4

Mr Birds Ways

On 7 January 1768, the Royal Society Club met for their weekly dinner in Fleet Street. Usually only twelve formed the evening’s party, as they had the week before when Franklin had attended. But on this, the opening dinner of the new year, there was an exceptional turnout. In all thirty-three dined, and the Mitre had prepared for them a menu of delicious variety, ‘salmon, soles, haddocks, achbone of beef, ham & veal pye, neck of mutton roast, plumb-pudding, 2 Lasterlings, turkey, 2 apple pyes, 2 dishes lobsters, a crab, 2 dishes of Tripe, sweetbreads fricasied, capon, beef steaks, butter and cheese’.¹

At the head of the table sat the Earl of Morton, president of the Society. Also there was Daines Barrington, the lawyer, antiquarian and friend of Thomas Pennant; the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne; and Lord Charles Cavendish, the inventor of a self-registering thermometer and scion of the Devonshire family. On a dark January evening, between the dim light and high spirits, the crab and claret, this is where acquaintances were made and decisions were shaped. In Georgian Britain, circles of power remained relatively small, and were difficult to penetrate. For newcomers to town, cards or letters of introduction were vital passports into spheres of influence. But they would only ever admit an aspirant to the first step of a slippery staircase. To reach the places where intimacies with the great could be made and true influence could be exerted, remained an impossibility for most. ‘No Strangers be admitted to dine here for the future except introduced by the President’, affirmed one of the club’s by-laws. To be admitted a guest was both an opportunity and a challenge. And that January night, making his debut at the dinner as the guest of the medical doctor Alexander Russell, was Alexander Dalrymple.

It was more than two years since Dalrymple had returned from the east. He had spent much of that time compiling his catalogue of historical voyages through the South Seas – the period term for the Pacific Ocean. Though most would have known something of Abel Tasman, Jacob Le Maire or the Spanish adventurer Juan Fernández’s voyages, Dalrymple had gone much further. He had delved into archaic manuscripts, uncovered and translated old letters and journals to compile details of bewitching islands, ‘all planted, sown and till’d’, richly wooded and full of fruits, overseen by native peoples who were sometimes ‘general brown like Spaniards’, sometimes black, sometimes white, ‘and others of which the complexion is reddish as if burnt by the sun.’² Trained by the East India Company, Dalrymple’s eye was alive to the commercial opportunity. One of the passages to have caught his attention spoke of an island ‘furnished with fine trees’, cocoa-nuts, herbs ‘extremely beneficial to the sick; plenty of mussels, of nacres, mother of pearl, and pearl oysters … so that there is great prospect of an advantageous pearl fishery’.³

The club’s meeting afforded Dalrymple a chance to describe these worlds intimately, face to face; to elaborate, and allure those who were sure to be interested. Along with their new taxes the government was known to be meditating a ‘blue water’ policy, an expansion of British trade across the world’s nations. The hope was that new trade would provide more debt-servicing revenue. With the contest at an end in North America, the government’s attention had turned to old, adventuring schemes. There were still many parts of the earth’s surface about which little was known. In an age of reason it seemed ludicrous that few had sailed south of the fiftieth parallel in the Indian or Atlantic oceans or that no one had properly mapped the Spice Islands of the East. The East India Company’s charter approved the commercial exploration of these islands – whatever the Dutch protests might be – yet in the early 1760s the British had no presence east of Sumatra, ‘and scarce any intercourse or commerce in that quarter but at Canton in China’.⁴

This was the region that Dalrymple knew, a place of glittering seas and thriving woodlands that must have felt impossibly distant to the wintry London outside the Mitre. A hard frost had set in before Christmas. It had not abated as the old year turned into the new. By 9 January the cold was being spoken of as remarkable. At Bath a temperature of 8°F had been recorded, estimated to be one of the coldest of the century. In London the blast had laced the streets with ice. Not far away the Thames was no longer a river of water but a stiffening mass. ‘This morning the river below the bridge carried all the appearance of a general wreck; ships, boats, and small craft, lying in a very confused manner, some on shore, and others sunk or overset.’ At Deptford, a fishing boat was found choked in the ice. Inside, the hands were frozen and dead, ‘the youngest of them, a youth about seventeen, was found sitting as erect almost as if alive’.⁵

What had happened at Deptford was repeated in neighbourhoods across London and out into the countryside. ‘The severe frost … has continued with remarkable, rigour, to the great calamity of the lower part of the people, who were already severely distressed by the exorbitant price of provisions’, one writer judged.⁶ With the Thames frozen to Westminster, the lower river had become clogged with inward-bound East Indiamen and colliers, their running ropes stiff in the blocks, their sails struck and stowed beneath. Meanwhile in the Port of London the coal heavers, lightermen and jobbing sailors were left without work. It was a relief for everyone when, on 14 January, the frost broke and a general thaw set in. After weeks of inaction, the river broke open. Within the space of a day the snow vanished, ‘as if by enchantment’. Soon East Indiamen were once again coming alongside at the East India Docks.

It was on a vessel like these that Dalrymple had travelled home from Madras. He had stepped ashore from the Nottingham Indiaman in 1765, a cultivated traveller of twenty-eight. After thirteen years away, he had a dash of the East about him. Travelling home to his family’s seat at Newhailes House, East Lothian, Scotland, he had sat for a portrait in the Chinese sitting room. The figure captured in this work by John Thomas Seton has all the slender elegance of one of Gainsborough’s country squires. He is sitting with an arm draped languidly over a curved chair wearing the midnight-blue frock coat and breeches, white knee-length stockings and gold-buckled shoes of the East India Company. He seems relaxed, assured, romantic. His left arm stretches out, leading the viewer’s eye to a terrestrial globe. A tricorn hat and a chart lie on the table. Most striking of all in the portrait is the quality of light. It is not the drab, diffused light of the Scottish Lowlands, but rather it has a champagne brightness to it. It is as if Dalrymple has somehow gathered the radiance of the East up and carried it to Scotland with him. Here is the geographical scholar and the prosperous merchant in one, the visual manifestation of Enlightenment.

Dalrymple was born in this Scottish country house in 1737 to Sir James Dalrymple, the auditor of the Exchequer, and Lady Christian. It was an affluent beginning. His elder brother David was the first of the siblings to rise to prominence, appointed as one of the Lords of Session under the title Lord Halles. Another became a lieutenant colonel in the army and one more Lord Provost of Edinburgh. But from an early age, Alexander had been drawn in a different direction. Stories were later told of how he was tutored in geography by his father, ‘who enlivened his lessons by narratives of his own travels in Europe’. But even then, Alexander’s horizons stretched far beyond Venetian canals or Parisian houses. ‘The Author looking up to Columbus, to Magellan’, he wrote in a third-person reflection, ‘and to those immortal heroes who have display’d new worlds to our view, and extended the European name and influence amongst distant nations, was inflamed with the ambition to do something to promote the general benefit of mankind, at the same time that it should add to the glory and interest of his country.’⁷

Dalrymple settled on the East India Company. By the mid-eighteenth century the company was Britain’s prime trading arm, with a monopoly of the trade in the eastern islands. For a boy like Dalrymple, there was no finer place. After some bursts of tuition, and with the influence of his father, he had left Scotland as a boy of fifteen. In December 1752, Dalrymple had embarked from Gravesend on an East Indiaman called Suffolk bound for Madras. India would be Alexander’s home for the next thirteen years. Despite his pedigree and contacts, he endured a difficult beginning. Arriving at the port he found his letters of introduction worthless – all his contacts were either away from town, dead or had taken to the bottle – and worse still, his handwriting was declared so abominable he was not permitted to take up the anticipated post as a writer. Instead he was banished to toil in the storehouse, ‘where nothing was to be learned worth learning’.⁸ He had recovered from this inauspicious beginning. Graced with intelligence to match his ambition, at length he had won the trust of Lord Pigot, governor of Madras, and then afterwards an influential administrator called Mr Orme, who gave him ‘free access’ to his library, ‘an advantage doubly estimable from the rarity of books, and the excellence of Mr Orme’s selection’.⁹

Here on the eastern outpost of the British Empire, Dalrymple was at liberty to learn, socialise and plot among the grandees of the company. Increasingly he was sought for his opinion on efficient routes as he turned his knowledge to practical advantage. Earmarked as the company’s next secretary in Madras, his future seemed secure. But the same predilection for travel that had enticed him across the globe had not yet subsided. ‘In this station’, an account in the Naval Chronicle later ran, ‘we see the zeal of Mr Dalrymple verging upon ambition; for it appears, that while examining the old records, to qualify himself, by a knowledge of them, to fill the office of secretary, he found the commerce of the Eastern Islands was an object of great consideration with the Company, and the attainment of it became the immediate object of his aspiration.’¹⁰

Over the years 1759–63, as the Western and Eastern worlds were consumed by conflict, Dalrymple persuaded Pigot to allow him to explore the untapped islands of the East. Initially he travelled as a guest on East Indiamen which were passing Madras on voyages to China. Later Dalrymple was able to secure command of his own vessel, and he was given the freedom to explore like few others before him – combining the roles of merchant and navigator in ways not dissimilar to Milner on the British coast. Dalrymple entered into alliances, struck treaties, navigated shoals, rocks and reefs, visiting the islands of Sooloo (Sulu) and Balambangan, all the while exercising ‘a nice judgment and dextrous management’.

This was the pedigree Dalrymple carried to Britain with him in 1765. Sitting for his portrait in his family’s Lothian home, the world might well have lain at the end of his outstretched arms. He had made promises of discoveries that would invigorate trade, and he had delivered on them. Not only this but he had commanded his own vessel and had interacted with island populations successfully, gaining an uncommon regard for them and their ways. Now residing at the town house of his patron, Lord Pigot, in bustling Soho Square, with the transvestite spy Chevalier d’Eon, twice lord mayor William Beckford and General Henry Conway for neighbours, Dalrymple had been able to turn his attention to the greatest prize of all – one that had absorbed his imagination since boyhood: the southern continent.

 

For time out of mind there had been talk of an undefined land mass at the far side of the world. Eratosthenes, the chief librarian of the celebrated library of Alexandria in the third century BC – a man famous for calculating the earth’s circumference – is among the candidates for sowing the seed in ancient times. The seed would germinate. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the notion of a lost austral world had become a feature on early modern maps. Called by various names – to the Spanish it was the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit, to others it was ‘Beach’, ‘Antipodes’, ‘Terra Australis’ – as the age of exploration wore on rumours concerning its discovery were intermittently whispered. At the end of the earth was a beguiling land inhabited by winged horses and flying fish. A beckoning land mass filled with gold, silver, minerals, rare spices.

That a continent existed in total isolation, progressing in a never-converging parallel with civilisation in the north, seemed to most ‘a chimera, a thing in the clouds’.¹¹ They suspected the process at work. A ship, sailing without precision instruments in the South Seas, would spy an island or disembark on a coast. An anecdote would be carried home to Europe. A line would be plotted on a chart. The line would converge with something else and a fantasy would flourish until another explorer exploded it and the process started again. ‘To say the truth’, one writer conceded, ‘all notions built upon conjectures only, however beautifully ranged in a system, serve only to puzzle and mislead.’¹² Another English writer, John Callendar, elaborated:

It is very certain that the discovery of Terra Australis Incognita is considered by many wise and knowing people, as a kind of philosopher’s stone, perpetual motion, or, in plain English, as a chimera, fit only to take up the empty brains of wild projectors. Yet there seems to be no sufficient reason, why such as are competent judges of the matter in dispute, should decide peremptorily that there is no such country; or if there be that it is not worth the finding. These sort of hasty conclusions are extremely fatal to science in general and to the art of navigation in particular.¹³

As Callendar implies, the idea of a southern continent had never completely lost its appeal. And with Britain’s maritime trade developing fast, the idea that an entire new land mass was yet to be explored excited many. As the global map had been filled in, less and less room remained for this land mass. Its most likely location lay right in the centre of the South Seas, at a high latitude not dissimilar to Britain’s – a place perfectly suited for trading the same clothes, the same foodstuffs, the same minerals.

Not to enquire after such a land mass seemed lunacy. After all, even if there were no firm discoveries, then there were strong hints. Geographers had long marshalled evidence of a secret land betrayed by the movements of winds and currents, patterns of bird migrations and the suggestive presence of driftwood or, most telling of all, the density of ice in the sea beyond Cape Horn.^* To Arthur Young it would be ‘astonishing’ that such proof was not lure enough for the maritime powers of Europe. Do they not have, he asked, the:

curiosity to become acquainted with the ideas, the manners, the customs, and the knowledge of so considerable a part of the globe, all which are at present as unknown as those of the inhabitants of the moon? What a wonderful idea is it to think of the arts, the sciences, and the species of human learning which may reside among these unknown people, and wait only for the active curiosity of some European to extend them in a million of beneficial shapes to the rest of mankind!¹⁴

These were ideals Dalrymple shared. In a book manuscript he started preparing in 1766, Dalrymple called the southern continent his ‘first and most striking object of research’.¹⁵ At the library at Madras he had sifted clues from the voyage accounts written long ago by the Spanish. ‘An active mind, long employed on any subject’, he reflected, ‘will acquire ideas from very faint lines.’¹⁶ He believed the southern continent had been sighted on its western edge by the Dutchman Abel Tasman in 1642 and on its east by the Spaniard Juan Fernández half a century before. There were more accounts, too, contained within the latitudes, from 64°S to 40°S, each quite possibly a tantalising peek of an enormous whole.

Dalrymple had not only relied on anecdote. Following the thinking of the French scholar Charles de Broses and his Historie des Navigationes aux Terres Australes (1756), he couched his theory in mathematical terms. De Broses advocated a theory of ‘equipoisure’, the idea that for the globe to be kept in regular motion an exact, or similar amount of land had to exist to the south of the equator. This ‘equipoisure’ was an idea fashioned to appeal to rational minds, and its implications infected Dalrymple’s outlook. He carefully tallied up all the known land masses. He found that between the equator and the tropics a similar proportion of land existed in both hemispheres. The harmony was only disturbed in the higher latitudes, the north having seven-eighths more land above the Tropic of Cancer than had been discovered beneath the Tropic of Capricorn. Extrapolating out, Dalrymple made the ‘strong presumption, that there are in the southern hemisphere, hitherto totally undiscovered, valuable and extensive countries’. As Abel Tasman had proved no land existed east of the Cape of Good Hope, Dalrymple concluded that in the South Seas ‘from the Tropick to 50° South latitude there are extensive countries’. He reckoned that another of Tasman’s discoveries, New Zealand, to the extreme west, was likely to form the eastern edge of this continent. As for the endless stretch to the east, for Dalrymple’s sums to tally, it ‘must be nearly all land’.¹⁷

Dalrymple’s conjectures were designed to appeal to the eighteenth-century mindset. Posed mathematically, his counterpoise theory aligned with the idea that there was a secret inner harmony in the earth’s movements. This is precisely what Newton had shown with the tides. Ever since the Renaissance, European civilisation had admired the presence of proportion, from Florentine architecture to Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. That neat proportions might exist inside the human body or the cloisters at Santa Croce was one thing; it would be the ultimate Enlightenment discovery to find that the earth – the base for everything – had its own terrestrial balance.

But how to test Dalrymple’s hypothesis? If a southern continent did exist, then it was concealed from European eyes by its very remoteness. It took a minimum of six months’ sailing for a British ship to even enter the South Seas. Before they got there they were forced to pass the brutal, wind-tossed barriers of Cape Horn or the Strait of Magellan and thereafter they were condemned to be ‘continual wanderers’ in the South Seas. Twenty-five years before, British naval administrators had looked into remedying this by founding a naval base in the south Atlantic to act as a launch pad into the Pacific, as well as providing a haven for the ships where they could replenish and repair after the arduous Atlantic passage.

A few potential sites in particular – the Falkland Islands and the elusive Pepys Island – had aroused interest. In the late 1740s the British Admiralty, under the innovative leadership of the young First Lord, John Montagu, Lord Sandwich, had begun preparations for an exploratory voyage to the region. This was a dangerous policy. Ever since the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed between Spain and Portugal in 1494, the Spanish had considered this ocean their private property.^* Commenced in secret, the Spanish however soon got wind of the British ambitions. They ‘so vehemently opposed it, and so strongly maintained the right of the Spaniards to the exclusive dominion of the South Sea’, as well as the ‘Magellanic region’ in which the islands lay, that Sandwich had been obliged to abandon his plans.¹⁸

Fifteen years later, however, after the Treaty of Paris, British attentions had again drifted south. They were not alone. Still aggrieved at the loss of their Canadian territories, the French had ‘conceived the design of indemnifying’ themselves ‘by a discovery of the southern continent, and of those large islands, which lie in the way to it’.¹⁹ These aspirations had been spearheaded by a figure of European reputation, the nobleman, diplomat and former chief of staff to Montcalm in Quebec, Louis Antoine de Bougainville. He had read of the Falklands in British travel books and had recognised their strategic importance at once. Whoever controlled these islands would govern the sea paths to the Pacific.

Stealing a march on the British, de Bougainville had sailed from Saint-Malo in September 1763, and by April 1764 had arrived at the Falklands. Following close behind in the thirty-two-gun frigate Dolphin was Commodore John Byron. Leaving in the summer of 1764, Byron was instructed to take possession of both Pepys and the Falkland Islands. Byron failed to find Pepys Island, which turned out to be a geographic phantom, but in January 1765, nine months after de Bougainville, Byron sailed into a ‘fine convenient bay’ in the Falklands that he named Port Egmont. After a short residence of nine days, Byron claimed the islands for Great Britain. It was a ‘very merry’ occasion, one of his officers wrote, ‘a large bowl of arrack punch being carried on shore, out of which they drank, among several loyal toasts, success to the discovery of so fine a harbour’.²⁰

De Bougainville’s and Byron’s visits left the Falklands split. The French had landed on the east of the islands while the British had planted their flag on the west. With the situation further aggravated by Spain’s insistence that the islands fell within their sphere, an uneasy geopolitical situation had developed. It would not last. The scramble for the Falklands in 1763–5 marked the beginning of a transnational rivalry between Britain and France. (Spain, a waning force but one that could not be entirely ignored, remained a jealous onlooker.) ‘What continuance of happiness’, Samuel Johnson pondered from Fleet Street, ‘can be expected, when the whole system of European empire can be in danger of a new concussion, by a contention for a few spots of earth, which, in the deserts of the ocean, had almost escaped human notice, and which, if they had not happened to make a sea mark, had perhaps never had a name?’²¹

In the mid-1760s neither the British nor the French were of the mood to be discouraged by such moralising or by the terms of ancient treaties. After his call at the Falklands in 1765, Byron headed through the Strait of Magellan into the South Seas. Soon after, de Bougainville followed. Having encircled the world, Byron was back in London by late spring 1766 and the Dolphin was immediately recommissioned for another foray into the South Seas. On her second circumnavigation she sailed under the command of a Cornishman, Samuel Wallis, accompanied by Lieutenant Philip Carteret in a consort, HMS Swallow, and a transport for provisions. Wallis’s secret instructions – to sail into the South Seas looking for Terra Australis – were so closely guarded to protect them from European spies that none of the sailors were told of their destination.

This was how matters stood in the mid-1760s as Dalrymple appeared with his new charts in London. With both the Falkland Islands and the southern continent objects of considerable interest, he was guaranteed at least the ear of the powerful. And with Adam Smith’s support and a privately printed run of his Account of the Discoveries Made in the South Pacifick Ocean Previous to 1764 – one copy was presented to the Earl of Shelburne, the Secretary of State for the Southern Department – his prospects began to look rosy. Dalrymple wanted a ship to take him to the South Seas. And, as luck would have it, the grandees at the Royal Society – for reasons of their own – were inclined to help him get there.

 

The Royal Society’s Dining Club had a different motive for being interested in the South Seas. On 3 June 1769, as everyone well knew, the planet Venus would be visible not as a glimmering star in the night sky, but as a perfect black circle that, over certain sections of the earth’s surface, would slide across the face of the sun. This ‘Transit of Venus’ was a cosmic encounter not to be repeated in the lifetime of anyone living. Transits happened in pairs every 105–122 years, and the 1769 transit was to form the second half of this major eighteenth-century astronomical event. The first act of the drama had been played out on 6 June 1761. Roused by a zealous Frenchman, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, France, Sweden, Russia and Britain had hurriedly dispatched teams of astronomical observers to different locations within the transit zone, which spanned the continents of Asia and Europe. The ambition was to gather observational data about the transit from highly dispersed areas across both hemispheres. This would provide mathematicians with the raw data they needed to compute a fascinating equation: the distance between the earth and the sun. Hopes had been high, but the results had been mixed. With the world in conflict, the astronomers’ ships had been chased, locations had been inaccessible, native populations had proved hostile and the weather had often been unkind. On top of these issues, more problems with the instruments had come during the observations themselves.

Looking forward to 1769, the learned scientific societies of Europe and America intended to rectify the past mistakes. But this time there was a new obstacle. Only the very beginning of the transit would be visible in Britain and western Europe. For it to be traced in its entirety, the astronomers calculated, observers needed to travel either north into the everlasting light of the northern summer, or west to America. One perfect location would be the South Seas, but no one knew the exact location of any likely island – and terra firma was absolutely necessary, as precise observation was impossible on the rocking deck of a ship. To this riddle, Dalrymple with his charts and experience presented an attractive solution.

The organisation of the British transit observations was being overseen by the Royal Society. As far back as 5 June 1766 they had ‘resolvd to send astronomers to several parts of the World’. More detailed discussions had begun in November 1767, when a list of possible places and people was discussed at a council meeting. Among potential sites were Fort Churchill in Hudson’s Bay and Newfoundland, and it was thought to be ‘proper to Send two Observers to the South Sea’, though no one was quite sure where. ‘Mr Dalrymple’ was named among the appropriate candidates for making the observation.²²

Over the next weeks the society’s plans began to fall into place. Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal who himself had been one of the travelling astronomers in 1761, oversaw the appointments. William Wales, a mathematician, was selected for the North American observation, and Jeremiah Dixon was favoured for a trip to Norway. Meanwhile Dalrymple’s candidature for the South Seas leg was gathering momentum. It had no doubt struck the organisers that, by appointing him, they were not only selecting a navigator who might carry some certified astronomer to a charted island, but they might also probe unknown regions for the southern continent.

By December 1767 Dalrymple was receiving letters from the Earl of Morton, president of the society, that provided signals ‘of the favourable intentions of the Council’. The central remaining question related to Dalrymple’s status aboard ship. On occasion civilian experts, not naval officers, had been appointed to captain ships. Three times Edmond Halley had commanded HMS Paramour at the turn of the century as he investigated questions relating to the magnetic variation of the compass. More recently in France, de Bougainville had been given a ship, though he had no naval rank. This was the arrangement Dalrymple wanted to replicate. As he had suggested before, this was a vital matter to him. He believed that a split command – between a sea officer and philosophic gentleman – would invariably cause trouble. Sensing a decision had already been taken, Dalrymple took the chance to press his case. On 7 December 1767, he wrote to Charles Morton, secretary of the society. He knew their focus remained on the transit, and Dalrymple assured them, ‘Wherever I am in June 1769, I shall most certainly not let slip an opportunity of making an Observation so important to Science.’ Unabashed, he rounded off:

However it may be necessary to observe that I can have no thought of undertaking the Voyage as a Passenger going out to make the observation or on any other footing than that of having the management of the Ship intended for the service.²³

Britain in the 1760s was a country riven by contradictions. For all the glittering excess, there were thousands who subsisted on short-term contracts, rarely with much more than a handful of pennies in their pocket. This was life. But it was precarious life. The frost at the start of 1768 had made their situations acute. The loss of a month’s income had driven many to the edge of starvation and made the accounts of society glitz in London and opulence in the West End, reports of a ‘brilliant Court’ at St James’s and wild bets by the county gentry, all the harder to bear. No ministry had managed to remedy the inequalities. After Grenville’s administration had fallen in 1765, it was replaced by a short-lived one led by the Marquis of Rockingham, which was then replaced by a ‘chequered and speckled’ coalition headed by William Pitt, although he – as Earl of Chatham – was largely a symbolic figure and often away from Westminster with illness. Fed up with years of ineffective leadership, in 1766 the Annual Register had printed a ‘Humorous Proposal for a Female Administration’, which advocated a new type of government, composed entirely of women. For each political post, a society lady was proposed. If readers were tickled by the absurd idea, the author advised, then perhaps they should compare those nominated – Catharine Macaulay was allotted the position of Royal Historiographer – ‘with the Males who at present enjoy those places’.²⁴

There would be no women, of course, just more taxes. And many were starting to wonder where the drive for dominion would end. ‘Power is like Fire; it warms, scorches, or destroys, according as it is watched, provoked, or increased’, the English Commonwealthman John Trenchard had written.²⁵ Meanwhile, in the first months of 1768, the price of bread in the capital rose by a quarter to twopence a pound, disturbing the economic equilibrium in a way no one yet comprehended. As plans for Dalrymple’s voyage were developing in February 1768, just one thing was wanting: a dynamic element to bring grievances to a head. And the element that soon appeared proved so combustible that it threw all London into confusion. Aside from everything else, the disorder it brought to the Thames would almost ruin the Royal Society’s South Seas expedition before it had even begun.

Ever since John Wilkes was chased into exile in 1763, the government had been haunted by the prospect of his return. Having him publically declared an outlaw, they had conferred on him something of a Robin Hood status. Everyone knew the election offered him his best chance of a return and the Newcastle Courant relayed his movements in veiled snatches. In the opening issue of the year, on 2 January, came news: ‘They write from the Hague, of the 16^th, that “The famous Mr Wilkes is actually here.”’ A month later the story had developed. To ward Wilkes off, the government was attempting to bribe him with the governorship of the Bahamas. The counter-rumour was that Wilkes was preparing to join dissident forces abroad, at Boston in Massachusetts, perhaps. But everyone knew his most explosive move would be to hazard all and return to London. No one – not Charlton in his Whitby classroom, not Fishburn in his shipyard, or Milner on the Earl of Pembroke – would have missed the significance of the Courant’s report on 27 February: ‘We hear that a celebrated Outlaw is at the Moment actually in the Kingdom.’

In any other year, this might have been as far as the story got. But as Milner brought the Earl of Pembroke into the Thames for the last time, the Wilkes story was about to catch fire. On 11 March, to the astonishment of everyone, Wilkes broke out into public, offering himself as a candidate in the forthcoming election. Convicted in the courts of law, Wilkes had chosen instead to stand trial in the court of public opinion. ‘It is said to be really true’, ran a disbelieving item in the Chronicle of 19 March, ‘the Parliamentary Rolls furnish a Precedent that an Outlaw may be chosen a Representative without a revoking of the Outlawry.’ This was a level of brinkmanship no one had witnessed before. Lionised by the public and loathed by the establishment, ‘this was a push’, wrote one onlooker, ‘which required all the art and power of the ministry to parry’.²⁶

A contagion ripped through London. Wilkes had targeted the City of London constituency and the citizens clamoured for the latest developments. After his speech was published on 11 March, he made a subsequent address at the Guildhall hustings on 16 March:

I stand here, gentlemen, a private man, unconnected with the great, and unsupported by any party. I have no support but you: I wish no other support: I can have none more certain, none more honourable.²⁷

The polls opened directly. Georgian general elections had a different rhythm to those of today. Instead of a long run-up to a single polling day, the campaigns were shorter, while the process of voting continued for days. The Guildhall poll opened on 16 March and as days passed voters came in increasing numbers. And it was during these days, around 21 March 1768, that an official from the Navy Board approached Thomas Milner with a request to examine his ship.

This meeting of Milner and the faceless official is one of those significant moments in history that hides in a half-light. All we know is that it probably happened near to a wharf called Mr Birds Ways. This was the sailors’ quarters. On the river’s north bank at Wapping sprawled a neighbourhood of narrow, densely populated streets. Radcliffe Highway, the road from Smithfield to Essex, ran through this area. Branching off the Highway as it crossed Wapping was Old Gravel Lane, a place of linen drapers, taverns and chophouses that grew insalubrious as it reached the riverside. This was a transient area populated by sailors, coal heavers, prostitutes and petty criminals, a voluble mass who lived most of their lives out of doors: hauling home their sea chests, or hawking for business. Bird Street was just seconds from Old Gravel Lane, closer to the river next to Wapping Old Stairs and a minute along from Execution Dock where pirates, smugglers and mutineers were hanged. Somewhere here on the riverside, at Mr Birds Ways, the Earl of Pembroke lay at anchor.

 

Across London in Westminster, the last month had been one of tumult at the Royal Society. As Benjamin Franklin wrote to Jean-Baptise LeRoy in France, ‘Our Society are about to send three Setts of Astronomers abroad, to observe the next Transit of Venus; the Places, Hudson’s Bay, the North Cape, and somewhere South of the Line.’ But while they had been ‘attentive to what is to pass in the Heavens’, they had neglected terrestrial affairs. Their ‘Clerk and Collector, has unobserv’d run away with our Money upon Earth, to the amount of near 1500 Pounds, which makes it necessary for us in the Affair to apply for Royal Assistance’.²⁸

This sorry affair, stinging for the society’s finances, would have yet greater consequences. Franklin had put his name to the memorial ‘To the King’s most excellent Majesty’ which had been drawn up explaining the ‘passage of the Planet Venus over the Disc of the Sun … That the like appearance after the 3^rd of June 1769 will not happen for more than 100 years.’²⁹ The ‘Memorialists’ bolstered their case with an appeal not just to patriotism, but also to the king’s sense of his regal legacy. They reminded him that a hundred years before, the society had been established to fulfil the very task with which they were currently concerned. The memorial was sent in February and it took only a few weeks for the king to approve the request and forward £4,000, ‘to defray the expense of conveying such persons as it shall be thought proper to send’. The finances were secured. But with the king’s money came a loss of independence. No longer were the society to act unilaterally. On 29 February 1768 the Admiralty were brought into the planning of the voyage, being told that the king had decided ‘a suitable vessel should be provided by the Royal Navy’.³⁰

At once the administrative cogs had begun to turn. The search for an exploration vessel was underway by the start of March. Details of the hunt are committed to history in a succession of letters between Whitehall, Wapping and Deptford. The Admiralty’s secretary wrote to the Navy Board on 5 March asking for a proposal for ‘a proper vessel to be fitted for this service’.³¹ Three days later the board replied that a sloop, Tryal, ‘would be suitable’. She was being refitted in Deptford dock but it would be the end of May before she could be got ready ‘and there is no vessel at home to be depended upon for so long a voyage, that can be sooner fitted’. The Admiralty replied within two days, suggesting a ship called the Rose, reminding the board ‘it is necessary the ship should sail this spring’. Eleven days passed before the board replied with a verdict. It had looked into the Rose but found that she ‘may be unable to stow the quantity of provisions required’. But although the Rose was unsuitable, they had another suggestion: ‘The Board suggests a cat-built vessel, which would be roomy enough for the purpose. One of about 350 tons can be purchased in the River Thames.’³²

This was, on the face of it, a left-field suggestion. A collier had no elegance to merit such a glamorous commission. She had no figurehead, no guns to protect her, no great cabin for the officers to entertain in style. There existed a prejudice against merchant ships among naval men. The very idea of the tawdry bows of a collier in the sparkling waters of the Pacific must have seemed horrifyingly incongruous – like a debutante arriving to a Piccadilly ball in arm with a Limehouse costermonger. And yet this was a suggestion borne of experience. In the Seven Years War colliers had often been used to carry cargoes and men. Moreover, after the winter there was a plentiful supply in the Thames: strong-built, with massive hold capacities. The idea appealed. The Admiralty replied to the board the very same day, 21 March. There was an urgency in the letter, as if a presentable solution, or at least a tolerable one, had at last been struck upon. ‘The recommendation of a cat-built vessel is approved, and the purchase is to be effected at once.’ Two days later the Admiralty were discussing the vices and virtues of two colliers at their daily meeting. One was called the Valentine, the other, Earl of Pembroke.

The precise nature of what happened over the next few days is uncertain and contested. The letters suggest responsibility for assessing the ships had devolved from the Navy Board to the Deptford Yard officers, those who worked with vessels each day and understood them best. Perhaps it was they who preferred Milner’s ship, but others later claimed to have swung the decision. One of them was Dalrymple himself. Twice in public Dalrymple asserted that he chose Fishburn’s collier over the others. Once he maintained that he had travelled to Mr Birds Ways, in company with the surveyor of the navy, to view the two vessels. ‘The one he approved was accordingly purchased.’³³ Dalrymple only made this assertion in 1802, but he made a similar statement in 1773, arguing he had preferred the Earl of Pembroke ‘to the other ship which was smaller’, because it was ‘able to carry another anchor and cable’, features which he felt ‘might be of the utmost consequence’.³⁴

There is nothing in the official documents to support Dalrymple’s claim. Different traditions state that the Earl of Pembroke was selected by a naval captain, Hugh Palliser, or even by James Cook – a fact which is a chronological impossibility. In the retelling of the history, Dalrymple’s assertion has come to be viewed as exaggeration or bombast, but there remains something persuasive in his account. Dalrymple was later derided as many things: intemperate, volatile, grudging – he certainly had some magma at his core – but no one ever suggested he was a liar. And taking the maxim that one certain lie is suggestive of many more, Dalrymple would have been foolish to persist with a claim so easily countered had he known it to be false.

Who really instigated the transaction between Milner and the Navy Board is unknowable. All that can be said for sure is that the Earl of Pembroke emerged in the last week of March as the best of all the options. It took a week for the surveys to be completed. Three colliers were inspected: the Valentine, Earl of Pembroke and Ann & Elizabeth. The decision, in the end, seems to have rested on availability, utility and condition, after which the Earl of Pembroke was judged best. Along with the question of who made this choice, a second puzzle for posterity has its origins in this time. The Navy Board’s original order had been for a ‘cat-built vessel’, something that, strictly speaking – with her wide stern and flush deck – the Earl of Pembroke was not. Perhaps the Deptford Yard officer could not judge the subtle differences, or perhaps he sought to conceal the fact to speed along the process with a fudged description of a ‘Cat-built Bark’. Either way, the sentence would distort interpretations of Fishburn’s collier for centuries to come.

The attributes of the Earl of Pembroke are captured in a letter of 27 March from the Deptford Yard officers to the Navy Board. Her tonnage was 368.71/94. The value of her hull was £2,212 15s 6d, and of her masts and yards £94 10s. For Milner, it was the luckiest of all encounters. His collier, a trim and steady sailor, three years and nine months old, was valued at £2,307 5s 6d. The Navy Board offered £2,840 10s 11d. It was a deal that would take his ship but leave him rich. On 29 March, the Navy Board reported to the Admiralty:

A Cat-built Bark in Burthen 368 Tons, 3 years 9 months old, has been purchased. Requests permission to proceed with fitting her for the voyage. It may be necessary to sheath and fill her bottom and prepare her for carrying six or eight carriage guns of four pounders and eight swivel, as was proposed for the Tyral. In what name is she to be registered?³⁵

The Admiralty mulled this question for a week. But for the moment one important thing at least was assured. Whether or not Dalrymple had been involved or not, the more material fact was that he had his ship.

 

A note from the Deptford Yard officers to the Navy Board on 31 March suggests the decision to purchase the Earl of Pembroke was authorised in a warrant issued three days earlier, on the 28th. It means there is a chronological convergence. In one city, on one date, in one year, two monumental events occurred: the acquisition by the Royal Navy of the Earl of Pembroke and the re-election to Parliament of John Wilkes.

Taken alone, Wilkes’s 1762–3 subversion campaign against Bute and his ministry stands as an extraordinary event in British politics. But his actions in the early spring of 1768 outdid even this. Hundreds crammed into the Guildhall on 16 March to hear him speak at the hustings. ‘So great was the Curiosity of the People to see Mr Wilkes’, the Newcastle Courant explained, the streets outside the Guildhall were twice as full. When hands were shown – the simplest and most common method of electing candidates – Wilkes seemed to have scraped in third. But an official poll was demanded and, over a week, faction had its way. On 23 March the results were announced, with Wilkes finishing a distant last. But then came the twist. Mounting the platform he turned what many anticipated as a concession speech into a launch announcement for a new campaign. ‘And now, gentlemen, permit me to address you as friends to liberty’, Wilkes said, ‘and freeholders of the county of Middlesex; declaring my intention of appearing as a candidate to represent you in parliament.’³⁶

The day for the Middlesex poll was set for 28 March. It was to take place at Brentford, west London. After five days’ electioneering, the Wilkes campaign was in jovial spirits. Wilkes set out on 27 March and the following morning he was the first candidate on the hustings. It was one o’clock before any opponents arrived. Sir William Beauchamp Proctor came on horseback, while George Cooke arrived in a coach and six.

The results were announced the following morning, Tuesday 29 March, at nine o’clock.

Mr Wilkes		1292
Mr Cooke		827
Sir William Beauchamp Proctor		80737

Thereafter it was euphoria. A mob formed in Brentford that would not let any coach pass without ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ daubed on its sides. Flags were hoisted with the jeering maxim: ‘More Meat, and fewer Cooks’, much to the chagrin of George Cooke. As night fell on 29 March, lighted candles – symbols of liberty – stood in every window.

Wilkes’s election thrilled and disgusted in equal measure. Ballads were roared on every street, mobs required ‘gentlemen and ladies of all ranks as they passed in their carriages to shout for Wilkes and liberty’. What had begun on the banks of the Thames was soon being repeated in other parts of the country. On his way to Winchester, Benjamin Franklin ‘observed that for fifteen miles out of town, there was scarce a door or window shutter next the road’ not daubed with Wilkite slogans, ‘this continued here and there quite to Winchester, which is 64 miles.’³⁸ Meanwhile Milner, north-bound to Whitby with money enough to retire, would have arrived as disturbances were starting in Newcastle. They began in the first week of April. Five hundred sailors gathered in protest at the staithes in North Shields. They marched from there to Sunderland where they read a list of grievances and demanded ‘immediate redress’. After this they boarded colliers and struck their yards. Their numbers swelled. They spent the day parading through the streets, beating drums, colours flying. ‘In the afternoon’, a report later emerged in the Annual Register, ‘they separated, and the former returned again to Shields, where they committed great outrages, particularly on the butchers and bakers, who suffered the loss of all that lay in their way.’³⁹

 

By the end of March it must have seemed to the Earl of Morton and the council of the Royal Society that, after so much dissembling, their plans had at last slotted into place. They had their commander, they had a vessel and they had the financing from the king to subsidise it all. But just as the political order had disintegrated in Middlesex, their plans had parted at the seams.

The problem was Dalrymple himself. If he was known for his industry and intelligence, he was also known for his independent mind. Dalrymple had long cultivated this vision of himself as free-thinker. ‘Errors may lead to the truth’, he had once written, ‘but when all men’s notions are ground in one mill, they serve no purpose of investigation or discovery.’⁴⁰ His attitude had been fixed in his many years of contemplation. The voyage was to be his voyage, a fact he had made plain from the outset in both his application to the Earl of Sherburne through Adam Smith, and latterly in his letter to the Royal Society in December. The long process of diplomacy – finding and cultivating contacts, writing letters, advancing his case – had occupied him for years. For the most part Dalrymple had been successful. Ranged behind him now were the council of the Royal Society. But a change of circumstances in February had rendered all this interest useless. Having set down a list of ambitions for the voyage, tailoring its scope and helping source a vessel, Dalrymple’s role in his long cherished project was about to end.

His problems had begun with the Royal Society’s memorial to King George in February. Along with the king’s financial assistance came the involvement of the Admiralty. The voyage was no longer to be a private undertaking, instead it was to be a joint venture between the Royal Society and the navy. The Royal Society would take responsibility for the observations while the navy would supply the vessel and the nautical expertise. This was not how Dalrymple had envisaged affairs. No longer were Morton, Franklin, Cavendish and Maskelyne in control. Instead a set of new names had materialised: Admiral Hawke, the old hero of Quiberon Bay and now First Lord of the Admiralty; Sir Charles Saunders, Hawke’s predecessor; Hugh Palliser, the returning governor of Newfoundland; and Philip Stephens, the influential secretary to the Admiralty. Once the Earl of Pembroke had been bought and plans were underway for her fitting out and the appointment of her officers, these were the people that mattered. And with them, Dalrymple held no sway.

In Dalrymple’s later account he hinted of an immediate antagonism on the part of the navy. When he was viewing the colliers, Dalrymple wrote, he had favoured the Earl of Pembroke over the other because of her storage capacity, ‘being able to carry another anchor and cable’. But having mentioned this to the Admiralty official – whom he refused to name – Dalrymple wrote ‘A navy Oracle told me I was much mistaken if I thought I should have just what stores I pleased, that there was an Establishment, altho’ I might be allowed an anchor and cable extraordinary on such a voyage.’⁴¹

If this exchange did happen, it must have occurred at the end of March, as the purchase of the Earl of Pembroke was underway. It was a harbinger of what would happen the following week when the Royal Society gathered for a council meeting on 3 April 1768. Dalrymple was invited to attend as a guest, presumably eager to hear that everything was ready to begin the complicated process of fitting out. But on 3 April he learned that was not so. The Earl of Morton announced he had recommended Dalrymple to the Lords of the Admiralty for the command, ‘but was told that such appointment was totaly repugnant to the rules of the navy’. The idea a civilian should take command of a king’s ship subverted the entire hierarchical system that had been established for a century. Dalrymple’s response is captured in an exchange, recorded briefly enough. ‘M^r Dalrymple attending the Council declind the Employment of Observer unless he could Command so it was resolvd to Consider of a proper person in his place.’⁴²

The ‘worthy’ Hawke, Dalrymple later wrote, ‘was wrought upon by insinuations that he would be exposed to a parliamentary impeachment if he employed any but a Navy Officer’. Caught in an impossible situation, Dalrymple explained, Hawke had no choice but to halt his commission. Dalrymple did not blame Hawke, as many in later years supposed, instead he felt betrayed by others who had deliberately frustrated his plans. ‘Although offers were made to Alexander Dalrymple’, he wrote in his third-person account of the episode, ‘that the instructions of the voyage should be entrusted to him, and the Officer commanding the vessel be positively ordered to follow his opinion, on the compliance with which his promotion was to depend, yet Alexander Dalrymple, sensible, from experience … that a divided command was incompatible with the public service in such voyages, declined going out on that footing.’⁴³

There are two ways to interpret Dalrymple’s behaviour. His refusal to join may have been the entitled outburst of a man determined to have it all his own way. Dalrymple certainly had an ungovernable temper. Later in his life he would act petulantly. But equally it may have been, as he claims, a selfless decision made in the knowledge – and in this he surely would have been right – that trouble would ensue from a split command. In either case, during a single Royal Society meeting, perhaps an hour or two in length, Dalrymple’s dream ended. He was to be denied the greatest opportunity of his life. Meanwhile the Royal Society had been tossed from the horns of one dilemma to another. A week before, they had had a commander and no ship. Now they had their ship, but no one to sail it.