Planting the World

Several days passed and letters from Blagden, Dryander and Banks crisscrossed but finally, thanks to Blagden’s personal intervention and Banks’s arguments in Au’s favour, Nepean withdrew his objection and Au was given the go-ahead on 15 September 1785 to join Thompson’s convoy to Africa.[58]

Blagden seemed to know instinctively that he had got the right man. As he told Banks: ‘He is literally the only person that offered; & yet fortunately much superior to any one we could have expected.’ Almost without pause Blagden listed his attributes: ‘his education has been far beyond his present situation in life,’ he had an excellent writing style, could draw, knew many languages and several sciences, ‘attended the hospitals in London’, knew surgery, ‘is bold, active & animated with the most laudable ambition of being distinguished’.[59] Fine words, indeed.

Blagden spoke with Thompson who expected Au in Portsmouth – ‘everything seems well settled,’ Blagden assured Banks.[60] Banks now drew up his promised ‘Instructions’. The document detailed every aspect of Au’s substantial task: if he found signs of agriculture, he was to report on the nature of the soil, the tools and manure used, and the crops harvested; he was to collect specimens of everything that was cultivated; he was to describe the topography, the water quality, the forests, and take samples of every living botanical specimen, flowers, fruits, roots and seeds. And, without detracting from this objective, he was ‘to collect such seeds as he shall find ripe or bulbous roots as he may dig up which on his return home may furnish the Royal Gardens at Kew with something valuable to that magnificent collection’.[61] There is no doubt that Banks had high hopes for this mission. The settlement of convicts was not his aim – that was the government’s business: appropriating the natural history of somewhere new was, and he relished the anticipated results.

HMS Grampus and HMS Nautilus sailed for Africa on 28 September 1785. Au was on board but not under that name. Both the instructions drawn up for him and his entry in the ship’s muster announced a change of name: the man whose education, according to Blagden, far surpassed his station in life was now known as Antoni, and then Anthony Pantaleon Howe – it wouldn’t be the last time he changed his name.[62]

By the turn of the year the two ships were nearing the point where they would separate. Then disaster struck. On 16 January 1786, Commodore Thompson suddenly became very ill and died the very next day. George Tripp, the second-in-command, took over the Grampus and with it charge of the Africa station. The command of HMS Nautilus fell to the nineteen-year-old Thomas Boulden Thompson, the late Commodore’s ‘nephew’ and heir.[63]

On 2 February, the two ships parted as planned. The voyage to southwest Africa now began and it proved to be long and dull but, finally, on 21 March 1786, the ship arrived in St Helena Bay, about 150 kilometres to the north of Cape Town. The plan was to survey the coast northward from this point, including finding Das Voltas Bay, whose precise location was disputed.

It didn’t begin well and it continued badly. On 11 April they found Das Voltas Bay but the soil looked barren and dry. On 27 April they entered Walvis Bay and met four local people whose homes, located some way inland, looked poverty-stricken, more like huts than houses: they resembled, Thompson remarked, ‘the halves of bee hives, with the backs to the wind’.[64] It was all too depressing and on 17 May, Thompson decided that he had seen enough and took the Nautilus to the west heading for the island of St Helena, leaving the African coast for good. His terse comments in his journal on that day said it all: ‘completed the Survey of the Coast from Lat 32.47.47 S. to 16.0.0 S. without finding a Drop of fresh Water or seeing a Tree’.[65]

HMS Nautilus was back in Spithead on 23 July 1786. Immediately Thompson went to London to see Lord Sydney. Over a period of three weeks, the two men discussed the voyage and Thompson’s conclusions.[66] Sydney would have found the disappointing news painful. The government had invested so much in the hope of a settlement in southwest Africa and now it was over.[67]

A settlement at Das Voltas was deemed impossible and a substitute place was desperately needed. There were at least 1300 felons on hulks who had been sentenced to transportation and they needed to be moved.[68] On 18 August, Lord Sydney wrote a letter to the Treasury. The report of the officers of the Nautilus, he remarked, concluded that ‘the coast [was] sandy and barren, and from other Causes unfit for a settlement.’ He then went on: ‘His Majesty has thought it advisable to fix on Botany Bay situated on the coast of New South Wales.’[69] Banks was not mentioned by name as recommending the destination, but, incorrectly, Cook was.

There was no need for a survey. Cook had already done that when the Endeavour was on the coast. Events moved very quickly. By the end of the month Lord Sydney had informed the Admiralty of the decision and of the King’s command that a warship and a tender should be prepared to accompany a fleet of ships carrying 750 convicts to Botany Bay. A month after that, the Admiralty confirmed that they had ordered two ships to be fitted and that the lead ship, HMS Sirius, would be under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip.[70]

The newspapers were soon on to the story.[71] Botany Bay and transportation became inseparably linked.[72] The Europeanisation of Australia would now begin.

Anthony Pantaleon Howe had returned with a collection of seeds from some of the places HMS Nautilus anchored.[73] They went to Kew. Though it was not a voluminous collection, Banks was pleased with the way Howe had conducted himself.

Howe would soon be sent on another, and much more, daring mission.

3

1780: The First Circumnavigation of Archibald Menzies

A little before Banks became involved in the potential location of penal colonies, he had been focusing on the Pacific Northwest. It began with the fur trade, in particular the pelt of the sea otter, but, as usual, Banks saw an opportunity for collecting plants.

On 7 October 1780, the Resolution and the Discovery, the ships of Cook’s third Pacific voyage, anchored in Deptford, after a four-year voyage to find a passage linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The trip had been a disaster: no passage was found, Cook was killed in a skirmish on Hawaii on 14 February 1779, and his successor, Charles Clerke, had died on the return voyage.

The tragic news of Cook’s death had travelled overland across Russia to reach London many months before the return of the ships.[1] John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty, was nominally responsible both for the expedition and for the publication of its narrative. Whatever enthusiasm he may have had for the expedition, he lacked any for the publication and, no sooner had the ships docked, than he was in touch with Banks hoping for help. Montagu had all the journals of the voyage to hand but, as he told Banks, ‘I had so much trouble about the publication of the last two voyages, that I am cautious or rather unwilling to take upon me to decide in what manner & for whose emolument the work shall be undertaken.’[2] Banks immediately came to his aid and wrote to James King, who had taken command of HMS Discovery after Clerke died, asking him to write the narrative. King was delighted to accept and thereby came under the patronage of Banks, someone he admired and whom he referred to as ‘the common Center of we discoverers’.[3]

Until the ships returned, no one in London had any detailed knowledge of the expedition’s proceedings. It was all in the logs and journals, which had only arrived with the ships and would now be put at King’s disposal and, by extension, at that of Banks, who was in overall charge of the publishing project.

At some point during the writing of the narrative Banks must have learned, either by reading it in draft form or hearing of it from King, that during April 1778, while the Resolution and the Discovery lay at anchor in Nootka Sound (the indigenous name which Cook renamed King George’s Sound), Vancouver Island, the ships’ company, officers and crew alike, were treated to an unusual sight. Cook noted in his journal that no sooner had they entered the bay than they were surrounded by canoes filled with furs of various animals but, in particular, those of what Cook called the ‘sea beaver’ (but which we know as the sea otter). The indigenous people were there to trade and seemed to know what they were about and what they wanted. ‘For these things’, Cook remarked, ‘they took in exchange, Knives, chisels, pieces of iron & Tin, nails, Buttons, or any kind of metal. Beads they were not fond of and cloth of all kinds they rejected.’[4]

Banks would not have been surprised to learn this. Though he had never been to this part of the world he knew a lot about it. He would have known that the Russians, beginning with Vitus Bering’s expedition to the North Pacific in 1741, had discovered the fur-bearing mammals in the area and, soon afterwards, began trading them to the Chinese. He would have known that Georg Steller, the expedition’s naturalist, produced the first description of the sea otter and, particularly its pelt, the gloss of which, he reported, ‘surpasses the blackest velvet’.[5] Banks would also have been familiar with Peter Simon Pallas’s published account of his travels in Russia, which provided a detailed account of the trade in furs from Russia to China at the Siberian–Chinese border trading post of Kyakhta.[6] William Coxe’s 1780 publication, Account of the Russian Discoveries Between Asia and America, the first of its kind in English, also spoke glowingly of the trade in furs, and was only the latest in the long line of publications that discussed the Pacific fur trade.[7] Banks would have concluded from all this information that there was no reason why the British could not follow the Russians into this lucrative space.

The possibilities of a British-controlled Pacific fur trade had, in fact, already been advocated by both James Matra and Banks when their proposal for settling Australia, dated 23 August 1783, was put before the government.[8] The plan, it will be recalled, proposed a community of free settlers with the addition of American Loyalists who would produce for export to Britain and re-export to Europe a number of crops suited to the climate and which could be imported for cultivation from India, the nearby Spice Islands, New Zealand and elsewhere. Because Matra and Banks were imagining a settlement that would not be an expense to Britain, but rather increase its wealth, they proposed that commerce should be opened between New South Wales and the fur-rich Pacific coast which Cook had surveyed. The conclusive element, Matra and Banks emphasised, was the fantastic return on investment that the fur trade guaranteed. ‘The skins which they procured’, Matra and Banks wrote referring to Cook’s third voyage, ‘then sold in China at 400 hard Dollars each, though for the few they brought home, of the same quality, they only received about Ten Pounds each.’ And there was more. ‘As our situation in New South Wales, would enable us to carry on this Trade with the utmost facility, we should no longer be under the necessity of sending such immense quantities of Silver for the different Articles we import from the Chinese Empire’.

The government, as seen in a previous chapter, did not take up Matra’s proposal for settling Australia with free settlers and American Loyalists, and the commercial possibilities of a Pacific fur connection were not pursued. But the idea of British ships plying a trade between Nootka Sound and China remained attractive.

It got a tremendous boost when James King’s authoritative telling of Cook’s final voyage was published on 4 June 1784. King laid it out simply and starkly in a chapter in volume three which described the journey of the Resolution and the Discovery from Macao, the Portuguese settlement at the mouth of the Pearl River in southern China, to the main port city of Canton, almost 100 kilometres further up river. The whole stock of sea otter pelts that were sold in Canton fetched just under £2000. Considering that by the time the ships got to Canton, some of the pelts had already been sold on the Kamchatka Peninsula and others had been spoiled, this figure represented an enormous profit margin.[9] King also mentioned that some of the ship’s company were so obsessed by the potential wealth they were on the point of mutiny, intending to force the ships to return to the Pacific coast of America. Indeed, as it turned out, while they were in Canton two seamen from the Resolution commandeered the ship’s cutter. A search was made but to no avail. ‘It was supposed’, King wrote, ‘that these people had been seduced by the prevailing notion of making a fortune, by returning to the fur islands.’[10]

King remarked that the British fur trade should be an extension of the East India Company’s trade in Canton and, with two ships making the return voyage to Nootka Sound from Canton annually, they could bring as many sea-otter skins as possible to this lucrative market. At the time the East India Company held a monopoly of all British trade in most of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. King added that in order to have something with which to trade at Nootka Sound, each ship would need to carry five tons of unwrought iron, ‘a forge, and an expert smith, with a journeyman and apprentice, who might be ready to forge such tools, as it should appear the Indians were most desirous of … iron is the only sure commodity for their market.’[11]

At a price of just under £5, King’s three-volume account of Cook’s last voyage was not cheap. The entire print run, however, sold out in three days and a contemporary reviewer commented that second-hand sets were changing hands for more than twice the original price.[12] No doubt much of the attraction was the account of Cook’s death but some readers must have been keen to learn about the fur bonanza that was the Pacific Northwest.

Richard Cadman Etches was just the sort of person to be intrigued by the promise of the fur trade. Born in Derbyshire, Etches came to London in 1779, the same year as Cook died, and seems to have established himself quickly in the City’s tea and wine business, going into partnership with Robert Hanning Brooks.[13] Details about his activities are at best sketchy but on 13 March 1785, Etches met with Banks to discuss his proposal: to send two ships to the Pacific Northwest to obtain furs for trade in Canton as King had recommended.

Banks thought that Etches should be more ambitious. Japan, for example, should be included as a possible market.[14] Banks had been led to think about Japan as a commercial possibility probably as early as 1774 when John Blankett, a British naval officer, wrote a report to Lord Sandwich at the Admiralty on the potential of Japan and the nearby islands as a market.[15] But what impressed Banks the most was most likely the visit to Soho Square by Carl Peter Thunberg, who had been with Francis Masson collecting plants at the Cape, and who had been at the Dutch East India Company settlement in the Bay of Nagasaki for more than a year in 1775 and 1776. Thunberg had stayed at Banks’s home in late 1778 and early 1779 on his way back to Sweden from Japan, and while he was there he had spoken to Banks about the potential of Japan as a market.[16]

Banks agreed to write to Thunberg, who by then was in Uppsala, asking him to expand on the Japanese market and, specifically, his opinion of the likelihood of British ships being allowed to trade in the ‘northern Provinces’, something which Thunberg had said was possible.[17]

Banks also suggested that Etches should think bigger in terms of how he wanted to finance the venture. Etches agreed with him and, in addition to the £20,000 subscription he had arranged to fit out the two ships, he would try to increase the nominal capital to £200,000 if the first venture were a success – which he didn’t doubt it would be.[18]

Not long after the meeting with Banks, Etches floated his new business, which he appropriately called ‘The King George’s Sound Company’. It had nine partners: Richard Cadman Etches, his brother John, a number of other merchants, and two naval officers from Cook’s third voyage, George Dixon, who served as an armourer on HMS Resolution, and Nathaniel Portlock, who was appointed on HMS Discovery as master’s mate and then transferred to HMS Resolution following Cook’s death.

Portlock may already have worked for Etches but apparently he didn’t know Dixon. Banks, however, did know him. Dixon had been in contact with him in late August 1784 to propose an expedition across America starting in Quebec. Dixon wanted it to be as much a scientific expedition as a commercial one. He volunteered to undertake the astronomical work and to assign David Nelson, whom he knew from the Resolution, to be responsible for natural history. As Banks had recommended Nelson to be the naturalist on the Resolution, he would have been pleased with this suggestion.[19] All the other personnel, thirty or forty men, Dixon thought he could get in Quebec where there was a greater likelihood of finding men who knew the trade and even some indigenous languages.[20] In his reply Banks welcomed the idea but thought the time was not right, since a new nation, the United States, had just been declared on that continent.[21]

As a consolation, Banks may have suggested to Dixon that he should attach himself to a commercial venture to the Pacific, and it is very likely that it was Banks who told Dixon about Etches.[22] However the connections were made, what was important was that by including two veterans of Cook’s final voyage, Etches was drawing a line directly from Cook to himself, coupling London, again, to Nootka Sound.

Thunberg’s reply to Banks has not survived, but it is highly likely that he repeated his positive opinion of Japan. In Etches’ proposal to the East India Company to allow him to trade at Canton, he referred to his having received ‘the most flattering encouragement from conversation of Gentlemen of the greatest eminence and abilities (for knowledge of Japan)’.[23] The East India Company granted approval in the early part of May for the venture to proceed and to open up commercial relations with Japan.[24]

Etches then bought two ships and began fitting them out for the voyage. By the beginning of June the ships were being provisioned and then a problem was discovered. Etches also needed the permission of the South Sea Company, whose charter included the Northwest Coast of the Pacific, to trade. Negotiations, conducted by George Rose, Secretary to the Treasury, were quickly begun and by 4 August, all the paperwork was in order.[25]

On 29 August, a distinguished party assembled at Deptford to inspect the ships. In the group were George Rose and Joseph Banks; his schoolfriend Constantine Phipps, now Baron Mulgrave, a member of the Board of Control for India and the Board of Trade; and Sir John Dick, British Consul at Leghorn from 1754 to 1776, a civil servant who had taken an early and keen interest in the venture.[26] Though the ships were ready they had still not been named. George Rose named the larger of the two the King George, and Banks, charged with naming the smaller ship, christened it Queen Charlotte.[27]

And so, on 31 August 1785, the first two ships of the King George’s Sound Company left Gravesend, but it took two more weeks, until 16 September, before they could clear the English coast for the long voyage to the Pacific Northwest by way of Cape Horn and the Hawaii Islands. Portlock was in overall command of the expedition, and captained the King George, while Dixon took responsibility for the Queen Charlotte.[28]

Too impatient to wait for news of the first expedition, which was somewhere in the Pacific, Etches began to plan a second.[29] He found another veteran of Cook’s voyages to command it – James Colnett, who had served as a midshipman for three and a half years under Cook on HMS Resolution on his second voyage to the Pacific.[30]

In the summer of 1786, Colnett, now a first lieutenant, took leave from the Royal Navy (it was peacetime and many naval officers were on half-pay), and, in his own words: ‘Having been recommended to a Company of Merchants trading to the NW side of America, the beginning of July 1786 I receiv’d a Letter from their Secretary offering me the command of a Cutter to perform a Voyage to KING GEORGE’S or NOOTKA SOUND …’[31] That ship was named the Prince of Wales. Its tender was the Princess Royal, under the command of Charles Duncan, a naval man like Colnett.

Preparations for the voyage were quick and even though they missed their sailing date of early August, on 23 September 1786 the ships left Deptford for the Pacific. The second Etches expedition was on its way and this time Banks had a botanical collector on board – Archibald Menzies.

Menzies had first written to Banks at the end of May 1784, when he sent him a letter and a small parcel of seeds from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Menzies explained that he was doing this ‘at the request of Dr. Hope, Professor of Botany at Edinburgh’.[32] While Banks did not know Menzies, he certainly knew John Hope well, having been corresponding with him since 1766 at least.[33] Hope, a physician and an early and ardent supporter of the Linnaean system, had been Regius Professor of Botany in the University of Edinburgh since 1768 and in charge of the Royal Gardens (forerunner of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh).[34] Menzies had been born in Weem near Aberfeldy, Perthshire in 1754, the son of a tenant farmer. He had attended Hope’s botany lectures while studying medicine at the university. He also worked for Hope as a gardener between 1775 and 1778.[35]

Menzies never got his medical degree but may have been granted a licence to practise surgery. This would have been enough for him to apply as a surgeon’s mate in the navy, which he did in 1782, and joined HMS Nonsuch that year.[36] A year later he was on HMS Assistance as assistant surgeon and, when he wrote to Banks, he was stationed in Halifax, the base of the North American Station of the Royal Navy, on the same ship.

In 1784, Menzies, now thirty years old, returned to Halifax from cruising the waters of the Caribbean, as part of the duties of the British naval presence in the region.[37] The parcel for Banks contained seeds from where the ship had called: Barbados, Dominica, St Kitts and Nevis in the West Indies, and Sandy Hook, near New York. For those plants he could examine, Menzies remarked, he included their Linnaean names.[38] Menzies ended his letter by telling Banks that the land around Halifax promised excellent botanising and that he would ‘wholly devote [his] vacant hours to natural history … I have no doubt that I shall be enabled to send you another parcel early in the autumn.’[39]

He was as good as his word. On 2 November 1784, Menzies sent Banks a second parcel – the first one he knew had arrived safely and was much appreciated – of seeds from Nova Scotia, several of which he could not find mentioned in the edition of Linnaeus he had with him.[40]

Over the next two years Menzies continued to remain in contact with Banks and sent him seeds, including some from the Bahamas. Unfortunately, as Menzies had to admit, he had been unable to find the species of plants that Banks had specifically asked for.[41]

Still, Banks must have been very pleased. Not only did he have specimens of plants from Nova Scotia but he was now in touch with a professional collector who might just be called a botanist – Menzies’s command of the Linnaean system qualified him for that appellation.

On 12 July 1786, a day before the East India Company gave Etches permission to trade in the Pacific Northwest, Banks got a letter from Menzies that he would soon be in England.[42] A little over five weeks later, 21 August 1786, Menzies wrote to Banks from Chatham to announce his arrival. He said that he was forwarding another parcel of seeds to him and expected to be in London himself in a matter of a few days. He added that he had heard that ‘there is a Ship, a private adventurer, now fitting out at Deptford to go round the World – Should I be so happy as to be appointed Surgeon of her, it will at least gratify one of my greatest earthly ambitions, & afford one of the best opportunities of collecting seeds & other objects of Natural History for you …’[43]