[INTRODUCTION]
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Introduction
THIS companion volume to Captain Cook in New Zealand, edited and published by Messrs A. H. and A. W. Reed in 1951, is printed from the contemporary copy of Joseph Banks's original journal of his voyage on the Endeavour, made for his friend Captain Constantine Phipps, R.N. (afterwards second Baron Mulgrave) and now in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. The history of the manuscript before it came into Turnbull's possession is not known.
An edition of the Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks by Sir Joseph D. Hooker was published in London in 1896, with introductory biographical sketches of Banks and his companion Solander and a few notes, mostly botanical and geographical identifications. The text was based upon the copy of the original made by the Misses Dawson Turner when their father (Hooker's maternal grandfather) was contemplating a life of Banks: this copy later passed into the possession of the British Museum. Hooker, however, admitted that the journal contained "nearly double the quantity of matter" he had reproduced; and he "corrected the language to accord with modern requirements". Banks himself might have given the journal some literary revision had he published it, as he at one time intended to; but the best twentieth century practice in such cases is to retain the original text. Dr J. C. Beaglehole is preparing a definitive edition of the entire journal from the original, now in the possession of the Mitchell Library, Sydney.
The present edition of the New Zealand portion of the journal--about a fifth of the whole--has a more limited purpose. This introduction will be confined to a brief account of Banks's career, mainly based on the standard biographies by H. C. Cameron (London: Batchworth Press, 1952) and E. Smith (London: John Lane, 1911); a discussion of Banks's objects in joining Cook's expedition; and an estimate of his contribution to the success of the voyage and, in particular, of the value of his journal as an account of New Zealand in 1769-70. The notes on points of natural history
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owe much to the generous help of Professor G. T. S. Baylis, Professor of Botany in the University of Otago, Professor B. J. Marples, Professor of Zoology in the University, Dr G. H. Satchell of the Department of Physiology, and Dr Elizabeth Batham, Lecturer in Charge of the Portobello Marine Biological Station; on points of Maori culture I have had the great advantage of discussions with Dr H. D. Skinner, formerly Director of the Otago Museum. Comparisons between Banks's journal and those of Cook and other members of the expedition have been much facilitated by the kindness of the Council of the Hakluyt Society and Dr Beaglehole in allowing me to consult in advance of publication his edition of The Voyage of the Endeavour, the first volume of the Hakluyt Society edition of Cook's voyages.
Joseph Banks was born in Argyle Street, London, on 2 February (O.S.--13 February N.S.) 1743. Lord Brougham, who knew him, says that he came of a landowning family which had been established since the reign of Edward III in the West Riding of Yorkshire and afterwards in Lincolnshire; but the recent researches of Dr J. W. F. Hill have shown this statement to be misleading. The real founder of the fortunes of the family, which came from Giggleswick, Yorkshire, but remained obscure until the seventeenth century, was Sir Joseph's great-grandfather, another Joseph Banks, who was born at Giggleswick in 1665. This man, the younger son of a professional soldier, became a prosperous attorney in Sheffield, bought and sold property and was successively M. P. for Grimsby and Totnes before his death in 1727. In 1714 he had bought Revesby, an old Cistercian abbey, which had passed at the dissolution of the monasteries into the hands of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and brother-in-law of Henry VIII, and afterwards to other families. There Joseph Banks installed his eldest son, another Joseph, who had recently married Anne Hodgkinson, only daughter of a well-to-do merchant of Overton, Derbyshire. This Joseph, Dr Hill thinks, was "a man of ability overshadowed by his father": he sat in the House of Commons for Peterborough from 1728 to 1734. He died in 1741. His eldest surviving son, William, also inherited the estate of his maternal grandfather Hodgkinson. He too entered Parliament, for the "rotten borough" of Grampound, on petition, in 1741; but in 1745 he lost the use of his lower limbs
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and his health gradually worsened until 1761 when he died at the age of forty-two. 2
Our Joseph Banks was born "with a silver spoon in his mouth", therefore; but the level of ability and activity in his family seemed to be on the decline. His mother, Marianne Bate, is said, however, to have been "remarkable for charities and piety" and brought a good new strain into his blood. His father sent him for four years to Harrow and then to Eton. Henry Brougham's father, who was his schoolfellow at Eton, described him as "a remarkably fine-looking, strong and active boy, whom no fatigue could subdue and no peril daunt". 3 His introduction to botany he himself described in later life to his physician, Sir Everard Home. "One summer evening he had bathed in the river as usual with other boys, but having staid a long time in the water he found when he came to dress himself that all his companions had gone; he was walking leisurely along a lane, the sides of which were richly enamelled with flowers; he stopped and looking round, involuntarily exclaimed, How beautiful! After some reflection, he said to himself, it is surely more natural that I should be taught to know all these productions of Nature, in preference to Greek and Latin... He began immediately to teach himself Botany; and, for want of more able tutors, submitted to be instructed by the women, employed in culling simples... to supply the Druggists and Apothecaries shops, paying sixpence for every material piece of information." When at home for the holidays he unearthed a copy of John Gerard's well-known Herbal and with its aid continued his botanical studies. 4 He had some difficulty at first in carrying them further at Oxford when he went up to Christ Church in December 1760. It was the Oxford of which Adam Smith wrote that "the greater part of the professors have for these many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching": the Professor of Botany, Sibthorp, was one of these. Banks was meanwhile ragged by his contemporaries. "If he
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happened to come into any party of Students, in which they were discussing questions respecting Greek Authors, some of them would call out Here is Banks, but he knows nothing of Greek." 5 But Banks was a man of action. He secured Sibthorp's permission to engage a lecturer "whose remuneration was to fall entirely upon the students who formed his class". Having found enough subscribers and armed himself with letters of introduction to the Professor of Botany at Cambridge, "he went immediately in the Stage Coach to Cambridge and brought back with him Mr Israel Lyons, a Botanist and Astronomer". 6 When he went down from Oxford in December 1763 without a degree, he was, one may imagine, a pretty well qualified naturalist, whatever his other deficiencies.
Banks's father had died while he was at Oxford and in February 1764 he came of age and entered into possession of the family property at Revesby. He could have lived the life of a country gentleman, gone into Parliament like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, and with his wealth and ability maybe gained high office. But he regarded these pursuits as he had Greek and Latin at school and university. He sought influence indeed, but in other ways. He did not neglect his tenants at Revesby and served as Recorder of Boston and High Sheriff of the county. But the career he chose for himself was to be a man of science.
The Royal Society in those days was readily accessible to men of wealth and position who professed some scientific interest, and in 1766 Banks was elected F.R.S. He had already shown, however, that he was more than a mere dilettante. On 7 April of that year he had set out in H. M. S. Niger for Newfoundland and Labrador with his friend Constantine Phipps, who shared his interests. These naval visits to supervise the Newfoundland fishery clearly gave leisure for scientific work. Banks collected many plants for his famous herbarium and prepared a full journal, which remains unpublished. 7
This Newfoundland journey had given Banks a taste for ex-
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ploration. He contemplated a journey to Lapland but soon abandoned it when he perceived the opening that had been given him by the expedition to observe in Tahiti the transit of Venus across the sun's disc and which the Royal Society had initiated and James Cook been appointed to command. 8 On Banks's representations, the Council of the Royal Society at a later meeting recommended to the Admiralty "that in regard to Mr. Banks's great personal merit and for the advancement of useful knowledge, he also, together with his suite, being seven persons more... be received on board". 9 Such things are not done without preliminary soundings; and Banks's fishing friendship with the Earl of Sandwich, a member of the ministry who had been First Lord of the Admiralty and was to be so again, perhaps prepared the way for his plan. 10 However that may be, the Council's request was acceded to and Banks, his fellow-naturalist Daniel Carl Solander, Hermann Sporing, assistant draughtsman, the artists Sydney Parkinson, Alexander Buchan and John Reynolds, with two servants from Revesby, Peter Briscoe and James Roberts, and two negroes, Thomas Richmond and George Dollin, duly joined the Endeavour, 11 which sailed from Plymouth on 25 August 1768.
Of this staff Solander was the most important and his presence throws light on Banks's purposes in undertaking this voyage. He was a Swede (as was Sporing) and a favourite pupil of his fellow-countryman Carl Linnaeus, the "prince of botanists" of that age. After the pioneering work of Aristotle's pupil Theophrastus and of Dioscorides, a Cilician Greek of the first century, botany had for many centuries stood still or even declined. It began to revive in the later Middle Ages but as late as the sixteenth century was mainly concerned with the production of herbals for medical purposes. In the seventeenth century, however, it made remarkable advances, with the aid of the recently invented compound
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microscope. The study of plant anatomy was founded by the Italian Malpighi and the Englishman Grew. The German Rudolph Camerarius established by experimental proof the sexuality of plants. But the developing science was bogged down in problems of classification. "By the middle of the seventeenth century," H. S. Reed writes, "the number of plants known and named had become so large that chaos resulted from all attempts to classify them by any system then known." 12 Knowledge, moreover, kept on expanding. From the time of Cesalpino (1519-1603) botanists of distinction had applied themselves to this problem. During the seventeenth century the Germans Jung and Bachmann (Rivinus), the Englishman John Ray and the Frenchman Tournefort devoted attention to it, but it was not until the eighteenth century that even a temporary solution was found. This was the work of Linnaeus, who was not an original experimental scientist but had an organizing brain of wonderful clarity and precision. Born in 1707, he published in 1735, in Holland, the first edition of his Systema Naturae and with that began a domination of his subject which lasted until his death in 1778.
Linnaeus's system of classification, based on the number, union and grouping of stamens and carpels in the flower, was essentially artificial and he knew it would ultimately be superseded by a system based on the natural affinities of plants. But at a time when the known plant world was rapidly expanding it enabled the whole, or virtually the whole, of it to be classified into classes, genera and species. Indeed, though "botany was his first love", Linnaeus applied similar principles of classification to zoology and even to mineralogy. With the acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis in the nineteenth century his botanical ideas became hopelessly out of date. In fact they were never quite accepted in France, the home of the most original botanists of the generations after Linnaeus. But the vastness of his knowledge, his powers of description and his fame and skill as a teacher at the University of Upsala gave him great influence in and beyond his own time, especially in Sweden, Germany and England. Despite the revolutionary changes in classification, many genera still
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bear the names Linnaeus gave them. One might still say, "Si monumentum requiris, circumspice." 13
Linnaeus's passionate interest in the voyage of the Endeavour is shown in letters to and from his English correspondent Ellis. Banks's admiration for him is evident in his proposal to journey to Lapland, the scene of Linnaeus's own botanical explorations, and to visit Linnaeus en route. In collecting a great representative herbarium he was probably modelling himself on Linnaeus. Moreover, Linnaeus had secured from the Swedish East India Company in 1746 the privilege of one free return passage a year for a pupil designated by him. It was these men surely who deserve the credit given by Hooker to Banks as "the pioneer of those naturalist voyages of later years, of whom Darwin is the great example". 14 Banks, we shall see, took a leaf out of Linnaeus's book.
When he sailed on the Endeavour, Banks was only twenty-five. He had good field experience, however, and excellent equipment. "No people," wrote Ellis to Linnaeus, "ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History. They have got a fine library of Natural History; they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing, they have even a curious contrivance of a telescope, by which, put into the water, you can see the bottom at a great depth, where it is clear. They have many cases of bottles with ground stoppers of several sizes, to preserve animals in spirits. They have the several sorts of salts to surround the seeds; and wax, both beeswax and that of myrica; besides these are many people whose sole business it is to attend them for this very purpose." 15 Solander told Ellis that the expedition would cost Banks £10,000. Banks took an active part in the hunt for botanical and zoological specimens; but it may be presumed that Solander, seven years his senior and steeped in the
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Linnaean system, had the greater share in the work of identification, classification and naming of new species. This seems to be implied in the journal entry for 3 October 1769. The intention certainly was to publish these results, with plates, and thus make the botanical fruits of the voyage available to the scientific world; Linnaeus eloquently urged publication; and Solander, installed as Banks's librarian, prepared "five folio books of neat manuscript". 16 But Solander was one of those men, not uncommon in the learned world, who are always on the point of writing books and never write them. Nothing had been published when Solander died on 16 May 1782.
Banks had by that time become too deeply involved in other things to take up the task Solander had laid down. His botanical interests did not disappear but they were transcended. There is much less botany in the journal than one might expect and this is not merely because the details were left to Solander. The journal is the work of a man of universal curiosity, convinced by his experience that "the proper study of mankind is man".
Cook was not merely the commander but the commanding figure of the expedition. But except on matters nautical Banks could hold his own, even though fifteen years Cook's junior. He became Cook's right-hand man ashore. Only once, judging from their journals, was there a clash between these two strong personalities. These good relations over nearly three years with frequent days or even weeks of intense strain do great credit to both.
In the first part of the Endeavour's voyage Banks had little contribution to make, apart from his observations of marine animals dragged up in his casting-net and his occasional botanical excursions on land. At Madeira from 13 to 18 September he did what he could, but "the season of the year was the worst for both plants and insects". At Rio de Janeiro, where the viceroy could not be convinced that this converted collier was a King's ship, Banks only got ashore by defying his orders, landing before daybreak and staying until dark night. The first test of his mettle came at Tierra del Fuego. On 16 January 1769 Banks and Solander, with the surgeon, and the astronomer, Green, their servants and two seamen to assist in carrying baggage, set out very
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early "to penetrate as far as we could into the country, and if possible gain the tops of the hills, which alone were not overgrown with trees". The going was heavy and when the party was up in the hills the artist Buchan had a fit and then a snowstorm came on. In such a situation the natural leader emerged. Only Banks's strong will kept the party from complete disaster. He could not prevent his two negro servants from freezing to death, but by a painful effort he got Solander to the fire which he had sent an advance party to light. Next morning he led the half-starving party back to the ship. Buchan's experience perhaps contributed to his death three months later, but the other nine of the party of twelve recovered.
When the expedition reached Tahiti on 13 April Banks came into his own. Though keenly enjoying the adventure as a naturalist, he revealed also wonderful powers of observation of the life he saw around him and an intuitive understanding of a people whose culture differed widely from his own. As a boy of inquiring mind he had shown a capacity to get on with humble people, and this had now developed into something like genius. Maybe the romantic eighteenth century cult of the noble savage had prepared Banks for what he found; but it is remarkable how the man who, at Madeira and Rio, had deplored the lack of a spirit of improvement and wished those countries were in the hands of Englishmen, here at Tahiti sheds his prejudices and looks at the scene with the eye of a scientist who yet remains a humanitarian. Cook, with a true perception of Banks's gifts, put him in charge of the traffic with the Tahitians, which was of course no mere question of curio-hunting but concerned the supply of the expedition, the success of its scientific object and the safety of the ship's company. Banks succeeded in making himself understood by the chiefs and was soon on good terms with them. He was thus able, when an essential article of scientific equipment, the astronomical quadrant, was stolen, to recover it without resort to force. Indeed he deprecated reliance on force and shares with Cook the credit for the absence of any such armed clashes as had marked the visit of Wallis in the Dolphin two years earlier. 17 These friendly relations gave Banks a pretty free field for his ethnographical inquiries; and there was enough of the boy in Banks for him to
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enjoy stripping, donning a loin-cloth, and allowing himself to be smeared with charcoal and water in order to take part in a mourning ceremony. It was Banks too who took the responsibility for allowing Tupaia, the high priest of Ra'iatea and the best-informed man the explorers had met in Tahiti, to accompany them, as he wished, on their further voyage.
Thus when the Endeavour reached the coast of New Zealand, Banks's appetite for ethnographical investigation had been whetted by three months' experience on Tahiti. The Endeavour spent about eight weeks in various New Zealand harbours but the preliminary establishment of good relations with the Maoris, never completed at Poverty Bay, had to be repeated half a dozen times; and the field to be observed was so much wider than in Tahiti that the success attained would hardly have been possible without the presence of Tupaia as an interpreter. The beginning was inauspicious. The warlike Maori of Poverty Bay had had no such warning of European superiority in arms as the Dolphin had given the Tahitians. Armed conflict was perhaps inevitable but was forced on by one of Cook's rare errors of judgment. Banks, whose humanity never degenerated into mere sentiment, continued to believe that demonstrations of armed strength were necessary, but thought this day's fight "the most disagreeable day my life has yet seen". Fortunately the good treatment of the captured boys retrieved this bad start, and Cook learned by experience to meet Maori threats and war dances with firmness and precaution but not with preventive war.
Circumstances limited Banks's investigations to the coast. This of course hampered his work as a naturalist. There is no evidence in the journal that he saw New Zealand's characteristic flightless birds: 18 still less of course could he see New Zealand's mountain flora. He was hampered also in his observations on the distribution of population in New Zealand and on the social organization of the Maori; and only at one place, the Thames, did he remark on the suitability of New Zealand for colonization. But his journal contains observations of the greatest value on the life and character of the Maori when untouched by European influence, on his dress and ornaments, his houses, his food and its cultivation and preparation; on the state of health among the
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Maori; on Maori weapons and methods of warfare, Maori arts and burial customs. On the more abstruse questions of religion he has little to say, but he makes a beginning of the comparative study of the language. Banks's remarks on the arts of the Maori are particularly interesting. Cook, who comments on many of these things but more shortly and probably with some reliance on Banks's authority, speaks of course with greater weight on canoes; but Banks had greater artistic perception and a more graphic pen than any visitor to New Zealand for many years to come. What he has to say on tattooing, weaving and carving gives us an insight into the material culture of a newly discovered people which would be hard to match in the annals of exploration. The death of Buchan, whom Banks had brought with him as "landscape and figure painter", was most regrettable. Parkinson, who was primarily a botanical draughtsman, also died before the end of the voyage; but the plates made from his drawings provide at least some illustrative detail of Maori life. Before the voyage of the Endeavour all that was known of the Maori was the scanty detail of the armed conflict with Tasman, with the plate, in the published accounts of his voyage. After the Endeavour's visit not only were the coasts of New Zealand charted with some degree, often a very high degree, of accuracy, but its people were known to be akin in origin, language and culture to the Tahitians and indeed in language to the Malays. For the first achievement the credit belongs to Cook, for the other mainly to Banks, of course with Tupaia's aid. Moreover the friendly relations established, thanks to both Cook and Banks, with the Maori tribe at Queen Charlotte Sound enabled Cook to fix upon it with some confidence as a base for future explorations. Thus began a connexion which grew steadily closer until in 1840 New Zealand became a British colony.
The immediate effect of Cook's next discovery, the eastern coast of New Holland, which he named New South Wales, was greater than that of his discovery (in so far as it was a discovery) of New Zealand. For Banks the naturalist New South Wales was even more exciting, since nothing in New Zealand could be compared with the discovery of the kangaroo. On the other hand. Banks the ethnographer was disappointed with the limited opportunities he had, even during his enforced stay of seven weeks at Endeavour River after the ship had struck a reef, of
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observing the Australian aborigines. He had with him Dampier's Voyages; but it was unsatisfactory to find the aborigines "differ so much from the account that Dampier (the only man I know of who has seen them besides us) has given of them". 19 His experience of Tahiti and New Zealand was here of little help. When the Endeavour was repaired, all were keen to move on to the triumphant conclusion of Cook's explorations, the passage through Torres Strait, known from the chart in Dalrymple's book. The last stages of the voyage were an unhappy anti-climax. Banks has observations of much interest to make on various islands in the Netherlands Indies. But the Endeavour's visit to its capital, Batavia, ended in tragedy. Cook had mastered scurvy; but his very precautions against that disease, his insistence on fresh water and on fresh fruit and vegetables, probably added to the ravages of dysentery among the ship's company. 20 Malaria was also endemic near Batavia and the season was reputed the most unfavourable of the year. Banks himself was very ill and only recovered when moved into the country. Solander's life was despaired of. W. B. Monkhouse, the surgeon, Reynolds the artist, poor Tupaia and his boy Tayeto died at Batavia. Later, at Prince's Island, in the Straits of Sunda, another epidemic of dysentery carried off Green the astronomer, Parkinson the artist, Sporing, Jonathan Monkhouse, the midshipman whose "fothering" had saved the ship on the Barrier Reef, and several of the crew; and Banks and Solander were seriously ill again. The Endeavour had lost forty per cent of her complement when, after an uneventful voyage by way of the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, she anchored in the Downs on 12 July 1771. 21
Despite these losses the extraordinary success of the voyage as a whole ensured for Cook and his companions the welcome of conquering heroes on their return. "Banks," writes one of his biographers, "leaped into fame and became a person of importance." 22 He was no longer merely a naturalist of the school
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of Linnaeus: he could stand on his own feet. He could take fame in his stride with more assurance than the modest Cook, all too conscious of the deficiencies of his education. Cook of course was received by George III; but Banks and Solander also had an audience, on 10 August, and the scientist and the King began a lifelong friendship.
Even the voyage of the Endeavour had not given Banks his fill of exploration. He was keenly interested, as the journal shows, in the question of the unknown southern continent which had engaged the attention of geographers for two hundred years. His friend Lord Sandwich was now again First Lord of the Admiralty and he was very willing to be asked to take part with Cook in another voyage to clear up this question once and for all. He proposed to take with him a party of twelve, including the indispensable Solander, the chemist Priestley, who was to act as astronomer, Zoffany the painter, and James Lind, physician and astronomer also. He urged that adequate accommodation be given them for their scientific work; and the Admiralty had the Resolution, which Cook had chosen to replace the Endeavour, altered accordingly. But the Resolution, with a "low and small cabin and remarkably low between decks"-at least in Banks's opinion 23--"was found upon trial to be so crank that she would not bear her proper sail to be set on her". 24 The Navy Board consequently restored her to her original condition. Banks then went down to inspect her but returned convinced "that the ship was neither roomy nor convenient enough for his purpose, nor no ways proper for the voyage". 25 Bitterly disappointed, he determined not to go. He had spent over £5000 in preparations and lest the money should be entirely wasted took Solander, Lind and others on a botanizing voyage to Iceland instead. 26 There was no quarrel, though perhaps some coolness, between Banks and Cook: it was Sir Hugh Palliser of the Navy Board whom Banks blamed. But he could not bear to go down and welcome Cook on his return
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in 1775 from his second voyage. What made it worse was that Cook had been proved right and Banks wrong about the southern continent.
These incidents of 1772 marked in fact the end of Banks's career as a scientist-explorer, but also the beginning of another, almost equally remarkable, as a patron of science and an adviser of George III and his successive ministries on scientific matters and on the colonization of Australia. In the biographies of Banks this second career demands more space than the first, but in an introduction to his journal it can only be treated briefly. On the death of the King's mother, the Princess Dowager of Wales, on 8 February 1772, Banks took the place of the Earl of Bute, whose early influence George III had long outgrown, as scientific adviser at Kew, whose gardens the Princess had begun to develop. Banks saw the possibilities of the gardens as a centre of practical botany and used his position to organize the "scientific study of plant life in all the dependencies of the Crown" which Linnaeus's example and his own voyages had doubtless suggested to his mind. The transport of the breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies, which led to the mutiny of the Bounty (though Bligh successfully accomplished his task on a second voyage) is the best known of Banks's activities in acclimatization; another was the acclimatization in India of the tea plant from China. Banks also made it his aim to collect at Kew every known plant which might be either useful or ornamental. About seven thousand exotic plants are said to have been introduced into England in George Ill's reign and Banks and his botanist-collectors were certainly responsible for most of them. Many of these collectors were botanists of distinction. One of them, Robert Brown, was given by Alexander von Humboldt the title of princeps botanicorum which Linnaeus had enjoyed in his day.
The honour that Banks himself most enjoyed was his election on 6 December 1778, at an unprecedentedly early age, as President of the Royal Society. This election was due not to his scientific eminence so much as to the desire of the Council "to heal a breach which had recently appeared between the Society and the Court". The subject of dispute, whether lightning-conductors should be pointed or blunt, gave a good opening to the wits; but the dispute was a misfortune and Banks, the friend and adviser of the King, was the man to end it. Banks's long reign
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of nearly forty-two years began peacefully. He had now taken a large house in Soho Square, where he settled with his wife (he married in 1779) and his eccentric sister, and this with its library and museum became "the resort of men of science from every country in the civilized world". Though Banks, unlike the cheerful, rotund Solander, had no small talk, his curiosity was insatiable and his talk about his great voyage impressed even that severe judge Dr Johnson. This personal intercourse in Soho Square, "half scientific half social", and the vast correspondence that went with it fulfilled some of the purposes of the organized conferences and scientific journals of a later age. Curiously enough Banks, who was a thorough man of business in the conduct of his own affairs, was not very businesslike as President of the Royal Society: he made it better known but, as a recent historian of the Royal Society remarks, "it remains a mystery why he should have tolerated the financial irregularities and administrative shortcomings which existed in the Society". 27 He had to meet one serious challenge to his authority, in 1783-4, but that originated in a personal question, though the opposition had some support from the mathematicians. Having overcome this revolt he reigned supreme for the rest of his life.
But Banks's posthumous renown is greatest as "the Father of Australia" and he has a real claim to this honour. It was his evidence that recommended Botany Bay to a Committee of the House of Commons which sat in 1779 to determine the future fate of convicts sentenced to transportation; and his evidence, curiously enough, was more favourable to Botany Bay as a place of settlement than his journal had been. 28 Other expedients were in fact tried first; and it was not Banks but J. M. Matra, another shipmate of Cook, who brought men's minds back to the subject after the War of American Independence. Banks, however, was consulted before Lord Sydney, in 1786, took his momentous decision to make New South Wales a penal settlement. Moreover, although no correspondence between Banks and Governor Phillip survives, he was the unofficial adviser of Phillip's suc-
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cessors, Hunter, King and Bligh and also of successive Secretaries of State. Many of the civil and military officers corresponded with him also. After the "rum rebellion" against Bligh, Banks's influence diminished. He had recommended Bligh's appointment and it had not been a success. Macquarie did not want to identify himself too closely with the Bligh regime. Moreover, although John Macarthur, leader of the "rum rebellion", kept away from New South Wales for some years for fear of a charge of treason, the policy of pastoral expansion for which he stood was bound to win the day once the Blue Mountain barrier had been crossed. Curiously enough Banks had been responsible, by means which have never been revealed, for the introduction of the first Spanish merinos into the King's flock in 1787; but Macarthur's purchase of merinos from the flock for importation into New South Wales in 1805 had not been made through Banks but in his despite. 29 Banks disliked the man and he misjudged the country, thinking it unsuited to sheep. He had of course seen only the coastal fringe.
Banks in his later years had to some extent outlived his reputation. The gouty autocrat of the Royal Society, who for the last ten years of his life had to be carried or wheeled about in a chair, was admirable in his refusal to become a useless invalid; but there may be some truth in the unkind remark of Sir Humphry Davy, his successor as President, that "in his relations with the Royal Society he was too personal and made his house a circle too like a court". 30 He was something of an obscurantist too in his attitude to new scientific societies. He had not always been like this. It was he who, on the death of the younger Linnaeus in 1781, suggested to James Edward Smith the purchase of Linnaeus's vast collections, library and correspondence. These acquisitions became as it were the nucleus of the Linnean Society, founded in 1788 with Banks's active support. But he was frankly unfavourable to the later foundation of the Geological Society and the Astronomical Society, fearing that they would draw members away from the Royal Society itself. He did not
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realize that the world of science had outgrown Soho Square. On the other hand the caricatures of Gillray and the squibs of "Peter Pindar" need not be taken too seriously. In that irreverent age established institutions which could not be reformed--and Banks was an institution in himself--could at least be held up to ridicule. Sir Joseph Banks, Baronet, Knight of the Bath, Privy Councillor, patron of science, no doubt had his vulnerable spots; but there was still something left of the young Joseph Banks who had sailed with Cook, the humanitarian, the generous friend of the aspiring young scientist, the enthusiast for exploration, the high Tory who yet thought of a French scientist as a fellow-scientist and not as an enemy and who used his influence to secure the release of Flinders from imprisonment with the pertinacity of a Voltaire. When he died on 19 June 1820 a mighty pillar of Old England fell.
Banks was not an original scientist of the first rank but no less a man than Sir Joseph Hooker speaks with respect of "his labours and studies as a working naturalist". Sir Humphry Davy's reference to him as "a tolerable botanist" is an unworthy jibe. Field work is still the foundation of botany. Darwin returned from his field work with new ideas out of which he built, with the aid of experiment, a revolutionary theory. Banks's studies in the field gave him no such encouragement to original experimental work, for which he was probably unfitted in any case; but he had shown himself willing to endure hardship and danger in the cause of science and no reader of his journal can doubt that he possessed the true scientific spirit. After his voyages he still rendered great service to science as a leader of the scientific world, a promoter of scientific exploration, of botanical research and of applied and economic botany. Banks's interest in colonization, his instinct for empire-building, found its outlet in Australia, not in New Zealand. But he remains one of the greatest men who have visited New Zealand. He outmatches even Cook as a scientific observer of Maori life and ranks with him as a champion of humane treatment of the Maori people. In the land of which he wrote so vividly, Pakeha and Maori should join to do him honour.
W. P. MORRELL
16 Skibo Street,
Kew,
Dunedin.
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Sir Joseph Banks as a Writer
The Dictionary of National Biography states that the writings of Sir Joseph Banks are comparatively trifling, and at first glance, one is therefore astonished to see the vast array of publications below his name in the catalogue of the British Museum Library. On closer examination it becomes clear indeed that few of these are from the pen of Sir Joseph, and it is then that the significance of the great lists appears. In some important way Banks has been concerned with these publications--perhaps as author of a pamphlet, of an article within a volume, or has been the subject of a booklet, the target of controversy or lampoon.
Apart from his journal, it is probable that a description of his botanical collections would have been of the greatest value, but though the publication was projected, the early death in 1782 of his colleague Dr Solander prevented his going on with it. Indeed, the plates were engraved and a set of prints from these is in the Turnbull Library.
Banks's service to science and to many causes was in his influence and prestige rather than in his writing. He wrote A Short Account of the Causes of the Disease called the Blight, Mildew and Rust, 1805. He was the author of an anonymous tract on the Propriety of Allowing a Qualified Exportation of Wool, 1782, and in 1809 he brought out a small work on the Merino sheep, a pet subject of both King George III and Banks himself.
But there are two ways in which the mind of Sir Joseph Banks found expression--as an executive and as a correspondent. For 42 years he was President of the Royal Society, the most influential and distinguished of English learned bodies. He stimulated much of its activity and its members' work and writings, both at the council table and personally. Thus only the history of the Royal Society reflects this motive power adequately. But his ideas and his influence were conveyed largely in his voluminous correspondence, which has hitherto not been published except for fragments.
It is just to say, however, that much of the text that has been
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accepted vaguely as that of "Cook's First Voyage", as appearing in the classic work edited by John Hawkesworth in 1773, owes a certain amount to the journals of Banks, to which the editor had full access. It is one of the reproaches against Hawkesworth in his edition that he did not indicate the sources he drew from, or indeed when he was drawing from the well of his own opinion.
The simple generalization therefore seems inescapable, that any student of English geography, navigation, science, agriculture, botany, transportation, colonization, Iceland, Newfoundland, the South Seas or Kew Gardens, in the years before and after the end of the eighteenth century, can with advantage turn to what Sir Joseph Banks has almost certainly said in print or written in a letter to one of his many correspondents.
C. R. H. Taylor
Alexander Turnbull Library
June, 1958
