The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Richard Holmes
three enormous, overflowing rooms, each with its own theme. The first, the ‘Armoury’, belonged symbolically to the human male, dedicated to weapons, utensils and sailing equipment from all over the South Seas. The second was more female in theme, a huge domestic collection of clothes, headdresses, cloaks, woven cloths, ornaments and jewellery, together with 1,300 new species of plant ‘never seen or heard of before in Europe’. The third room was dedicated simply to Nature in all her diversity. It contained ‘an almost numberless collection of animals; quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibia, reptiles, insects and vermes, preserved in spirits, most of them new and nondescript [unclassified]…Add to these the choicest collection of drawings in Natural History that perhaps enriched any cabinet, public or private: 987 plants drawn and coloured by Parkinson; and 1300 or 1400 more drawn with each of them a flower, a leaf, and a portion of stalk, coloured by the same hand; besides a number of other drawings of animals, birds, fish etc…’
The Oxford Keeper was struck by the beauty and diversity of the whole amazing collection, a glimpse into an entirely new and wonderful world. Banks had found a new role as its guardian and its promoter. ‘Indeed most of these tropical islands, if we can credit our friend’s description of them, are terrestrial paradises.’82
Banks’s early hero Carl Linnaeus had turned collecting and displaying into something approaching a European art form. At Uppsala he planted a clock garden or ‘botanical sundial’, marking each hour by clumps of plants that opened only at one particular time of day (according to the strength of the sun). The time could thus be ‘read’ by the rotating patches of open petals, and even by the release of flower perfumes (such as tobacco plants in the early evening). However, Linnaeus’s genius for taxonomy and display disguised the fact that his natural history was essentially static.♣
Banks was now welcomed into the scientific societies in London: the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Society of Dilettanti. He was summoned more frequently to advise the King at Kew, where from 1773 he was gratified to find himself acting as unofficial director. After the débâcle over Harriet Blosset, he began living with a young woman called Sarah Wells, and set her up in an apartment in Chapel Street, on the other side of St James’s Park. Here he would meet Solander and his other friends, give noisy dinner parties and have plenty of talk of science and adventure. This ménage seemed an extension of his Tahitian liberties, and certainly there was no prospect of conventional betrothal or marriage. Solander refers simply to ‘Mrs Wells’s’ charm, good nature, and delicious supplies of ‘Game & Fish’.83
Indeed, the Town and Country Magazine for September 1773 claimed that ‘Mr B the Circumnavigator’ had an illegitimate child, but perhaps this was more confused botanical satire, as the mother was named as ‘Miss B—N living in Orchard Street’. Nonetheless, one of Banks’s close friends, the zoologist Johann Fabricius, wrote to him in November sending compliments to Sarah Wells and adding: ‘What had she brought you?…A boy or a girl?’84 If there was a child, Banks did not allow it to affect his free social arrangements. Sarah became known and much liked by many visiting men of science, the Swedish naturalist Johann Alströmer referring to her intelligent conversation and fondly recalling a memorable ‘Soupé at his Maitresse, Mistress Wells’s’, with Banks and Solander on riotous good form.85
Tahiti pursued Banks in other ways. In summer 1774 one of Cook’s fleet commanders, Captain Furneaux of HMS Adventure, returned with a first visitor to England from the South Seas. He was entered in the ship’s muster books as ‘Tetuby Homey’, from Huahine in the Society Islands, ‘22 years, Able Seaman’. This news immediately reminded Banks of all his hopes for Tupia and his son, which had been so tragically destroyed in Batavia in 1770. Banks and Solander hurried down to Portsmouth to greet ‘Homey’ in July.
There, confined to the captain’s cabin, they found a tall and strikingly handsome Tahitian man, who was soon to become known in England as ‘Mai’ or ‘Omai’. He announced that he hoped to make his fortune, and fully intended to return to Tahiti as a rich and experienced traveller, having survived the expected savagery of the English.86 Omai turned out to be quick-witted, charming and astute. His exotic good looks, with large, soulful eyes, were much admired in English society, especially among the more racy of the aristocratic ladies.
Banks treated Omai partly as an honoured guest, and partly as an exotic specimen. The ambiguity of the attitudes displayed in his Tahitian journal was now put to the test. Banks fitted Omai up with European clothes, a brown velvet jacket, white waistcoat and grey silk breeches. He took him to dine with the Royal Society, with the Society of Philosophers (ten times), and carefully introduced him at a number of society soirées. Omai’s bow, executed with the aplomb of a dancer, became celebrated. He quickly won all hearts, and was eventually presented by Banks to King George III at Kew. The introduction became legendary, when Omai executed a superb version of his bow, and then sprang forward to grasp the royal hand, and grinning broadly, cried out, ‘How do King Tosh!’87
From then on he was lionised almost continually for a year. Thanks to Banks he met a host of celebrities, among them Lord Sandwich, Dr Johnson, Fanny Burney and the poet Anna Seward, who wrote a poem about him. He learned to ride, shoot, conduct flirtations, and play excellent chess-Dr Johnson never stopped teasing his friend, the learned antiquarian Giuseppe Baretti, that Omai had once checkmated him. Omai also made excellent jokes about current English fashions. Fanny Burney records his delighted and unrestrained ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ on seeing the Duchess of Devonshire’s high-piled hairstyle.
Conscious of European diseases, Banks had Omai undergo Jenner’s new technique of inoculation with cowpox vaccine, against the lethal smallpox. He also caused something of a scandal by absolutely refusing to teach Omai to read, or to have him instructed in any form of Christian religion. Their most happy time together came in the summer of 1775, when Banks took Omai with several friends on a field expedition to Whitby and Scarborough. They travelled up in leisurely fashion, comfortably installed in Banks’s large, lumbering coach, stopping off to eat at remote country inns and botanise in the summer fields.
An imposing portrait of Omai, standing formally alongside Banks and Solander, was painted by William Parry, and displayed at the Royal Academy in 1777.88 It again demonstrates the ambiguity of the relationship between patron and protégé. Banks points dramatically towards Omai, who stands gazing out at the viewer, wrapped in the dazzling white robes of Tahitian ceremonial dress, almost Roman in his stately demeanour. His naked feet and tattooed hands are clearly shown. Though there is an extraordinarily calm, almost aristocratic, beauty about his presence, it is not clear if he is Banks’s companion or his trophy. Other portraits were painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who also executed an exquisite pencil drawing of Omai’s head, emphasising his magnificent mane of dark hair, his large, tender eyes and finely formed mouth. Another more prosaic solo portrait was especially commissioned for John Hunter’s anthropological collection, later housed at the Royal College of Surgeons.89
In 1777 Cook departed on his third Pacific voyage, taking Omai with him. He left behind his record of his second expedition, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World. The text was accompanied by extensive illustrations, including pictures of Omai, numerous botanical studies of rare plants, and sketches of the naked Tahitian dances witnessed by Banks and Parkinson. The drawings of Omai were later used by the anatomist William Lawrence in his Lectures on the Natural History of Man (1819).
Cook’s sober book caught the public’s imagination. The poet William Cowper, tucked away in his Buckinghamshire vicarage at Olney, and permanently trembling on the brink of disabling depression, found extraordinary relief and delight in imagining the great voyage