The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Tahiti was rapidly turning into a legend, and a somewhat tarnished one at that. When a hugely expensive pantomime entitled Omai, or a Trip Round the World was successfully staged at Drury Lane in 1785, the island had started its long decline into a source of popular entertainment. The extravagant sets and titillating costumes, all designed by Loutherbourg, foreshadowed a world of grass-skirt cliché that would eventually lead to Hollywood. Shrewdly capitalising on this new-found fashion, Madame Charlotte Hayes staged in London a notorious nude ‘Tahitian Review’, in which ‘a dozen beautiful Nymphs…performed the celebrated rites of Venus, as practised at Tahiti’. It was said that wealthy clients could then ‘anthropologically’ sample the native girls (who were all of course London cockneys).

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Meanwhile Banks established a kind of permanent scientific salon at a new house at 32 Soho Square, where his adoring sister Sophia was brought in to act as his housekeeper. The unofficial ménage with Sarah Wells across the park in Chapel Street continued, but perhaps under increasing sisterly protests. Her brother, Sophia felt, should begin to settle, conform to convention and become ‘enlightened with the Bright Sunshine of the Gospel’.96 Indeed, Banks never embarked on any other expedition after his voyage to Iceland in 1772. Instead he continued to develop his enormous archive of scientific papers, drawings and specimens, with the help of Solander, now his official archivist and librarian. Yet still Banks published nothing. The daring young botanist and explorer was slowly turning into a landlocked collector and administrator.

In November 1778 Banks was elected President of the Royal Society at the remarkably early age of thirty-five. Then, quite suddenly it would seem, he decided to marry, and began to pay court to a twenty-one-year-old heiress, Dorothea Hugessen, the cheery daughter of a wealthy landowner from Kent, worth (as Jane Austen would say) 14,000 a year. They married the following March at St Andrew’s, Holborn, and Banks settled down to a position at the heart of the British scientific establishment for the next forty-one years. Dorothea became a much-loved companion, and proved herself a wonderful hostess at Soho Square. Surprisingly she would have no children, but she formed a close alliance with her sister-in-law Sophia. Together the two women succeeded in managing the more chaotic side of Banks’s social life with great success.

This required a final parting with Sarah Wells, which was tactfully and generously managed. Solander again proved himself an avuncular go-between. He later remarked that ‘Banks and Mrs Wells parted on very good terms. She had sense enough to find he acted right, and of course she behaved very well. All her old friends visit her as formerly.’ There was no mention of a child, or of any regrets that Banks may have felt. Instead, Solander added that Banks had now spruced himself up for the weekly Royal Society meetings at Crane Court, off Fleet Street, appearing in ‘Full Dressed Velvet or Silk coat etc’. He would ‘properly fill the President’s chair’.97

For his presidency, Banks took as his heraldic crest the figure of a lizard. He explained his choice as follows: ‘I have taken the Lizard, an Animal said to be endowed by Nature with an instinctive love of Mankind, as my Device, & have caused it to be engraved on my Seal, as a perpetual Remembrance that a man is never so well employed, as when he is labouring for the advantage of the Public; without the Expectation, the Hope or even a Wish to derive advantage of any kind from the result of his Exertions.’98

Yet he settled into the presidential chair uneasily. It was typical of him that, on his election, he wrote as follows to Sir William Hamilton in Naples. ‘That I envy you your situation within two miles of an erupting Volcano, you will easily guess. I read your Letters with that kind of Fidgetty Anxiety which continuously upbraids for not being in a similar situation. I envy you, I pity myself, I blame myself & then begin to tumble over my Dried Plants in hopes to put such wishes out of my head. Which now I am tied by the leg to an Arm Chair, I must with diligence suppress.’99

In November 1780 he oversaw the historic move of the Royal Society’s offices from its obscure lodgings in Crane Court to its grand new premises in the recently completed Somerset House on The Strand, in a suitably commanding position overlooking the Thames. It was now recognised as a palace of science, to and from which travellers would come and go to the ends of the earth.100

In 1781 Banks was knighted for his energetic scientific work as Director of the royal gardens at Kew. Over the next decade he transformed the rambling and disorganised estate along the Thames into a scientific repository and botanical haven that far outstretched anything achieved by Linnaeus. He established more than 50,000 trees and shrubs at Kew, and introduced a vast number of new and exotic species that are now regarded as native: among them magnolias, fuchsias, monkey-puzzle trees, and the evergreen sequoia.101 He had notable successes with rare and difficult species such as the Venus fly-trap. The poet Coleridge among others refers to him as a reliable source of new exotic and experimental drugs such as Indian hemp, ‘Bang’ and cannabis.102

Yet the world of the South Pacific was drifting steadily away from Banks. His great companion and fellow voyager, the amiable, easy-going and ever-faithful Solander, was struck down by a heart attack, and died in the guest room at Soho Square in June 1782. Banks was inconsolable, and felt this loss more than any other he had experienced: it seemed to him the loss also of his own youth. He wrote tight-lipped to a mutual friend, John Lloyd: ‘To write about the loss of poor Solander would be to renew both our feelings for little purpose; suffice it to say then that few men, however Exalted their pursuits, were ever more feelingly missed either in the paths of Science or of Friendship.’103

A little later he wrote more confidentially to Johann Alströmer, who had once shared their carefree dinners with Sarah Wells, and who was now elected President of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. ‘His loss is irreplaceable. Even if I were to meet such a learned and noble man as he was, my old heart could no longer receive the impression which twenty years ago it took as effortlessly as wax, one which will not dissolve until my heart does…I can never think of it without feeling such acute pain as makes a man shudder.’104

There were now fewer and fewer survivors from the original voyage to Paradise; Banks felt like the ‘last of the Otaheites’. Perhaps also it was Solander’s death which fatally delayed any further work on Banks’s great Endeavour travel book. In 1785 he still wrote hopefully, seeing it as a kind of memorial to his friend: ‘Solander’s name will appear next to mine on the title page because everything has been brought together through our common industry. There is hardly a single clause written in it, while he lived, in which he did not have a part…it can be completed in two months if only the engraver can be brought to put the finishing touches to it.’105 But nothing appeared.

Banks suffered his first serious and disabling attack of gout in the summer of 1787, when he was still only forty-four. He received a sympathetic letter from the King, but neither realised how grave the affliction would become. By his fifties he was almost literally tied to his presidential chair, as he had feared and prophesied. Incapacitated by agonising swellings in his legs, the once tireless and athletic young explorer had to be pushed about his London house in a wheelchair.

His body may have been chairbound, but his spirit was increasingly airborne. In fact Banks’s personal enthusiasm as the universal scientific patron largely shaped and directed the adventurous character of Romantic science, which now flowered and flourished like one of his most exotic specimens. He revealed himself as a talent-spotter of genius, encouraging expeditions to Australia, Africa, China and South America; supporting projects as diverse as telescope-building, ballooning, merino sheep-farming and weather forecasting; helping to found museums of botany, anthropology, comparative anatomy; and above all maintaining through a huge network of correspondence and personal meetings the idea of science as a truly shared and international endeavour, even in a time of war, and even in relentless (if well-mannered) competition with the French.♣

He now looked back proudly at his own voyage as something historic and exemplary, to be emulated by the next generation: ‘I may flatter myself that being the first man of scientific education who undertook a voyage of discovery, and that voyage of discovery being the first that turned out satisfactorily in this enlightened age, I was in some measure the first who gave that turn to such voyages.’106

The great French naturalist Georges Cuvier agreed, later describing the Endeavour voyage as forming ‘an epoch in the history of science. Natural history contracted an alliance with astronomy and exploration, and began to extend its researches over an ever-widening sphere…Everything seemed to realise the romantic wonders of the Odyssey…Banks displayed his astonishing energy: fatigue did not depress him, nor danger deter him…and not simply by seeing, but by actively observing, he showed his true scientific character…Banks was always in the advance.’107

Banks wrote provokingly to a young man hesitating to embark on a perilous scientific expedition to the feverish shores of Java: ‘I have no doubt [your family] wish to force you to adopt Sardinapalus’s advice to his citizens to “Eat, drink & propagate”…Let me hear from you how you feel inclined to prefer Ease and indulgence to Hardship and activity. I was about 23 when I began my Perigrinations; you are somewhat older, but you may be assured that if I had listened to a multitude of voices that were raised up to dissuade me from my Enterprise, I should have now been a Quiet country gentleman.’

Banks’s house in the south-west corner of Soho Square soon became known as the operations centre of scientific research in Britain. It was widely recognised as such throughout Europe-especially in France, Germany and Scandinavia. His correspondence reached round the world, from Paris to New York to Moscow to Sydney. He had the ear of George III (until the King went mad). His library and herbarium were open to all; his daily ten o’clock planning breakfasts at Soho Square were famous; his house parties at his new country estate at Spring Grove in Surrey, purchased especially for the purpose, were often like international conferences.

He received visitors from all over the world, and was the patron of numerous private projects. He advised on the settlement of Australia, was made a Privy Councillor in 1797, and served on the Board of Longitude. After some early disagreements, he became the close friend of the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Later he was elected President of the Africa Association (which eventually became the Royal Geographical Society), and one of the founding Vice-Presidents of the Royal Institution. He began to exercise a dominant influence over the public development of British science and exploration, encouraging royal patronage, finding funds for research projects and expeditions, and skilfully boosting their national prestige. In effect Banks became Britain’s first Minister for Science.

Yet Joseph Banks never finally published his long-dreamed-of Endeavour Voyage, or any full account of his time in Paradise. Despite the death of his great friend Solander there is no real explanation for this failure, though perhaps it was a deliberate refusal. His journal exists in several manuscript drafts-one copied (and somewhat bowdlerised) by his sister Sophia; and there is a huge series of astonishing engravings (now archived in the Natural History Museum, London). Versions of the journal have been published by scholars, notably by J.C. Beaglehole, in facsimile by the Banks Society, and one recently put online by the University of New South Wales, Australia. But Banks’s Endeavour Voyage may count as one of the great unfinished masterpieces of Romanticism, as mysterious in its own way as Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, with which it bears some curious similarities, as an account of a sacred place which has been partly lost, and to which there is no return.♣

Instead, Banks seemed fated to relive his story through the extraordinary lives of his protégés. This is the genial, enabling role he plays in the fantastic series of explorations, expeditions and mind journeys that follow. His great Endeavour voyage had launched an Age of Wonder.

♣ De Bougainville’s account of his ship anchoring at Tahiti for the first time in April 1768 became one of the most celebrated passages in all French romantic travel-writing. ‘I have to admit that it was nigh impossible to keep 400 young Frenchmen at work, sailors who had not seen a woman for six months, in view of what followed. In spite of all our precautions, a young Tahitian girl slipped aboard and placed herself on the quarterdeck immediately above one of the big hatchways, which was fully open to allow air in to the sailors sweating at the capstan below. The young girl casually let slip the only piece of cloth which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all the crew exactly as naked Venus appeared to the Phrygian shepherd. Truly, she had the celestial form of the goddess of Love. More and more sailors and soldiers crowded to the foot of the hatchway, and no capstan was ever wound with such alacrity as on this occasion. Only naval discipline succeeded in keeping these bewitched young fellows from rioting; and indeed we officers had some little difficulty in restraining ourselves.’ Bougainville, Voyage autour du Monde (1771, Chapter 8, ‘Mouillage à Tahiti’).

♣ A very large ethical and philosophical issue about the nature of justice, property and ownership in society evidently lurked beneath these fleeting reflections of Banks and Cook. Over the next thirty years it would be addressed in various ways by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, William Godwin and Thomas Paine. Beyond that lay the whole question of imperialism and colonialism, that great, tangled Victorian inheritance, looming like a dark stormcloud on the distant horizon. For the time being the bluff innocence of this first expedition is well caught by Banks’s naval biographer, Patrick O’Brian: ‘In any case the thefts were not all on one side: [Captain] Wallis had taken possession of the entire island [of Tahiti] and its dependencies, which brings to mind the remark about the relative guilt of the man who steals a goose from off a common and the other who steals the common from under the goose.’ Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (1987), p.95.

♣ It was soon accepted that the Europeans in general were responsible. A satirical poem dedicated to Banks in 1777 had a bitterly sarcastic footnote referring to the transmission of ‘the Neapolitan fever’ to Tahiti, ‘where from the promiscuous intercourse of the Natives, it will probably very soon annihilate them all, and in the most dreadful manner, for the honour of Christian humanity’: ‘An Historic Epistle from Omai to the Queen of Tahiti’ (1777). In addition there is nature’s revenge on marauding European crews, as described in Coleridge’s ballad The Ancient Mariner. It is often forgotten that this poem describes the death of an entire ship’s complement of 200 men (bar the Mariner) after an encounter with a terrifying and diseased woman, ‘Life-in-Death’:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold:

Her skin was as white as leprosy,

The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,

Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

(The Ancient Mariner, lines 190-4)

The full catastrophe of venereal disease, which devastated the Pacific populations over the next two generations, has been described by Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (1966).

♣ The brief, tentative landings that took place on the coast of ‘New Holland’ (Australia) during May 1770, though they yielded Banks and Solander many prizes in flora and fauna, did not at the time strike Cook with anything like the significance that they would later acquire with the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in January 1788. Cook’s long entry for 6 May 1770 gives details of the ‘capacious, safe and commodious’ anchorage at ‘Stingray Harbour’ (firmly renamed ‘Botany Bay’ by Banks), the varied woods and the ‘very beautiful birds such as Cockatoos, Lorryquetes, Parrots etc’, but notes that the Aboriginal inhabitants were both reclusive and hostile, ‘and we were never able to form any connection with them’. By 29 May the Endeavour was already tangled in the maze of perilous shoals leading to the Great Barrier Reef.

♣ All this is quite unlike the wonderful simplicity and directness of Banks’s original Endeavour Journal, and reminds one how delicate the balance-both moral and stylistic-already was between observation and exploitation in these early pioneering days. Banks never wrote about Tahiti again in this mode, though none of his friends (except possibly Solander) would have disapproved of this gentlemanly jeu d’esprit. It has to be added that this is nothing compared to the epistolary lubricities of Banks’s friend Sir William Hamilton. Other influential essays on the South Sea Paradise were published by Bougainville, Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau at this time. Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (written in 1772 but not published until 1777) proclaimed Tahiti as a model for the reform of sexual relations in Europe: relaxing the conventions of marriage, promulgating free love between the young, and emphasising the importance of mutual physical pleasure between partners.

♣ Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) emphatically rejected evolution. His ‘systematics’ revealed no connecting law of growth or change, as would the transformational notion explored by several later botanists until Gregor Mendel (1822-84), patiently studying generation after generation of garden peas, gave rigour to the science of genetics. Coleridge pointed to this difference between an organising taxonomy and a dynamic scientific principle or law in essays in The Friend (1819). The psychology of collecting, ordering and naming specimens could also be seen as a form of mental colonising and empire-building. ‘Taxonomy, after all, is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval surveys were flooding London with specimens to be classified, inserting them in their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy, had undeniable political overtones. Take a bird or a lizard or a flower from Patagonia or the South Seas, perhaps one that had had a local name for centuries, rechristen it with a Latin binomial, and presto! It had become a tiny British colony.’ Anne Fadiman, ‘Collecting Nature’, in At Large and at Small (2007), p.19.

♣ It has been conservatively calculated that Banks’s correspondence ran to over 50,000 items, though these are still widely scattered in archives in Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand. See the Joseph Banks Archive Project on the internet. There have been various recent selected editions of his correspondence. These include The Selected Letters of Joseph Banks (2000) and the superb new edition The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, in six volumes (2007), both edited by Neil Chambers.

♣ Literally a Paradise Lost, in the sense that venereal disease, alcohol and Christianity had combined by the early nineteenth century to destroy the traditional social structures of Tahiti and to transform its ‘pagan’ innocence forever. The London Missionary Society, founded in 1810, instructed its Tahitian missionaries to ‘cultivate the tenderest Compassion for the wretched condition of the Heathen, while you see them led captive to Satan at his Will. Do not resent their abominations as affronts to yourselves, but mourn over them as offensive to God.’ Charles Darwin visited Tahiti on his way back from the Galapagos islands in November 1835, and later called it ‘Otaheite, that fallen Paradise!’ Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact (1966).

2 Herschel on the Moon

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Shortly after his election as President of the Royal Society in 1778, Joseph Banks began to hear rumours of an unusually gifted amateur astronomer working away on his own in the West Country. These rumours first reached him through the Society’s official Secretary, Sir William Watson, whose brilliant and unconventional son, a young physician based in Somerset, was a moving spirit behind the newly founded Bath Philosophical Society. Watson (junior) began sending accounts to his father of a strange maverick who owned enormously powerful telescopes (supposedly built by himself), and was making extravagant claims about the moon.

The initial reports that reached Banks were strange and somewhat sketchy. The man was called Wilhelm Hershell or William Herschel, possibly a German Jew from Dresden or Hanover.1 One winter night in 1779 young Watson had found this Herschel in Bath, standing alone in a cobbled backstreet, viewing the moon through a large telescope. Though tall and well-dressed, and wearing his hair powdered, he was clearly an eccentric. He spoke with a strong German accent, and had no manservant accompanying him. Watson asked if he might take a look through the instrument, which he noticed was a reflector telescope, not the usual refractor used by amateurs. It was large-seven feet long-and mounted on an ingenious folding wooden frame. The whole thing was evidently home-made. To his surprise he found its resolution was better than any other telescope he had ever used. He had never seen the moon so clearly.2

They fell into slightly halting conversation. Watson was immediately taken by Herschel’s humorous and modest manner, and soon realised that it disguised an acute unconventional intelligence. Herschel’s knowledge of astronomy, though obviously self-taught, was impressive. Though he had no university education, and said he had very little mathematics, he had mastered John Flamsteed’s great atlas of the constellations, read the textbooks of Robert Smith and James Ferguson, and knew a great deal about French astronomy. Above all he knew about the construction of telescopes, and the making of specula-mirrors. Though in his early forties, he talked of the stars with a quick, boyish enthusiasm, that betrayed intense and almost unnerving passion. Watson was so struck that he asked if he might call round to see him the very next morning.

The house at 19 Rivers Street, in the lower, unfashionable section of Bath, was modest, and clearly Herschel was not a gentleman of leisure. The lower rooms were cluttered with astronomical equipment, but the front parlour was dominated by a harpsichord and piled high with musical scores.3 It emerged that Herschel was a professional musician, held the post of organist at the Bath Octagon Chapel, and made ends meet by giving music lessons. He also composed, and was fascinated by the theory of musical harmony. His domestic situation was odd. He was poor, and unmarried, but Watson noticed that he spoke tenderly of a sister, who was not only his housekeeper but also his ‘astronomical assistant’.4

Watson invited his new acquaintance to join the Bath Philosophical Society. Herschel responded with alacrity. Though hesitant to speak in public, he started submitting papers through Watson. Many of them were strange ventures into speculative cosmology and the philosophy of science. They included such subjects as ‘What becomes of Light?’, ‘On the Electrical Fluid’ and ‘On the Existence of Space’.5

Proud of his new discovery, Watson sent what he considered the best of these early papers to his father, Sir William, at the Royal Society in London. Herschel was modestly worried that his English would not be up to the mark, and Watson tactfully corrected each paper. It was not their plain literary style, however, which caused controversy, but their content. The very first of them, ‘Observations on the Mountains of the Moon’, was so unconventional that it caused an unaccustomed stir when it was published in the Society’s august journal Philosophical Transactions in spring 1780. In it Herschel claimed that with his home-made telescopes he had observed ‘forests’ on the lunar surface, and that the moon was ‘in all probability’ inhabited.