Planting the World

Cook’s achievements were many. He was both a skilled navigator and a superb surveyor and cartographer. He not only discovered that New Zealand was formed of two islands and that the east coast of New Holland, from Point Hicks in the south to Cape York in the north, was continuous, but he surveyed the coasts and produced the first charts of both places. During the voyage of the Endeavour, besides producing these entirely new charts, he improved upon and corrected those already existing of Tahiti and the area around Cape York.[58]

But it was not Cook who was fêted on the Endeavour’s return.

Banks, cutting a more dashing figure, and Solander, depicted as fatherly and studious, were immediately taken into the nation’s heart as heroes. They were the talk of the town and their company was much sought after.

The most eminent person eager to meet Banks was King George III. The meeting happened on Friday, 2 August 1771, at St James’s. Francis Seymour Conway, Lord Beauchamp, who knew Banks from Eton and Oxford, and whose father was the Lord Chamberlain, performed the introduction (Banks and Beauchamp would meet again many years later under very different circumstances).[59] The newspaper articles described nothing of what happened that day between the King and Banks apart from commenting that ‘[Banks] was received very graciously.’

The son of Frederick, the Prince of Wales, who had died in 1751, George ascended the throne in October 1760, on the death of his grandfather George II. George III was five years older than Banks and he had taken a keen interest in the voyage of HMS Endeavour, supporting it ardently and committing £4000 of his own money to it.[60] So he had a stake in knowing what had been collected. London’s botanic community was certainly aware that the King was anxious to see Banks and Solander, even before they arrived.[61] Less than a fortnight after their first meeting, the King requested that both Banks and Solander, accompanied by Sir John Pringle – who at the time was Queen Charlotte’s personal physician, a leading member of the Council of the Royal Society and a friend of Banks and Solander’s – should meet him at his summer home in Richmond on Saturday for ‘a private conference … on the discoveries they made on their last voyage’.[62] As a member of the Council of the Royal Society, Pringle was very interested in the voyage of the Endeavour and would have been involved in aspects of the planning for the observation of the transit of Venus.[63] After the ship returned, Pringle met Banks and Solander, both separately and together, sometimes at his home and other times at Banks’s home in New Burlington Street, and on many other occasions, finding out about those aspects of the voyage that interested him most.[64]

At their meeting with the King, Solander and Banks no doubt brought examples of the plants they had collected.[65] Newspaper articles at the time report that Solander had already been to the royal gardens at Kew and had planted some samples from the voyage – ‘they have been set in the Royal Gardens … and thrive as well as in their natural soil’, commented one article.[66] For the rest of that month, Banks and Solander made frequent visits to Richmond during which time the King also examined their collection of plant drawings.[67]

When, in the year following the triumphant return of the Endeavour, the government decided on a second voyage to the Pacific, Banks began planning it as if it were his own. He convinced the First Lord of the Admiralty to let him radically alter the structure of HMS Resolution, the main ship, to accommodate him and his substantial entourage and equipment. He had gone too far. The ship was deemed unseaworthy on its first trial. Cook agreed, so did the Admiralty and the Navy Board, and the ship was ordered to be returned to its original state. Banks was devastated and angry at this turn of events and removed himself, his entourage and equipment from the ship and instead chartered a vessel, the Sir Lawrence, for his own scientific expedition to Iceland by way of the Hebrides.[68]

The Resolution debacle was undoubtedly a great disappointment to Banks but from it he learned a valuable lesson. He no longer tried to impose his will on others but sought instead to influence and persuade. In time he managed to restore his friendly relations with the Admiralty and Cook.

After the expedition to Iceland, and apart from a brief trip to Holland in 1773, Banks never went to sea again, but by then he had already spent four and a half years on ships sailing over much of the globe and collecting natural-history specimens. In this respect, Banks’s experiences set him apart from most naturalists of the time, but there was more to it than that, for during the time he was at sea he learned about how ships worked; about shipboard spaces, and how they might be altered for global botanical projects; and about how naval careers advanced and how much commanders mattered. Though Banks never went to sea again after he was twenty-nine, ships and the sea shaped the rest of his adult life.

Instead of travelling Banks established himself at home in England. In the summer of 1777, he moved from his accommodations in New Burlington Street to a grand house in Soho Square where his sister Sarah Sophia joined him. In the following year, at the age of thirty-five, he was elected President of the Royal Society, a post he occupied until his death in 1820. In 1779, Banks married Dorothea Hugessen and she joined the Soho Square household. A pattern of life was laid down: most of the year was spent in London, with a couple of months in the autumn at his country estates.[69]

Soho Square was much more than just a family home. It housed Banks’s personal library of books (in many languages and exceeding 20,000 titles at his death) and an unknown quantity of pamphlets and drawings;[70] as well as a vast herbarium, and zoological and mineral collections.[71] From 1773, Solander, Linnaeus’s disciple, was always near Banks, helping him with his collections, especially those gathered in the Pacific and on the Iceland expedition.[72] Soho Square’s international scholarly resources – including Solander: in himself, a major attraction – were made freely available to interested visitors from all parts of the world. Eventually, a five-volume catalogue of the library’s holdings was published and made public, under the guidance of Jonas Dryander, a Linnaean-trained Swede like Solander, who became Banks’s librarian following the latter’s death in 1782.[73]

In the study, close by the library and herbarium, were volumes of letters, both incoming and copies of those going out. It is estimated that at his death these volumes contained 100,000 letters and represented a global correspondence network of several thousand people from all walks of life, many of whom became life-long friends.[74]

Banks clearly lived a busy and satisfying life in England and yet, as he confided to his friend Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador to the Neapolitan court, he sorely missed the excitement of the scientific adventures of his youth.[75]

Although Banks and Solander were initially presented to the King at his summer home in Richmond, he soon moved to Kew, in a property that then stood in the gardens. The story goes back to the early 1730s when Frederick, the Prince of Wales, George’s father, leased a house opposite to what is now called Kew Palace.[76] This house, which soon came to be called the White House, was designed to be a royal residence and act as a family retreat during the summer months. Not long after signing the lease, the beginnings of a garden were laid out and plants were brought into cultivation. Over the following years the gardens were expanded as more land was bought.

On 20 March 1751, Frederick died unexpectedly aged forty-four and the house and gardens passed to his wife, Augusta, the Dowager Princess of Wales. With her close botanical advisers, especially John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute, who had his own magnificent garden at Luton Hoo, Augusta, who spent part of each year at the White House, was able to expand Kew gardens. Many exotic plants were donated by Bute himself and leading London botanists, many of whom he knew well – other plants were purchased from London nurserymen.[77] A key moment in the history of the gardens for the next few decades was the appointment in 1759 of William Aiton to be in charge of the physic garden.[78] Aiton was born in 1733 in Lanarkshire, Scotland and came to London in 1754, where he found work at the Chelsea Physic Garden, then under the direction of Philip Miller. Between Aiton and Bute, Kew’s stock of plants became large and diverse. By the end of the 1760s, with plants from many parts of the world, notably North America, Kew was, according to many contemporary observers, Britain’s best-stocked garden and rivalled similar royal gardens in Europe, especially the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the Schönbrunn in Vienna.[79]

Then another tragedy struck the royal family. Augusta died in February 1772. George III, who had been spending the summer months at Richmond Lodge, now removed his family to Augusta’s White House, which Queen Charlotte, his wife, began to redesign for their occupancy.[80] Bute disappeared from the scene and the royal gardens at Kew now came under the King’s direct control.

Banks’s relationship with Kew certainly went back to 1764, for it was then that he met Aiton, possibly through Daniel Solander or James Lee at the Vineyard Nursery, Hammersmith.[81]

For the next few years Banks had little more to do with Kew than to visit and observe.

By the end of 1776, however, Banks’s relationship with Kew had changed significantly.[82] Banks, himself, had trouble defining his new role: all he could say, as he tried to describe it in a letter to the Spanish Ambassador in London in 1796, was that for many years he ‘exercis[ed] a kind of superintendence over His Royal botanic gardens’.[83]

The ‘superintendence’, as he called it, might have been the single most important part of Banks’s exceedingly busy life. It was always on his mind and, whenever the opportunity presented itself for a naturalist or gardener to accompany a voyage, Banks tried to ensure that Kew’s needs were not forgotten.

This was the beginning of a very long relationship between Banks and the King. It would last for almost forty years and ended only in 1810 when George’s debilitating illness made contact impossible. Banks would meet the King whenever possible on a Saturday, usually at the royal gardens at Kew, and they would spend several hours walking, talking about plants and other topics of mutual interest, particularly about the development of the gardens at Kew.[84]

The stakes were very high. Plants mattered. The greater the splendour, the finer and rarer the visual and sensual experience they offered, the better. For the first few decades of Kew’s existence, its stock of plants had been the result of donations and exchanges with similar gardens. Many new varieties from all over the world found themselves at Kew by this route but there had not yet been any attempt at a systematic collection in the wild. By the time of the change in Banks’s relationship with the royal garden, however, this had altered dramatically. Kew’s first plant collector was already abroad, and over the following thirty years, he and Banks became very close.

PART I

Preface

Between 1777 and 1779 Joseph Banks’s life changed in several important ways that set a pattern for the rest of his days. In 1777, he moved with his sister, Sarah Sophia, into his permanent home in Soho Square. It was a large house with enough space to accommodate his domestic life and his professional interests. His great library focused principally on natural history and its associated texts, manuscripts, drawings and specimens. In 1778, Banks was elected President of the Royal Society after having been a Fellow for just over a decade; he was only thirty-five years old. In 1779, he married Dorothea Huggesen, who moved into Soho Square with him and Sarah Sophia. In the same year, Banks leased and subsequently bought Spring Grove, a property with extensive grounds in Heston, Middlesex. Over time Banks had gardens laid out, and greenhouses and hothouses built. Produce grown there was sent to Soho Square and this was where Banks carried out a number of important horticultural experiments. Banks also began what became an annual pilgrimage to manage his Lincolnshire estates, centred on his country home at Revesby Abbey, where he, his wife and sister would spend every September and October.

In contrast to the English focus of his domestic life in London and Lincolnshire, Banks was being drawn in other, more outward-looking and global directions. In 1776, Francis Masson, Kew’s first official collector since 1772, became Banks’s direct responsibility. Masson had already been to the Cape of Good Hope collecting for the royal gardens at Kew, and he was on his way to Madeira to continue his assignment when Banks took over his direction. During the next three decades, while Masson travelled through the Atlantic region, Banks handled all his preparations, telling him where and what to collect, arranging his finances and managing the receipt of his specimens for Kew.

Banks, already a wealthy man, now settled down as a county notable and the President of the Royal Society. His contact with Masson offered Banks something entirely different, something unpredictable that must have reminded him of his experiences on the Endeavour. Banks could share vicariously in the excitement of finding new plants to send to Kew, of making Kew a place where plants from all over the globe could thrive, far from their native habitats. It gave Banks, as he said himself, the greatest of pleasures, to harness the intellectual resources of Soho Square, its library and herbarium, to the practical horticultural experience and knowledge of Kew, all for the benefit of the King and his garden. Banks would continue pushing these projects into new geographic regions, whenever the opportunities arose.

These early collectors, including Masson, were mostly Scots – they were generally better trained and more knowledgeable about botany than their English counterparts. Most of these men sought out Banks rather than the other way round. They expanded their own and Banks’s geographical horizon, collecting plants in parts of the world – the Pacific Northwest, China, southwest Africa and the Coromandel Coast – whose botany was hardly known in Europe.

1

1772: Masson Roams the Atlantic

Joseph Banks did not choose his first collector himself. Francis Masson had been appointed as Kew Garden’s first plant collector by Sir John Pringle. Sir John had been a close friend of the royal family even before 1764 when he was made Physician in Ordinary to Queen Charlotte. Liked and trusted by the King, he had replaced the Earl of Bute as adviser to the royal garden at Kew. Though, as he admitted, ‘I myself am so little a Botanist’, he was very well connected in cosmopolitan scientific circles, and would have acted as the King’s agent in selecting Masson, no doubt taking the advice of the head gardener at Kew, William Aiton.[1]

Masson had been working under Aiton, as a gardener at Kew, and had made a good impression. He was a fellow Scot, born in Aberdeen in 1741, but little is known about his life before Kew.[2] Although Banks took no credit for selecting Masson, saying Pringle did it all, he does seem to have had a hand in deciding where he was sent.[3] According to Masson, writing in 1796, it was Banks who ‘suggested to his Majesty the idea of sending a person, professionally a gardener, to the Cape’.[4]

Aside from recommending the destination, it’s unlikely Banks had anything to do with any instructions for Masson. Banks was busy planning a second voyage to the Pacific with Cook. This, and the intense pressure of classifying the huge botanical collection from the first voyage, and preparing the botanical drawings made on the Endeavour, took up most of his time.[5]

The choice of the Cape as the destination for Kew’s first plant collector, may not seem obvious; it was under Dutch rule for one thing. However, other circumstances did recommend it. Banks and Solander had spent some time there, from 14 March to 16 April in 1771, when the Endeavour made its last substantial stop before returning to England.[6] The plant collecting had not been as productive as they had expected, because, for almost half their stay, Solander had been confined to bed suffering from a fever. Referring to what possible botanical treasures might be found beyond the port, Banks commented ‘I can say but little … not having had an opportunity of making even one excursion owing in great measure to Dr Solanders illness.’[7] Even so, in the vicinity of the ship’s anchorage, they managed to collect more than three hundred varieties of plants, including a gardenia, an acacia and a heather.[8]

Observing the plants being cultivated by Dutch farmers in the fields around, and in the Dutch East India Company’s botanic garden, Banks concluded that though the climate was milder than that of England, the food crops, at least, were pretty much the same. This would have led him to conclude that the Cape area might be ideal for collecting plants that would be easy to grow at Kew, unlike the tropical plants that needed a protective habitat and artificial heat.

This observation would have been confirmed by the fact that Kew was already growing plants from the Cape, many of which had been introduced to the garden in the 1730s by Philip Miller, head gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden.[9] Not only had there been these living plants for Masson to see but Hans Sloane’s herbarium was then at the British Museum, which contained an impressive collection of Cape plants that had come into Sloane’s possession from other collections and collectors.[10] Also, since the early years of the seventeenth century, Cape plants figured in specialised texts, such as the famous Hortus Cliffortianus, compiled by Linnaeus, and many of these publications were at the British Museum or in Banks’s home.[11]

These factors alone recommended the Cape as a collecting destination but also important was the fact that maritime contact between it and Europe was excellent. Table Bay, the Cape’s harbour, was always full of foreign ships, primarily from the Dutch, Swedish and English East India Companies either heading into or returning from the Indian Ocean.[12] When the Endeavour arrived in Table Bay on 14 March 1770, Cook noted that there were already sixteen ships at anchor; over the following month he reported that four British East India Company and seven Dutch East India Company ships left for Europe.[13] With so many ships bound for Europe and with a sailing time of less than three months, living plants would have their best chance of survival at sea if shipped from the Cape.

What may have sealed the decision was that when Banks and Solander were at the Cape, they had met a Swedish soldier, Franz Pehr Oldenburg, who was working for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape and who was very interested in natural history, having already amassed a personal herbarium.[14] Before Banks and Solander left the Cape for England, they had made an agreement with Oldenburg to collect specimens for them after their departure. The specimens arrived in London sometime in 1772.[15] If Oldenburg was still at the Cape when Masson arrived, the benefits would be substantial, since, in addition to his local botanical knowledge, he spoke Dutch, which Masson did not.

It was decided that Masson would travel to the Cape by the beginning of April 1772 at the latest.[16] On 5 May Cook received an order from John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty, informing him that Francis Masson would be joining the ship for a passage to the Cape of Good Hope.[17] He would thus be sailing with Banks for part of the way, but five days after the order from Sandwich, the Resolution was given its first trial for its intended Pacific voyage. At the mouth of the Thames, Robert Cooper, the ship’s first lieutenant, declared to Cook that he would not risk the ship at sea in its present top-heavy state. The Resolution was ordered back to Sheerness, and the superstructure, which Banks had designed and which the Admiralty had built for him, was removed.[18] Learning of this Banks withdrew from the voyage and took his personal, and rather large, entourage with him.

In its new slimmed-down version, the Resolution, in company with HMS Adventure, left Plymouth on 13 July 1772. Masson had new scientific companions – Johann Forster and his son Georg Forster, the two naturalists who were hurriedly assigned to the ship following Banks’s departure. After two short stops, the first at Madeira and the second in the Cape Verde Islands, the ships anchored in Table Bay. Masson stepped into a bustling town at the foot of Table Mountain, a Dutch settlement with a population of around 5000 people, about half of whom were white: the black population was mostly composed of slaves owned by the Dutch East India Company and imported from East Africa and the Indian Ocean region.[19]

What instructions he carried with him we don’t know but within less than two months, on 10 December 1772, Masson headed to the interior, in an easterly direction, accompanied by Franz Pehr Oldenburg, who was still at the Cape, and an unnamed Khoikhoi, who was in charge of the wagon driven by eight oxen.[20]

Masson’s report of his expedition, written to Sir John Pringle, was read to the Fellows of the Royal Society in London. It was short and, apart from providing some information about where the party went, it contained few details. What we do know is that they got as far as the town of Swellendam in the Western Cape, about one hundred and fifty miles to the east of the Cape. (When Cook was at the Cape he reported that the Dutch had settled an area which, at its greatest extent, exceeded 900 miles and 28 days’ journey time.)[21] On 20 January 1773, after a two-day stay in Swellendam, they set off to return to the Cape by the same route they had taken out. Masson mentioned that he had collected and sent seeds of several species of heather back to Kew, which had germinated and been successfully grown there while he was still at the Cape.[22]

On his return to Cape Town, probably in February 1773, Masson was in for an unexpected treat: a fellow plant collector and a trained botanist had arrived in town.[23] Carl Peter Thunberg, who was born in the same year as Banks but in southern Sweden, had studied under Linnaeus at Uppsala University and had taken a medical degree. Like other disciples of Linnaeus, he left Sweden for foreign shores. Thunberg arrived in Amsterdam in August 1770 where he worked on plant collections from other parts of the Dutch Empire. In December 1771, he began his long journey to the East via the Cape where he arrived on 16 April 1772 in order to collect plants and learn Dutch. After acquainting himself with Cape Town and its local botany, including day trips into the surrounding countryside, on 7 September, Thunberg set out with three European companions, two Khoikhois and an oxen-driven cart for the interior: first to the north and then eventually in the direction of Swellendam and beyond. They were back in Cape Town on 2 January 1773.

At some point between February and September 1773, Masson and Thunberg met and decided to travel together on a botanical expedition. On 11 September they set out from Cape Town and headed in a northerly direction for about 100 miles from their point of departure. Masson could see that the decision to go to the Cape to collect was the right one as he looked down on the scene unfolding before him, on the sea coast from St Helena Bay back to the Cape: ‘The whole country’, he wrote, ‘affords a fine field for botany, being enamelled with the greatest number of flowers I ever saw, of exquisite beauty and fragrance.’[24] Having reached their most northerly point, the party turned southeast, heading again to Swellendam, and finally reached the ocean at Mossel Bay on 16 November. There they turned inland and made their way again in a southeasterly direction until they met the ocean for a second time at Algoa Bay (near present-day Port Elizabeth) on 14 December, almost five hundred miles from Cape Town. They had been away for months. They pushed on a little further to the east until they were on the banks of the Sundays River, which flows into Algoa Bay. But the Khoikhoi people they employed refused to go any further. The oxen were sick and the carts near collapse.[25] Reluctantly, they turned back and, retracing their steps, they arrived in Cape Town on 29 January 1774.