The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Richard Holmes
Rambler and the Adventurer. The misleading title of the latter, which had nothing to do with exploration, may have reinforced his apparent credentials. The subject was a gift, and the material was magnificent, if sometimes a little risqué. All that was required were accuracy, objectivity and the ability to assemble a vivid narrative. After nearly two years’ labour, Hawkesworth achieved none of these.
Hawkesworth’s Account of Voyages Undertaken…for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere and Performed by…Captain Cook… was published in three volumes in 1773. It was prolix, abstract, and much given to philosophical digression. Its author was easily shocked, and quick to moralise. He had no scientific or naval experience to draw on, and his views on foreign customs and native morality were prejudiced and illiberal. While digressing on the ‘Noble Savage’, Hawkesworth easily struck a lurid and provocative note. He wrote with delicious outrage of Tahitian dances and sexual practices. The girls danced the timorodee with ‘motions and gestures beyond imagination wanton…a scale of dissolute sensuality wholly unknown to every other nation…and which no imagination could possibly conceive’.77
A second account of the expedition, Journal of a Voyage on His Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour…, also published in 1773, was based on Sydney Parkinson’s journal as edited by his brother Stanfield. There had been a quarrel with Hawkesworth over the copyright of these papers, and Banks had also struggled to retrieve Parkinson’s botanical illustrations from Stanfield Parkinson. Banks felt, not unreasonably, that he had paid for them as Parkinson’s employer on the Endeavour (he had also discreetly sent £500 to Parkinson’s bereaved parents). Parkinson’s death in Batavia embittered and prolonged all these negotiations.
When it finally appeared, the Tahiti section of Parkinson’s journal proved to be brief but strikingly vivid, and left an extremely favourable impression of Banks. Parkinson was particularly observant of small details of Tahitian life: how the natives climbed coconut trees using a rope tied between their ankles; how they kindled fire by rubbing bark; how they wove baskets and dyed clothes; how they played their flutes with the nose; how the girls wore gardenias behind their ears and danced while snapping mother-of-pearl castanets; and how in the timorodee the most provoking gesture they made was pouting and twisting up their lips in what Parkinson called ‘the wry mouth’. It was also characteristic of young Parkinson that he had tried to learn to swim like the Tahitians, that on Banks’s advice he collected Tahitian vocabulary, and that after some hesitation he had had his arms tattooed with a ‘lively bluish purple’ design, of which he had been inordinately proud.
Two years after his return to England, when Polynesian affairs were still the rage, Banks himself put pen to paper in a short, preliminary appreciation of the Paradise island. It took the form of a light-hearted letter entitled ‘Thoughts on the Manners of the Otaheite’. It was a surprising piece, skittish and suggestive in tone, mannered in its classical references, and verging on the kind of mild pornographic frisson thought to be favoured by the French philosophers of Paradise: ‘In the Island of Otaheite where Love is the chief Occupation, the favourite, nay almost the sole Luxury of the Inhabitants, both the bodies and souls of the women are moulded in the utmost perfection for that soft science. Idleness the father of Love reigns here in almost unmolested ease…Except in the article of Complexion, in which our European ladies certainly excell all inhabitants of the Torrid Zone, I have nowhere seen such Elegant women as those of Otaheite. Such the Grecians were from whose model the Venus of Medicis was copied, undistorted by bandages. Nature has full liberty: the growing form [develops] in whatever direction she pleases. And amply does she repay this indulgence in producing such forms as exist here [in Europe] only in marble or canvas: nay! Such as might even defy the imitation of the chissel of Phidias, or the pencil of Apelles. Nor are these forms a little aided by their Dress: not squeezed as our Women are, by a cincture scarce less tenacious than Iron.’78 ♣
This was perhaps a glimpse of Banks the Tahitian libertine, though it was only circulated privately. The way was now open for Banks to publish his own journal, over 200,000 words in manuscript, together with some of the hundreds of beautiful illustrations and line drawings he had commissioned. A folio volume of 800 plates was planned, together with extensive journal extracts. Solander agreed to help him with the cataloguing and editorial work, and various assistants were hired, including the young Edward Jenner. It was intended as the greatest scientific publication of Banks’s lifetime, his masterpiece.
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The Pacific voyage, despite its final horrors of sickness and death, had not dampened Banks’s scientific wanderlust. ‘To explore is my Wish,’ he wrote the following spring, ‘but the Place to which I may be sent almost indifferent to me, whether the Sources of the Nile, or the South Pole are to be visited, I am equally ready to embark on the undertaking.’79
In summer 1772 Cook was commissioned by the Admiralty to undertake a second, much larger Pacific expedition, this time with several ships. Banks longed to go on this new adventure, and made extensive preparations and invested thousands of pounds in new botanical equipment. But perhaps celebrity had gone to his head. His plans were increasingly ambitious, and he had summoned an extraordinary range of scientific and artistic talents to accompany him, a sixteen-man team including the chemist and radical Joseph Priestley, the painter Johann Zoffany, and the brilliant young London physician Dr James Lind (later to be Shelley’s extracurricular science teacher at Eton).
Cook was quite prepared to acquiesce to all Banks’s scientific requirements, and had the great cabin in his new ship, the Resolution, redesigned to meet them, with higher ceilings, folding work tables and fitted cabinets. His own tiny captain’s cabin was moved to the rear of the Resolution’s quarterdeck. But the Admiralty regarded Banks’s demands as unacceptably imperious, and, without warning, withdrew its authorisation. Humiliatingly, all Banks’s equipment was offloaded and dumped on the quayside at Sheerness. On 20 June he received a sharp but stately letter of rebuke from his powerful friend Lord Sandwich: ‘Your public spirit in undertaking so dangerous a voyage, your inattention to any expense,…and your extensive knowledge as a naturalist, make it lamented that you are no longer one of the crew of the Resolution. But it may not be improper to set you right in one particular which you possibly may have misunderstood, and that is that you suppose the ships to have been fitted out for your use, which I own I by no means apprehend to be the case.’80
The Admiralty had, in effect, rejected the notion of underwriting another purely scientific voyage, for what Sandwich called ‘improvements in natural knowledge’. From now on Cook’s voyages were to take on more practical and empire-building objectives (though they would include testing the rival chronometers of John Harrison and John Arnold).
Lord Sandwich made it clear that Banks would have to pursue his science on his own: ‘Upon the whole I hope that for the advantage of the curious part of Mankind, your zeal for distant voyages will not yet cease, I heartily wish you success in all your undertakings, but I would advise you in order to ensure success to fit out a ship yourself; that, and only that, can give you the absolute command of the whole Expedition.’81
So Banks commissioned his own brig, the Sir Lawrence, went to the Hebrides and inspected Fingal’s Cave, and then sailed on to Iceland, where he made many friends, admired the geysers and volcanoes, collected lava specimens, but made few original discoveries. Back in London he continued to work with Solander on his Endeavour Journal, and set out his extraordinary collection of specimens at a temporary apartment in New Burlington Street. These began to attract learned visitors. The Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, William Sheffield, wrote a long, astonished description of Banks’s scientific treasures to Gilbert White in Hampshire.
Contrary to expectation, these were far more than just botanical specimens. They formed in effect a complete