The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  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.

  9

  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 Resolutions 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 museum of Pacific culture, combining natural history with ethnology and human artefacts in a quite new way. They were housed in 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 eveni
ng). 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 southwards. To explain his sensations, Cowper invented the idea of the ‘armchair traveller’: ‘My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.’90

  In his long, reflective poem The Task, Cowper accompanied Cook and Banks in his imagination. He transformed Banks, rather suitably, into an adventurous bee, busily foraging for pollen.

  He travels and expatiates, as the bee

  From flower to flower, so he from land to land;

  The manners, customs, policy of all

  Pay contribution to the store he gleans;

  He sucks intelligence in every clime,

  And spreads the honey of his deep research

  At his return, a rich repast for me.

  He travels and I too. I tread his deck,

  Ascend his topmast, through his peering eyes

  Discover countries, with a kindred heart

  Suffer his woes and share in his escapes,

  While fancy, like the finger of a clock,

  Runs the great Circuit, and is still at home.91

  Omai landed back in Tahiti in August 1777, and set up as a merchant of Western goods. He also became a sort of guide and impresario for visiting Westerners, ironically finding himself doing Banks’s job in reverse, explaining European culture to the sceptical Tahitians. He sold red feathers, cooking pots and pistols, but never fully reintegrated into Tahitian society. Cowper included Omai’s story in The Task, reflecting on the excitement of exploration, but also on the clash between European and Pacific cultures. He suggested that Omai might have become a victim of Romantic scientific enquiry, left permanently alienated from both worlds:

  I cannot think thee yet so dull of heart

  And spiritless, as never to regret


  Sweets tasted here, and left as soon as known.

  Methinks I see thee straying on the beach

  And asking of the surge that bathes thy foot

  If ever it has wash’d our distant shore.

  I see thee weep, and thine are honest tears,

  A patriot’s for his country.92

  Banks’s own liberated behaviour in the years immediately following his return to London suggests that he too had been permanently affected by his Tahitian experience. A visitor to Revesby in 1776 referred to him as ‘a wild eccentric character’ who obviously still dreamed of his ‘voyage to Otaheite’, and neglected his estates.93 He was reported to have taken a young woman — presumably Sarah Wells — on a scandalous fishing party with Lord Sandwich and his mistress Martha Ray, during which the women sang and danced while the men ‘played the kettle drums’ (perhaps in an attempt to recreate the Tahitian timorodee).

  Public opinion might laugh at him as an old-fashioned libertine, as in a satirical poem that went into circulation entitled ‘Mimosa or, The Sensitive Plant, Dedicated to Mr Banks’. Yet Banks genuinely believed that British society was often cruelly restrictive towards women, although he told the author Mrs Ann Radcliffe that he thought women themselves were often responsible: ‘The greater part of the Evils to which your sex are liable under our present Customs of Society originate in the decisions of women … The Penalty by which women uniformly permit the smallest deviation of a Female character from the Rigid paths of Virtue is more severe than Death & more afflicting than the tortures of the Dungeon.’94