra del Fuego. Solander and Banks rushed to collect as much as they could. Banks was anxious to go into the interior. The local people seemed friendly and the naturalists’ activities were not made difficult as in Rio de Janeiro. But it was here that the first tragedy of the voyage struck.

When they were climbing a part of the interior that resembled the Alps, the weather suddenly turned cold, with snow and icy winds. They were too far from the ship to make it back before nightfall and two of Banks’s black servants, George Dorlton and Thomas Richmond, having drunk too much, literally froze to death.

Banks continued to collect but stayed closer to the ship. On 21 January, the Endeavour left its anchorage and headed for Cape Horn where the ship left the Atlantic and entered the Pacific Ocean. The botanic haul was small but with about a hundred specimens, it was respectable nevertheless.

For the next two months and more, Cook took a northwest course, making straight for Tahiti and for the Endeavour’s planned anchorage in Matavai Bay, which they reached on 13 April, well in time for the rendezvous with Venus’s track across the sun, and strictly within the instructions laid down by the Admiralty.

How much anyone on the ship knew about Tahiti is unclear. Not long after Wallis’s arrival in London from the Pacific, some London newspapers carried reports of the discovery of a ‘large, fertile, and extremely populous’ island. Descriptions of the people were included such as the following: ‘The first day they came along-side with a number of canoes … there were too [sic] divisions, one filled with men, and the other with women; these last endeavoured to engage the attention of our sailors, by exposing their beauties to their view.’[41]

The Endeavour’s men, including Banks, were mostly young and hungry for experiences, and they were very impressed by the beauties on view. They soon discovered how different Tahitian society was from what they were accustomed to at home. Banks spent as much time learning Tahitian ways, particularly their uninhibited sexual practices – what he called ‘enjoying free liberty in love’ – as he did botanising.[42]

However, shortly after their arrival, Banks suffered yet another tragedy. Alexander Buchan, the landscape artist, died suddenly on 17 April. Banks was devastated in more ways than one as he explained: ‘I sincerely regret him as an ingenious and good young man, but his Loss to me is irretrievable, my airy dreams of entertaining my friends in England with the scenes I am about to see here are vanished. No account of the figures and dresses of men can be satisfactory unless illustrated with figures: had providence spard him a month longer what an advantage would it have been to my undertaking but I must submit.’[43]

The transit observations were made as planned. Banks continued to explore the island accompanied, at various times, by Cook, by John Gore, the third lieutenant, and by William Monkhouse, the ship’s surgeon, who had been with Banks on HMS Niger in Newfoundland and Labrador. On 4 July Banks did something he had never done before but which would become part of his botanical practices: in and around the encampment of what was called Point Venus, Banks planted seeds of watermelons, oranges, lemons, limes and other varieties he had brought with him from Rio de Janeiro and distributed large quantities of the same to the local people.[44]

Banks and Solander crisscrossed the island but on many days they collected little if anything. The botanical haul, at just over three hundred plants, was on the small side and about the same as they had collected in Madeira in a much shorter period of time and at a less opportune time of the year. On the other hand, Banks was particularly impressed by the Tahitian agricultural accomplishments, especially their cultivation of the breadfruit tree, which provided the population with its main source of nourishment.

On 13 July 1769, three months after arriving, Cook and the ship’s company bade farewell to Tahiti. Cook had carried out all but one of his instructions and now he turned to this final one. ‘When this Service is perform’d’, the Admiralty had written, ‘you are to put to Sea without Loss of Time, and carry into execution the Additional Instructions contained in the inclosed Sealed Packet.’[45]

These additional instructions told Cook that he was now to look for Terra Australis Incognita, the southern land mass that Wallis and some of his men thought they had seen in the distance when they were in the area.[46] The Admiralty told Cook that he should first look for land by sailing south to latitude 40 degrees; if nothing was found, then he should turn westward and search again in between latitudes 40 and 35 degrees until he met the eastern side of New Zealand.

Cook did what he was told and found no land mass in the great ocean, until 6 October 1769, after being at sea for almost three months, land was spotted at last. Was this the edge of the sought-after ‘Southern Continent’? Cook decided that the only way to know for certain was to follow the coast and see where it went. He did just that. For almost six months, the Endeavour sailed in and around the coast until, at the end of March, Cook confidently concluded that New Zealand was, in fact, made up of two major islands and, therefore, unrelated to Terra Australis Incognita. There was certainly no southern land mass in this part of the ocean and with that recognition, as Banks put it, came ‘the total demolition of our aerial fabric called continent’.

Banks and Solander botanised whenever they could though the circumstances were not as pleasant as they had been on Tahiti. The Maori people, who had not seen any Europeans since Abel Tasman’s minimal contact with them on South Island in 1642, were variously curious, friendly and outright hostile and warlike. But the plant collection, consisting entirely of plants new to European science, was significant and outnumbered those from the places that the ship had already visited.

Together with his officers, Cook now decided to sail back to England by way of the East Indies and the Cape of Good Hope, because it was too risky at this time of year to go back by Cape Horn.[47] This meant that Cook was hoping to meet the land which Abel Tasman had discovered in 1642, to which he gave the name Van Diemen’s Land, and to follow its coast northward until reaching its northern extremity.[48] Van Diemen’s Land was shown on one of the maps Cook had with him, which had been drawn by Alexander Dalrymple, and which he had initially given to Banks.[49] So, on 1 April 1770, the Endeavour sailed westward towards the eastern coast of New Holland.

A little over a fortnight later, at a place Cook called Point Hicks (near the present border of Victoria and New South Wales), land was spotted extending to the northeast and to the west but nothing was seen to the south where Van Diemen’s Land was supposed to be. Cook continued on the course he had decided upon when he was about to leave New Zealand. He turned the Endeavour to face north and began sailing along the coast of New Holland.

On 27 April, Cook, Solander and Banks, with four rowers, attempted to land but the surf beat them back. The next day, 28 April, Cook took the ship a little further up the coast, where there appeared to be an opening like a harbour, in which he anchored the ship. It had initially been called Stingray Bay but a little over a week later, Cook, in recognition of Banks and Solander, renamed it Botany Bay.

The first encounter with the local people was tense. They carried spears and the British fired a few shots into the air. Fortunately, no one was hurt. After that, the locals were wary of contact. Banks and Solander saw no one when they were ashore collecting although they suspected there were people about. After a few days they had collected so much Banks was afraid their haul would spoil before they had time to dry and press it in their collection books.

Banks and Solander already had enough natural history specimens, not just plants, but birds and insects as well, to keep them busy for a very long time. Cook had no reason to remain longer than it took to replenish the ship’s water supplies. On 6 May 1770, the Endeavour left its anchorage and began its voyage northward in the Tasman Sea.

Cook sailed close by the coast, close enough for Banks to see the land with the help of his telescope, and even make out the kind of trees that grew and the birds that populated the shore. Though he saw fires, he didn’t see any people. On 23 May, Banks got his first opportunity since leaving Botany Bay to collect. While he was away, those still on board spotted nearly twenty local people gathering on the beach though they soon retreated into the surrounding forest.

For the next few weeks the ship made its way up the coast, stopping infrequently and giving little time for Banks and Solander to collect much. Nothing remarkable was noted but then, ‘scarce were we warm in our beds when we were calld up with the alarming news of the ship being fast ashore upon a rock’.[50] The ship, now inside the Great Barrier Reef, to the northeast of a point of land Cook named Cape Tribulation, had ‘struck and stuck fast’, and was being cut into by coral.[51]

The pumps were worked to their limits and everything was done, including throwing overboard much of the ballast and all the guns on the deck, to float the ship. Banks confessed that he was on the point of packing everything up he could save and ‘prepared myself for the worst’.[52] By a combination of luck and skill, the ship, still leaking, was made to sail and Cook, carefully avoiding shoals and shallow water, began looking for somewhere on the shore where he could repair it. On 17 June, Cook, having spotted a likely place, was finally able to moor the ship in the mouth of a river.

It took seven weeks for the repairs to be made in the inlet of what Cook came to call Endeavour River (present-day Cooktown, Queensland). Banks and Solander did very well, even better than at Botany Bay: altogether they described almost 1000 species.[53] Cook had his mind on other matters. The ship was almost repaired and it was time to leave. On 4 August, Cook moved the ship from its mooring. For almost three weeks, he gingerly steered it northward, mostly between the coast and the Great Barrier Reef, avoiding shoals and visible coral formations until, on 20 August, the Endeavour reached the northernmost point of land, which Cook named York Cape (now Cape York).

Cook was close to waters that had been well charted by earlier European explorers. One important question remained unresolved, however: was the northern part of New Holland, where the ship now stood, attached to the southern coast of New Guinea as shown on several contemporary maps; or were these two land masses separated by a channel or a strait, supposedly discovered by the Spanish explorer Luis Vaez de Torres in 1606, the track of which was shown on Dalrymple’s map and which Cook believed existed?[54] As he sailed around the Cape, clinging to the coast, there was always water to starboard: the only land he saw was the coast on his port side. Cook concluded that he was in a strait, to which he gave the name Endeavour and which formed a part of the track Torres had taken more than one hundred and fifty years earlier. As he kept sailing in a westerly direction, the strait widened and led directly into the Arafura Sea and eventually to the heavily populated island of Java.

Batavia (present-day Jakarta), where the Endeavour anchored on 9 October 1770, had been the centre of the Dutch East India Company’s Asian trade network since the early seventeenth century, its harbour frequently teeming with European ships on their way to and from the East Indies.[55] Here, Cook could ensure that the ship would be expertly repaired in order for it to make it back safely to England. He could send his first despatches and a copy of his journal to the Admiralty, and the ship’s company could, for the first time since they were in Rio de Janeiro almost two years earlier, write precious letters home with some certainty that they would get to their destinations – it was from letters written here that Londoners, reading reports in the newspapers, first learned of the Endeavour’s safe arrival in Batavia.[56] Unfortunately, for the ship’s company, they were now exposed to a range of tropical diseases against which they had no protection. Many became ill, including Banks and Solander. The surgeon, William Monkhouse, was one of the first to die, followed quickly by his mate; then Charles Green’s servant and three more men.

On 25 December 1770, the Endeavour was ready to resume its voyage home. ‘There was not I believe a man in the ship but gave his utmost aid to getting up the Anchor, so completely tird was every one of the unwholesome air of this place’, wrote Banks.[57]

The worst fatalities, however, happened when the ship was back at sea heading for the Cape of Good Hope. On 24 January 1771 Herman Spöring died, who had acted as Banks’s secretary and also produced some fine drawings; two days later, Sydney Parkinson died and two days after that it was Charles Green’s turn. Banks’s accompanying suite, which had already been reduced by the earlier deaths of Richmond, Dorlton and Buchan, was reduced to three. Solander, Briscoe and Roberts were all that remained of the original eight. There were also deaths among the ship’s company and these continued as the ship made its way through the Atlantic.

On 14 March the ship anchored in the harbour of Cape Town. A month later they were on their way again and after a short stay at the British East India Company’s island of St Helena, Cook set a course for the English coast which he hoped to reach without stopping en route. The survivors were desperate to get home.

At three o’clock on 12 July 1771, a little short of three years on its circumnavigation, the Endeavour, the first British scientific voyage of its kind, landed on the coast of southern England at Deal.