The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Richard Holmes
quadrant was stolen one night shortly before the transit was due, he reacted with characteristic energy and courage. He knew that without this large and exquisitely calibrated brass instrument, used to measure precise astronomical angles, the entire observation would be rendered valueless. Not waiting for Cook or his marine guards, Banks roused the expedition’s official astronomer, William Green, and set off immediately on foot in pursuit of the thief. In the dizzy heat, Banks followed the trail far up into the hills, accompanied only by a reluctant Green, one unarmed midshipman and a Tahitian interpreter. They penetrated seven miles inland through the Tahitian jungle, further than any European had been before: ‘The weather was excessive hot, the Thermometer before we left the tents up at 91 made our journey very tiresome. Sometimes we walk’d sometimes we ran when we imagind (which we sometimes did) that the chase was just before us till we arrived at the top of a hill about 4 miles from the tents. From this place [the interpreter] Tubourai shew’d us a point about 3 miles off and made us understand that we were not to expect the instrument till we got there. We now considerd our situation. No arms among us but a pair of pocket pistols which I always carried; going at least 7 miles from our fort where the Indians might not be quite so submissive as at home; going also to take from them a prize for which they had ventured their lives.’7
Banks decided to send back the midshipman with a brief message to Cook that armed reinforcements would be welcome. Meanwhile he and Green would press on alone, ‘telling him at the same time that it was impossible we could return till dark night’.
Before dusk, Banks ran the thief to ground in an unknown and potentially hostile village. A crowd quickly gathered round them, ‘rudely’ jostling them. Following a Tahitian custom he had already learned, Banks quickly drew out a ring on the grass, and surrounded by ‘some hundreds’ of faces, sat quietly down in the centre. Here, instead of threatening or blustering, he began to explain and negotiate. For some time nothing transpired. Then, piece by piece, starting with its heavy wooden deal case, the quadrant was solemnly returned. ‘Mr Green began to overlook the Instrument to see if any part or parts were wanting…The stand was not there but that we were informed had been left behind by the thief and we should have it on our return…Nothing else was wanting but what could easily be repaired, so we pack’d all up in grass as well as we could and proceeded homewards.’
By the time armed marines came up, sweating and jittery, about two miles down the track, Banks had completed the transaction and made several new friends. Everyone returned peacefully to Fort Venus on the shore. For this exploit, all conducted with the greatest calm and good humour, Banks earned the profound gratitude of Cook, who noted that ‘Mr Banks is always very alert upon all occasions wherein the Natives are concerned.’8 Banks concluded mildly in his journal: ‘All were, you may imagine, not a little pleased at the event of our excursion.’9
Banks and Cook were a seemingly ill-matched pair. They were divided by background, education, class and manners. Yet they formed a curiously effective team. Cook’s cool and formal manners towards the Tahitians were balanced by Banks’s natural openness and enthusiasm, which easily won friends. With their help he would gather a mass of plant and animal specimens, and make what was in effect an early anthropological study of Tahitian customs. His journal entries cover everything from clothes (or lack of them) and cookery to dancing, tattooing, sexual practices, fishing methods, wood-carving, and religious beliefs. His accounts of a dog being roasted, or a young woman having her buttocks tattooed, are frank and unforgettable. He attended Tahitian ceremonial events, slept in their huts, ate their food, recorded their customs and learned their language. He was pioneering a new kind of science. As he wrote in his journal: ‘I found them to be a people so free from deceit that I trusted myself among them almost as freely as I could do in my own countrey, sleeping continually in their houses in the woods with not so much as a single companion.’10
3
Educated in the traditional classics at Harrow, Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, young Joseph Banks had discovered science and the natural world at the age of fourteen. Towards the end of his life he told a sort of ‘conversion’ story about this to his friend the surgeon Sir Everard Home. It was later enshrined by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier in his obituary speech or Éloge to the Institut de France. Emerging late one summer afternoon from a schoolboy swim in the Thames at Eton, the teenage Banks found himself alone on the river, all his schoolfriends gone. Walking back through the green lanes, solitary and preoccupied, he suddenly saw the mass of wildflowers along the hedgerows vividly illuminated in the slanting, golden evening light. Their beauty and strangeness came to him like a revelation. ‘After some reflection, he said to himself, it is surely more natural that I should be taught to know all the productions of Nature, in preference to Greek and Latin; but the latter is my father’s command and it is my duty to obey him…He began immediately to teach himself Botany.’
Despite the stilted form of this recollection (it is in Home’s words and dates from fifty years after the event), it seems that to the young Banks botany implied a kind of Romantic rebellion against his father, as well as against the standard school curriculum of classics. Even more important, it brought him into contact with a race of people who would normally have been quite invisible to a privileged Eton schoolboy such as he. These were the wise women of the country lanes and hedgerows, the gypsy herbalists who collected ‘simples’ or medicinal plants ‘to supply the Druggist and Apothecaries shops’ of Windsor and Slough. They were a strange but knowledgeable tribe, whom he soon learned to treat with respect. More than that, he paid them sixpence for every ‘material piece of information’ they supplied.
Banks also told Everard Home that it was his mother-not his father-who handed over her lovingly worn copy of Gerard’s Herbal, kept ‘in her dressing room’, with wonderful engravings that entranced him. It is thus that he is shown in a family portrait (possibly by Zoffany): an attractively long-haired and long-legged teenager, alert and faintly insolent, confidently posed in a studded leather chair with a portfolio of botanical engravings spread before him. Just under his left elbow, extraordinarily prophetic, is a large geographer’s globe in its mahogany cradle, with a rhumb-line of sunlight curving down towards the equator.
From then on Banks saw his destiny as a naturalist, and began avidly collecting rare plants, wildflowers, herbs, shells, stones, animals, insects, fish and fossils. His conversion story reveals other elements of his life and character: self-confidence, wealth, surprising sensitivity, unconventional directness, and an attraction to women. At university he made himself a disciple of the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, the leading Enlightenment botanist of Europe. Linnaeus had redefined the taxonomy of plants by identifying them according to their reproductive organs, re-cataloguing them in Latin according to genus, species and family, and collecting an unmatched array of specimens in his gardens at Uppsala.
Finding that there was no Linnaean lecturer in botany at Oxford, Banks reacted in a characteristic way. He rode to Cambridge, begged an interview with the Professor of Botany there, John Martyn, and simply asked to be recommended the best young botanist available. He came back triumphantly with a gifted young Jewish botanist, Israel Lyons, who had agreed to teach the subject to Banks and a group of like-minded undergraduates at Oxford. Banks paid Lyons a good salary out of his own pocket. Later he recommended him to an Admiralty expedition, and he remained his friend and patron for life. Lyons was Banks’s first scientific protégé. From the start Banks displayed the commanding air, as well as the charm, of a wealthy man. This trait was given free rein when his father died in 1761. At the age of eighteen he was now sole heir to large estates in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (they included over 200 farms) which would bring him £6,000 per annum (eventually rising to over £30,000), an enormous income for the period.
The family money made Banks a complete gentleman of leisure, a potentially fatal development, and he moved with his beloved mother and his only sister, Sophia, to a large house in Chelsea, near the Physic Garden. The conventional thing would have been for him to embark, like most of his friends, on the Grand Tour of Europe. Instead,