No one in Britain had heard anything of Endeavour for a year and a half. It had been the beginning of 1769 when the letters from Rio had reached London. Thereafter there had been silence.
On 22 September 1770 a different Royal Naval vessel anchored at Spithead. Aboard HMS Favourite, sloop of war, were captains George Farmer and William Maltby. They carried news of an ominous kind. Farmer and Maltby were returning to England from their station on the Falkland Islands. In a scandalous affront they had been attacked by a hostile Spanish force and evicted from their colonial base. The rest of the story was contained in a letter to Philip Stephens, the Admiralty secretary, that was hurried in secrecy at speed from Portsmouth to Whitehall.
Outraged columns were soon printed in the newspapers, telling the full story. In June a Spanish frigate had appeared off the British settlement of Port Egmont. Unnerved, Farmer hailed the ship. She replied that she needed water. For three days the frigate lay at anchor in the bay. Then, instead of sailing away replenished, four more frigates appeared. The conceit dropped, a broad Spanish pennant was hoisted. Having confirmed what they suspected, the bulk of the British forces fell back to the blockhouse while several sailors attempted to bring the Favourite into a defensive posture by the shore. The Spanish ships pursued her and fired two shots ‘which fell at a distance’.
A few tense days ensued. The outcome, though, could not be doubted. In the blockhouse was a British force of fifty or so. Against them were ‘about sixteen Hundred, with a Train of Artillery sufficient to reduce a regular Fortification’. This, along with the five frigates ‘from Twenty to Thirty-two Guns’, made opposition futile. A few obligatory shots were fired but, as Samuel Johnson put it, it was clear that any further resistance would have been ‘only to lavish life without use or hope’.1 A truce was called. Articles of capitulation were signed.
The annexation complete, the Favourite was initially detained for twenty days, during which time her rudder was removed. After this the garrison were permitted to gather their belongings and steer to the northwards. When news of what – in British eyes – was an unprovoked incursion, ‘at a time of profound peace’, became known, the initial shock turned to fury. The crisis was the first overseas test for the new government headed by Lord North, which had come to office at the start of 1770. The immediate consequences had not been confined to Parliament. The stock exchange fell three per cent. Within days the newspapers reported that the press gangs had been set to work in the ports, rounding up sailors for a ferocious British response.
At his home, Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Horace Walpole was bemused at the reports as others were furious. ‘England that lives in the north of Europe, and Spain that dwells in the south, are vehemently angry with one another about a morsel of rock that lies somewhere at the very bottom of America, for modern nations are too neighbourly to quarrel about anything that lies so near that as in the same quarter of the globe.’ For Walpole this habit of chasing after faraway islands had gone too far: ‘Spain huffs, and we arm, for one of the extremities of the southern hemisphere. It takes a twelvemonth for any one of us to arrive at our object, and almost another twelvemonth before we can learn what we have been about.’ Where this was all to end Walpole had no notion. ‘By next century I suppose we shall fight for the Dog Star and the Great Bear.’2
Many took the episode as evidence of Britain’s waning power. Not ten years ago she had been peerless after the Treaty of Paris. Since then the country’s standing had been undermined by a series of indecisive governments that had allowed discontent to fester in the colonies, had failed to deal with Wilkes, and had recently allowed the French to occupy Corsica, giving them an enormous strategic advantage in the Mediterranean. Adding to the dreary picture was a report in the General Evening Post, on 25 September 1770, which surmised:
that one ground of the present preparations for war is, some secret intelligence received by the ministry, that the Endeavour man of war, which was sent into the South Sea with the Astronomers, to make observations, and afterwards to go into a new track to make discoveries, has been sunk, with all her people, by order of a jealous Court, who has committed other hostilities against us in the Southern hemisphere.3
The piece was not founded on solid intelligence. But it seeded the idea that ‘Mr Banks and the famous Doctor Solander’, notables among the crew, ‘have shared the common fate with the rest of the ship’s company.’ In November 1770 another report, though one swiftly disavowed, revealed Endeavour had been destroyed by the Spanish in an action off the Philippines. Although there was no proof of this, the newspapers were only reporting in public what was being said in private. Sarah Sophia, Banks’s sister, felt obliged to counter the rumours, writing to Thomas Pennant, ‘we begin to fear we shall not see them till spring, upon account of their having missed the Trade Wind, but that is a very different situation to what the papers represented’.4
Endeavour’s fate was of little consequence in the larger context of the imminent war. Spain, not keen on the prospect of a conflict with Britain, claimed to have only asserted their right by treaty. This was a line that found little favour in Westminster where a general mobilisation of the navy had been ordered. ‘From this moment’, wrote Johnson in an essay on the crisis, ‘the whole nation can witness that no time was lost. The navy was surveyed, the ships refitted, and commanders appointed; and a powerful fleet was assembled, well manned and well stored.’ Johnson thought it a folly that Britain would go to war over a portable storehouse in the ‘deserts of the ocean’ 7,000 miles away. Firing cannons at the British, driving them from the shore and removing the rudder were each inflammatory actions, he admitted, but they were injuries the British should bear.
If the rudder be to a ship what his tail is in fables to a fox, the part in which honour is placed, and of which the violation is never to be endured, I am sorry that the Favourite suffered an indignity, but cannot yet think it a cause for which nations should slaughter one another.5
The crisis soon passed. In January 1771 there was a conciliatory declaration by the Spanish, accompanied by a promise to restore Port Egmont. It was just as well. Johnson had spoken of British ‘preparedness’, but in reality the crisis had completely surprised the navy, which responded slowly. For this the old, faltering First Lord, Admiral Hawke, was blamed, and once peace had been secured he was quietly retired. In his place came, for a third time as First Lord, that old friend of Joseph Banks’s, Lord Sandwich.
Tall, urbane, an enthusiast of cricket and music – he enjoyed pounding the drums at the Bach recitals at his home in Hinchingbrooke in Cambridgeshire – Sandwich was a veteran political operator. His name would pass into history in a strange sort of way, due to his fondness for eating salt beef between two slices of bread, but in his time Sandwich had a very different repute. From the 1760s he retained his notoriety as a rake and he lived openly (some said shamelessly) with his mistress, Martha Ray, who had borne him a succession of children over the last decade. If he continued to suffer the abuse of the press – Wilkes had written, ‘Nature denied him wit, but gave him a species of buffoonery of the lowest kind’6 – few really doubted that, in reality, Sandwich was both a wise old fox and a safe pair of hands. Generally regarded as the ministry’s best performer in the House of Lords, Sandwich was known for his mastery of the issues at hand, a coolness of demeanour and the ability to lay rhetorical blows. Easing into his new job in January 1771, there soon came news to excite even him. They were reports of Endeavour.
On 5 January 1771 a handful of lines appeared in the shipping columns, announcing that contrary to all rumour, Endeavour had arrived in the Dutch East Indies with Solander and Banks safe.7 It was an unverified account that left everyone impatient. Five months passed until, on 11 May, more definite intelligence was carried from India House to Sandwich at the Admiralty, confirming that Endeavour had arrived at Batavia on 10 October 1771, ‘and was repairing in order to return to England’.8 This news soon bridged the gap between private and public spheres. A letter from Sydney Parkinson, ‘principal drawer to Mr Banks’, was published, relating the ‘great hardships’ they had experienced, and vaguely outlining the arc of the voyage. ‘They have picked up a vast number of plants’, the report ran, ‘and other curiosities, and are expected in England some time next month.’9
Jane Gomeldon was one of those to receive a letter from Parkinson. ‘My dear cousin’, it began, ‘Fain would I have excused myself from writing, could I have found any excuse, I am so hurried and fluttered about here; but, when I considered what a pleasure it would give thee to hear of our safe arrival here, I thought it would be unjust to withhold it.’ Parkinson’s letter was necessarily short. ‘Were I to enter even into general things, I should not finish I do not know when’, he excused himself. But within the narrow limits of several hundred words, he acquainted one of his fondest friends with his unlikely story. ‘We had many hair-breadth escapes’ off the coast of New Holland, he wrote. ‘I have spared no pains during the voyage, to pick up every thing that is curious for thee; and I flatter myself that I shall make a considerable addition to thy museum.’10
Parkinson wrote these words on 16 October 1770, a week after they had anchored in Batavia, the main anchorage in the Dutch East Indies. In European minds this was a seductive place, rich in colour, wealth and spices. This was not what Endeavour’s crew found. Banks was disconcerted from the beginning. A boat rowed out to greet them. The officer aboard, wrote Banks, ‘and his people were almost as Spectres, no good omen of the healthyness of the countrey we were arrived at’11. Conversely Endeavour’s crew might have been called ‘rosy and plump, for we had not a sick man among us’. Only the ship herself was a desperate case. The leaks had multiplied since they left New Holland. She was now making from six to twelve inches of water an hour. Her keel was in a frightful state, the false keel was half missing and she still bore her old wound under the starboard chains.
All this had made a stay in Batavia a necessity. Cook had been horrified at what he saw on 8 November. In addition to the injuries they anticipated, they found the teredo worms had bored several floor pieces almost through, ‘so that it was a Matter of Surprise to every one who saw her bottom how we had kept her above water; and yet in this condition we had saild some hundreds of Leagues in as dangerous a Navigation as is in any part of the world, happy in being ignorant of the continual danger we were in’.12
As the repairs had begun the sailors and gentlemen drifted ashore. Banks had hired a house and two carriages. Having established a temporary home he sent for Tupaia. Their arioi friend had stayed aboard Endeavour, being sick with a ‘bilious’ complaint. Once ashore his spirits soared at the sight of:
Houses, Carriages, streets, in short, every thing were to him sights which he had often heard describd but never well understood, so he lookd upon them all with more than wonder, almost mad with the numberless novelties which diverted his attention from one to the other he danc’d about the streets examining every thing to the best of his abilities.13
It was but a brief happy interlude. Tupaia had left Ra’iātea fifteen months before. In this time he had lost the status and purpose of his previous life. Along with his servant or travelling companion, Taiato, he had persisted in his language lessons with Green the astronomer, making, Parkinson reckoned, ‘great progress in the English tongue’. But Tupaia had also been physically weakened. Suffering from incipient scurvy all the way up the New Holland coast, he had recovered at Endeavour River – spending the six-week stay angling in the shallows – but his illness had returned as soon as they were at sea. In Batavia, where everyone they met seemed to caution them about the ‘extreme unwholesomeness’ of the air, Tupaia’s ‘broken constitution’ stood little chance.
But he had not been the first to succumb. Most of the crew were lodged at a location called Cooper’s Island where they were seized by a putrid dysentery. Monkhouse, the surgeon, died first. Following him was one of the ship’s boys, then a steward of the gun room. As October 1770 ended and November began, the days began to fill with fresh reports of new victims. Banks’s two surviving servants, Peter and James, developed intermitting fevers ‘and Dr Solander a constant nervous one’. Banks blamed ‘the numberless dirty Canals which intersect the town in all directions’. Tupaia’s opinion was much the same. He asked to return to the ship so he could ‘breathe a freeer air’, but by the end of October he had been sinking too.
On 9 November Taiato, who had become the ‘darling of the ship’s company’, reached the final stage of his illness. ‘He frequently said to those of us who were his intimates’, Parkinson wrote, ‘Tyau mate oee, “My friends, I am dying.”’14 Parkinson had drawn Taiato – a short, full-cheeked boy with black curly hair, playing a nose flute – in Tahiti. All these months later he was left to watch as Taiato accepted every medicine prescribed him. But it was without success. Taiato’s death ‘so much affected’ Tupaia, Banks wrote, ‘there was little hopes of his surviving him many days’. Whereas Taiato had been an optimistic patient, Tupaia was a defeated one. He refused everything. He ‘gave himself up to grief’, Parkinson wrote, ‘regretting, in the highest degree, that he had left his own country’ and crying out inconsolably for his lost friend, ‘Taiyota! Taiyota!’ Tupaia died on 11 November.
As Endeavour grew stronger in the yard, her crew grew weaker in their beds. Both Banks and Solander had progressive, dismal fevers, and retreated to a country house to recover. And even when the ship got underway again in January, bound for England, the illness travelled with them. As Cook struck south-west into the Indian Ocean ‘the people’, wrote Banks, ‘in general grew worse and many had now the dysentery or bloody flux.’15 In the days to come Herman Spöring died, as did Charles Green the astronomer and, on 26 January 1771, with something in the order of 1,300 illustrations completed, his journal still earnestly progressing, and with his tender letter to Jane Gomeldon not yet delivered, so too did Sydney Parkinson.
On 12 July 1771, Endeavour anchored in the Downs and Cook sent an instant dispatch to the Admiralty, reporting their arrival and his intention to come ‘at once’ to Whitehall ‘with journals, charts &c’. His sailing duties at last at an end, a burst of administration was now required before he could leave the ship a free man, and begin the final leg of his circumnavigation to Mile End. There were the journals to collect and submit to the Admiralty; letters for the Victualling Board on the effectiveness of the sauerkraut, and muster books for the Navy Board listing in cool, crisp columns the names of those who returned and those who had not. The deaths had not ended in the Indian Ocean. Molyneux, the promising sailing master who had been so busy on the reefs of New Holland, ‘a young man of good parts’, wrote Cook, who ‘had unfortunately given himself up to extravecancy and intemperance’, had died after the Cape of Good Hope.16 Then six weeks before home, Hicks, Cook’s second in command, had finally succumbed to ‘a Consumption which he was not free from when we saild from England’.17
The last life to be lost was not a human one, but that of Banks’s greyhound ‘Lady’, who, a strangely affecting entry in Banks’s journal tells us, was ‘found dead in my Cabbin laying upon a stool on which she generaly slept’, a fortnight before home:
She had been remarkably well for some days, in the night she shriekd out very loud so that we who slept in the great Cabbin heard her, but becoming quiet immediately no one regarded it.18
Banks wondered at so instantaneous a death, but it was the story of another of the animals – this time a survivor – that thrilled the papers. Within a week of their return the General Evening Post printed a paean to the ship’s goat. Brought aboard to provide milk for the crew, the goat was already a veteran at the time of her enlistment, having spent three years in the West Indies and been round the world with Wallis in the Dolphin. Now a double circumnavigator, the newspapers were pleased to report, ‘She never went dry during the whole of the voyage.’ In gratitude, the authorities had decided ‘to reward her services by placing her in a good English pasture for the rest of her life.’ Greater honours awaited. Soon the goat would be sanctified in verse by Johnson:
In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove,
This Goat, who twice the world had travers’d round,
Deserving both her master’s care and love,
Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.19
The rest of the ship’s company were able to share in the goat’s glory as they dispersed from the Thames into the London streets. Cook’s privilege was to forward a list of names to the Admiralty, those who had performed exceptionally and so were deserving of promotion. Some feats had already made it into Cook’s journal – the midshipman Jonathan Monkhouse’s work with the fothering sail being one; though he, too, had died on the homeward passage – but now Cook had chance to write explicitly about the good conduct of Pickersgill, who had succeeded Molyneux as Endeavour’s master. Cook thought him ‘deserving of a Lieuts Commission’, a nomination that was honoured.
The public, though, would not hear any of these names. From May onwards, as Endeavour had entered the western approaches, letters written at the Cape of Good Hope outpaced her. First the Admiralty, then the families of the crew and finally the general public realised that this was the greatest South Seas voyage since Anson’s. By the time Endeavour came alongside at Deptford, the newspapers were impatiently trying to establish and arrange in any fashion the facts of what had happened. With Cook busy completing his duties and Banks and Solander occupied with the unloading of their massive collections, the papers interrogated the sailors for any detail they could. Solander, best known of the travellers, was reported to have been gravely ill but recovering fast. There were stories of Tupaia and his boy – ‘Natives of George’s Island’ – who had perished at Batavia but who had been ‘amazingly struck with the sight of Coaches and Horses, having never seen either Horses, Cows or Sheep … They were extremely surprised also at the Sight of themselves and Company in a Looking Glass.’ Charles Green’s demise was dramatised too. One newspaper claimed that ‘in a fit of phrensy he got up in the night and put his legs out of the portholes, which was the occasion of his death’. If this was not fanciful enough, the high peak of magnification was reached by the Public Advertiser on 7 August, who reported that ‘Mr Banks and Dr Solander have made more curious Discoveries in the way of Astronomy, and Natural History, than at any one Time have been presented to the learned World for these fifty years past.’20
Banks would do little to quench these rumours, despite the fact that he had been mostly indifferent about the Transit of Venus. He had never had a public profile before July 1771. Even in early reports of their return his name had trailed second to Solander’s. But from August onwards the names ‘Mr Banks and Dr Solander’ framed almost every Endeavour story. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship of the ‘ingenious gentlemen’, and they were now circumnavigators, eligible to a club of elite voyagers including Francis Drake, William Dampier and George Anson. And Banks was not grizzled and past forty. He was twenty-eight, handsome, eloquent and appealingly rich.
Of all the stories from the voyage, it was the size and scope of their natural-history collections that were the most thrilling. ‘No less than seventeen thousand plants, of a kind never before seen in this kingdom’, wrote the Westminster Journal. The Public Advertiser revealed that some of them had already been planted in the ‘Royal Garden at Richmond, and thrive very well’. John Ellis, always quick with the gossip, had written to Linnaeus on 16 July that Banks and Solander had returned ‘after so many perils, laden with the greatest treasure of Natural History that ever was brought into any country at one time by two persons’.21 On 8 August, in Uppsala, Linnaeus composed, in Latin, the most admiring of letters to ‘Immortalis Banks’. ‘None, from the earth’s foundation, has ventured such great things; none has ever been so generous; none, at any time, has so exposed himself to all dangers as you alone have.’ He signed off, ‘Farewell, man without equals.’22
Cook was left with the more moderate ‘approbation’ of the Admiralty. ‘Resolved’, ran their minutes on 1 August, that Cook ‘be acquainted [that] the Board extremely well approve of the whole of his Proceedings, and have great satisfaction in the account he gives of the good behaviour of his officers and men, and of the chearfullness and alertness with which they went through the fatigues and dangers of the Voyage.’ Each of these words must have been ringed with gold for Cook. And an honour greater than any before granted to a Whitby sailing master followed. Banks’s and Solander’s celebrity had already led to an audience with King George III on 10 August at St James’s. The king, having invested in the voyage after the Royal Society’s ‘Memorial’ of 1768 – had taken an interest in its progress. Now, on 14 August, Cook himself was introduced by Sandwich. At the same occasion an even more wished-for award was conferred. He was presented with his captain’s commission. He would now legitimately be ‘Captain Cook’.
Cook’s name was to be lost in the glow of the naturalists’. ‘The people who are most talk’d of at present are Mr Banks and Dr Solander’, judged Lady Mary Coke – salonesse, socialite and arbiter of fashion – their voyage had been ‘very amusing’. But not every word said of Banks was complimentary. Having mentioned nothing of it throughout the voyage, it now became clear that he had left a promise of marriage behind with a young lady called Harriet Blosset. Having arrived home at the height of the season, Banks appeared to have forgotten his bearings as a gentleman. ‘I saw Mr Morrice this morning’, Lady Mary Coke wrote on 14 August:
He was excessively drole according to custom, and said he hoped Mr Banks, who since his return has desired Miss Blosset will excuse his marrying her, will pay her for the materials of all the work’d waistcoats She made for him during the time he was sailing round the World. Everybody agrees that She passed those three years in retirement, but whether She imploy’d herself in working waistcoats for Mr Banks I can’t tell you, but if She loved him I pity her disappointment.23
If any social situation in Georgian London equated to being becalmed on the edge of a reef, then Banks had discovered it. This was a delicate scenario made infinitely worse by Banks’s handling of it. Everyone agreed that his was ungallant behaviour. Arriving back in London, Banks had simply ignored Miss Blosset, while going about town meeting old friends. Soon the news was out that Blosset had been sewing for a scoundrel. After a week of the indignity she decided that she could tolerate his behaviour no longer. She struck out for London having sent a letter to Banks in New Burlington Street, demanding an ‘interview of explanation’. Daines Barrington, a friend of Banks’s, heard the ensuing tale, which he set down in a half-amused, half-scandalised letter:
To this Mr Bankes answer’d by a letter of 2 or 3 sheets professing love &c but that he found he was of too volatile a temper to marry.
The answer as you may suppose rather astonished & some how or other after this there was an interview when Miss Bl: swoon’d &c & Mr Bankes was so affected that Marriage was again concluded upon. Notwithstanding this however a short time afterwards he writes a second letter to the same purport with the former, & leaves poor Miss Bl: in the most distressing as well as ridiculous situation imaginable.
It would take Jane Austen to fully portray the interview between Banks and Blosset, the span of which – Barrington discovered – ‘lasted from ten O’clock at Night to ten the next Morning’. By the time the bells of Grosvenor Chapel rang the next day, Banks had declared he was ready to marry ‘immediately’. But wise to his volatile moods, Blosset delayed. ‘If he was of the same mind a fortnight hence, she would gladly attend him to church.’ The inevitable letter came three or four days later from New Burlington Street, ‘desiring to be off’.24
In other circumstances the Blosset affair may have left a deeper stain on Banks’s character. But Banks’s fortunes were too far in the ascendancy to be checked. Young, urbane, good-looking with a dash of the dangerous and the exotic, that summer Banks experienced an early-modern version of what later would be called ‘celebrity’. The fashionable talked about his adventures. He was soon to be painted by Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds, shown as the intellectual man of action or the dreaming romantic, wrapped in Tahitian bark cloth or resting his arm on a table filled with scientific papers. His journal, inevitably, was polished into voyaging literature. Lord Sandwich selected Dr John Hawkesworth, one of the best London writers, to complete the job. Then there were the honorary doctorates from Oxford for Banks and Solander and the ever-closer relationship with the king. Banks became such a favourite at court that in September the Public Advertiser felt compelled to protest, ‘it is too great a Liberty to take with such sacred Characters, to suppose they would Day after Day stare at the Pictures of some useless Weeds, or gape over the Slippers and Habits of poor Savages, fit only to add to the like Curiosities at Don Saltaro’s Coffee-house’.25
Already the contents of the ship had dispersed, starting a process of fragmentation that would take parts of Endeavour’s massive collections into private houses, museums, libraries and universities. But as that exuberant summer tailed away into autumn, on 28 September 1771 there was a final moment of synthesis. Sandwich, the First Lord, held a ‘Splendid entertainment’ at his house in the Admiralty on Whitehall for all the principal people ‘belonging to the Endeavour’.26
Amid the excitement it was, perhaps, difficult to pinpoint exactly what the Endeavour voyage had achieved. Nothing new had really been found. The transit observations had been gathered, but not impeccably so. It was clear that plenty of curiosities had been carried home in boxes and jars, but what was the worth of these plants and spears in a country that, more than anything, was craving fossil fuels and new technologies? To gather all these plants many lives had been lost and no southern continent – one of the chief objectives of the voyage – had been found. As Johnson said to Boswell, ‘they have found very little, only one new animal, I think’, the kanguru. ‘But many insects, Sir’, Boswell replied.27
This was a hard verdict. With the transit observations it is difficult to see how Cook and Green could have done any better with the apparatus available to them. The ‘black drop effect’ they experienced was not particular to them, but rather a blight for every observer. As for the various collections, it took decades for people to come to terms with the scale of what had been brought home. One recent publication has tallied up Banks’s haul: ‘5 mammals; 107+ birds; 248+ fishes; 370+ arthropods; 206+ molluscs; 6 echinoderms; 9 salps; 30 medusae and some other animals’. On top of this were 30,400 botanical specimens, of which 1,400 were previously unknown to Western science.28 Everyone knew about Linnaeus’s herbarium at Uppsala. On Endeavour’s return in 1771 she contained a herbarium that outdid Linnaeus’s in scope, diversity and size. All told, this one single voyage enhanced the list of plant species collected in the Species plantarum of 1762–3 by around a fifth.29
Other personal collections augmented Banks’s vast one. For Cook the most important were his charts, views of coasts and maps of anchorages that had piled up as they went. Among them the most exciting were the charts of Tahiti, New Zealand and the east coast of New Holland. Botany Bay would not be forgotten. In the immediate aftermath, though, New Zealand was acknowledged as a discovery, ‘truly one of the highest consequence’. That the Dutch might have explored the islands a century and a half before but did not, presented the British with an opportunity many were eager to seize.
Arousing as much interest was the story of Endeavour’s near disaster on the reef. For some the escape – the calm weather, the nearby harbour, the abundance of turtle, the friendly breeze – was providential. It is an interesting insight into the development of Western philosophy that such an interpretation was not universally accepted. John Hawkesworth, compiler of the official account, theorised that it was a ‘mere natural event’.
If it was not a mere natural event, but produced by an extraordinary interposition, correcting a defect in the constitution of nature, tending to mischief, it will lie upon those who maintain the position, to shew, why an extraordinary interposition did not take place rather to prevent the ship’s striking, than to prevent her being beaten to pieces after she had struck: a very slight impulse upon the ship’s course would have caused her to steer clear of the rock, and if all things were not equally easy to Omnipotence, we should say that this might have been done with less difficulty than a calm could be produced by suspending the general laws of Nature which had brought on the gale.30
This passage is reminiscent of Banks’s phrase ‘almost providential’. Those are two revealing words. Having faced death and been fortunately spared, Banks still can’t quite bring himself to believe that God had anything to do with it. This was the age of enquiry and knowledge, and superstition was being driven away. But which voyager a century, or even a generation before, would have denied the inference that they were divinely favoured? In Banks and Hawkesworth we see the progress of Western thought. It was not God, it was luck.
The voyage provided more subject for discussion. On Sunday 18 August, six weeks after their return, Banks and Solander dined with the new president of the Royal Society, John Pringle, and Benjamin Franklin. Franklin wrote an intriguing account of their conversation. He was most interested of all in the people the naturalists had met. Those ‘of Otahitee (George’s Island) are civilized in a great degree’, Franklin heard. There was praise too for the Māori, ‘a brave and sensible People’, though the inhabitants of New Holland were beyond their understanding. They told Franklin an affecting story. One day they had found four children in a hut on the New Holland coast. It seemed, they thought, a good opportunity to establish relations. Seeing some other people at a distance who were shy and would not engage, ‘we adorn’d the Children with Ribbands and Beads, and left with them a Number of little Trinkets and some other useful Things’. Banks and Solander had then retired to a distance, to let events unfold. They had, at length, returned to the hut to find all the presents discarded on the floor. The story intrigued Franklin.
We call this Stupidity. But if we were dispos’d to compliment them, we might say, Behold a Nation of Philosophers! such as him whom we celebrate for saying as he went thro’ a Fair, How many things there are in the World that I don’t want!31
Franklin was not among those to get carried away with Banks’s return. There is surprisingly little in his papers on Endeavour that summer. Perhaps his attention was consumed by the ongoing disorder in America, or maybe he shared some of his friend Dalrymple’s sense of unfairness that all the glory had been deflected away from him. Dalrymple had been one of the most eager to hear news of the voyage. A central question – one that remained unanswered for many – had bothered him. How had Cook escaped the reefs and corals off New Holland?
Dalrymple soon got his answer. He met Banks soon after Endeavour’s return and he learned that they had searched for and located a strait that Dalrymple had mentioned in his book of historic voyages. Dalrymple knew at once that Cook ‘could only have got [this] from me’. This ‘Torres Strait’ had allowed Endeavour to pass between New Holland and New Guinea. The story was difficult for Dalrymple to stomach. This idea that he had not only mapped out the parameters of the voyage, but had then come to rescue the hapless crew gnawed at him. Now he was forced to endure the fanfare of their homecoming with every curiosity save the one he wanted them to find. ‘I did then, and still do, believe that a Southern Continent does exist’, he declared.32
Dalrymple’s anger was bottled up for eighteen months following Endeavour’s return. But after reading Hawkesworth’s account of the voyage, his fury exploded. Several letters addressed to Hawkesworth from Dalrymple emerged. They were productions of epic hostility, liberally enlivened with italics and capitals to better convey the warmth of his fury. He took aim at his foes, the unnamed Admiralty mandarins who had defeated him by stratagem back in 1768. And there was ammunition spare for Cook too, whom he thought negligent as an explorer. One of Cook’s journal entries aggravated him wildly. When Endeavour was on her run north-west from Cape Horn to Tahiti, tell-tale signs of land had accumulated, but Cook had written ‘It was a general opinion that there was Land to windward, but I did not think myself at liberty to search for what I was not sure to find.’33
This sentence was too much for Dalrymple to bear. ‘Such a declaration, if not foisted in by you, would almost preclude me from taking any further notice of C. Cook’s conduct or opinions’, he wrote. Dalrymple may have forgotten that Cook was hurrying towards Tahiti to study the transit – the principal objective, and one he hardly would be excused disregarding for some seabirds. But it was, to Dalrymple, an unpardonable offence. To negligence he added the charge of wanton violence, rounding off his public letter:
In the mean while I wish YOU more candour, and resign myself to Providence, although, in the wisdom of its dispensations, I was prevented, by the secondary influence of narrow minded men, from compleating the Discovery of, and establishing an amicable intercourse with, a Southern Continent; which, notwithstanding your sagacious reasonings, I still think, from my own experience, in such like voyages, may be done without committing murder.34
He was not alone in feeling unease at what had happened in Poverty Bay. Hawkesworth tackled the question of violence head-on. He expressed ‘regret’ at what had happened, but believed there was a sad inevitability to such confrontations. History was in motion, people were caught between forces. The pursuit of knowledge and commerce were pushing Europeans outwards, and it was logical that those they met endeavoured ‘to repress the invaders of their country’. If those who resisted were not ‘overpowered, the attempt must be relinquished’. The lesson for Hawkesworth was that those entrusted with the delicate task of voyaging must not be ‘men who are liable to provocation by sudden injury, to unpremeditated violence by sudden danger, to error by the defect of judgment or the strength of passion’.35
In the immediate aftermath of Endeavour’s return the Admiralty realised that they had been fortunate with their crew. Gore and Hicks had been fine sailors, and Pickersgill, Molyneux and Jonathan Monkhouse had all contributed to the safe management of the ship too. Banks and Solander were a more obvious success. It was more chance than design that had flung the philosophers and the sailors together and little forethought had been given to the social dynamics of their addition by anyone but Hawke. But for a little inconvenience aboard, the voyage had been enormously enhanced by their erudition, their methodological approach, their desire to chronicle and to collect.
Banks, in particular, had infused the voyage with his playful, probing, fun-loving personality. As loudly as his achievements were being blared from newspaper columns in 1771, he had done something in excess of what people comprehended even then. He had created an archetype. Whenever ships sailed on exploration voyages afterwards, they would carry a naturalist as a matter of course, who would often have something of Banks about them. They would be bright, cheerful, clever, game, often just down from Oxbridge, and boisterous in their resolution to experience the world. In time a twinkling list of naturalists would follow Banks: Georg Forster, Alfred Wallace, Charles Darwin and Joseph Hooker; the list is perhaps still going with Sir David Attenborough today.
No one had any notion of this historical significance in the 1770s. But people did get to appreciate another of Banks’s innovations. In 1773 the collected papers of Sydney Parkinson were published, as one of the earliest eyewitness accounts of Endeavour’s voyage. They introduced the public to Parkinson, a young, earnest, thoughtful voyager, whose fear of death was always finely balanced by his desire to experience the world around him. The ‘fair copy’ of Parkinson’s journal disappeared sometime on the homeward passage – something that occasioned a dispute between Parkinson’s elder brother and Banks – but what did make it into print in his A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas gave the British public a far clearer perspective of life in the Pacific islands. Brightening the pages were selections from Parkinson’s artistic work – enticing visual depictions of tattooed warriors, unfamiliar landscapes and exotic plants. These were only a fraction of Parkinson’s massive output, which stretched well beyond a thousand works. As Banks pioneered the voyaging naturalist, Parkinson shaped the role of the voyaging painter.
Above all of these was Cook. In 1771 the Admiralty could hardly have been more pleased with him. The list of accomplishments stood for itself, but it was his manner of going about things that was equally striking. In an excitable age Cook had demonstrated that he had much of the stoic about him. He had acted with cool resolution in the calamity on the reef. He had been uncorrupted by the pleasures of Tahiti. He had not got carried away with his successes, as Wallis and Byron had, but had kept diligently to his orders. Even in Batavia when everyone else had succumbed to maladies, Cook had seemed immune. Perhaps the Admiralty’s greatest discovery on the Endeavour voyage was Cook himself.
Promotions, honours and respect were granted the ship’s company, but nothing was immediately done for Endeavour herself. A generation later, when thinking about Cook’s ships, the Admiralty mandarin Sir John Barrow wrote that he would have had them ‘laid up in a dock’ until they had ‘wasted away plank by plank’. This is what Queen Elizabeth I had done with Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, Barrow recorded. ‘[Drake’s] ship was preserved with great care, for many years, in the dock-yard of Deptford; and when time had gradually reduced her to such a state of decay that she could no longer be held together, a chair was constructed from some of the soundest parts and presented to the University of Oxford, as a relic that was still worthy of further preservation.’36
There was nothing like this for Endeavour. By the time of Lord Sandwich’s entertainment at the Admiralty in September, she had already been recommissioned for service elsewhere. If Cook and Banks were to sail again, they needed to find a new ship. Plans for another voyage were already afoot. There was one obvious zone of interest that remained to be explored. This was a stretch of the mid-Pacific, at high latitudes. It was the final lingering place that a continent could be found. Cook’s Endeavour journal ended with a suggestion that they return to the friendly anchorage at Queen Charlotte’s Sound in New Zealand, and his plan was quickly adopted. On 25 September the Admiralty instructed the Navy Board to ‘purchase two proper vessels of about 400 tons for service in remote parts’. This time Cook was to have his choice. If imitation is the highest form of flattery, no better can be said of Endeavour than during that autumn Cook went to the Thames and selected two barks of similar design: Marquis of Granby, 450 tons, and Marquis of Rockingham, 336 tons. They were both colliers built by Thomas Fishburn. Far from being an obscure business on a provincial river, Fishburn’s shipyard was becoming something of a Georgian Cape Canaveral: a launch site for expeditions to new worlds.
The plan was to sail in the spring, and by November the usual flurry of communications was relaying between the Admiralty, the Navy Board and the Victualling Office. Names were proposed. Drake for the Marquis of Granby, Raleigh for the Marquis of Rockingham, though these were soon amended. Drake became Resolution and Raleigh became Adventure, Sandwich sanctioning the changes after a ‘hint’ from one of his colleagues, who pointed out that the Spanish ‘hold in detestation those two names [Drake and Raleigh] and will believe we do it on purpose to insult them’.
This discussion was one of scores that occupied Sandwich and Cook over the autumn and winter of 1771. The abundance of letters, memorandums, orders and notes between them can be studied today, but they were concealed from the public at the time, who were left to garner what information they could from the newspapers. This version of the voyage’s fitting-out was quite different. It was a separate telling of the same story that could be traced back to 26 August 1771, and a report in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, that proclaimed ‘Mr Banks is to have two ships from government to pursue his discoveries in the South Seas, and will sail upon his second voyage next March.’37
The public interest in the summer of 1771 did not only irritate Dalrymple, it left Banks hungry for more. He had one small voyage and one great voyage behind him as evidence of his pedigree as a traveller. More laurels, Banks convinced himself, awaited. This next voyage promised a return to Tahiti and a reacquaintance with friends (and flames), but otherwise it augured more snow than sunshine, with the proposed route taking them deep into the high latitudes. He was not daunted by this. ‘O how Glorious would it be to set my heel upon ye Pole!’, Banks exclaimed at Christmas 1771, ‘and turn myself round 360 degrees in a second.’38
As far as the newspapers were concerned, the next voyage was to be a Banks and Solander reprise, and they reported it as such. According to the Reading Mercury, it was anticipated ‘that Messrs Banks and Solander in their next voyage to the South Seas, will be ordered to proceed by the North-west passage, the Spanish Ambassador having peremptorily declared to our Ministry, that his Master will not suffer them to pass by the Falkland Islands’. More details came from the Kentish Gazette, which revealed on Christmas Eve that ‘Dr Solander and Mr Banks had a private conference with his Majesty on Wednesday evening at St James’s: they were closeted for near two hours. It is supposed they received some instructions relative to their intended voyage.’ Another ‘very long conference’ took place with Banks, Solander, Lord Sandwich and Lord North in early January, ‘relating to their intended voyage’.
Banks was financing his part of the voyage again, and having experienced the limitations on Endeavour, he was anxious to tackle the shortcomings. Applications to join Banks’s latest enterprise arrived by the hundredweight at New Burlington Street. By the spring Banks’s addition to the Resolution’s company had risen to fourteen. Naturally there was him and Solander. Then to capture the seductive elegance of the Pacific in oil he contracted Johan Zoffany, the German neoclassical painter, as the lead artist. Also in the suite were two other draughtsmen – both in the Parkinson mould – a surgeon, six servants and – a fact that has never been forgotten – two French-horn players.
Banks had been irritated to find Cook had purchased two more colliers without consulting him. He believed they were not big enough. Resolution was hardly larger than Endeavour, yet his suite was twice the number. It was too late for Banks to do anything about the ship, but he had insisted that alterations be made – against the advice of the Navy Board and Cook’s old patron, Hugh Palliser, who was now comptroller of the navy. The amendments to Resolution focussed on the traditional officers’ quarters and the great cabin. Fishburn would have been baffled to see the plan that was proposed. Everything in the upper works was to be raised a foot. A new deck was ordered and a ‘round house’ was to be constructed over the great cabin, a place for Cook and the principal officers away from the great cabin that would remain Banks’s domain.
These alterations were completed at Deptford as Banks assembled his team in the early spring. Allied with reports in the newspapers, this contorted ship became an attraction in herself, Cook recording that ‘out of Idle curiosity’ people of ‘all ranks’ came to view her, ‘Ladies as well as gentlemen, for scarce a day past on which she was not crowded with strangers who came on board for no other purpose but to see the Ship in which Mr Banks was to sail round the world.’ On 2 May, with the departure imminent, and all Banks’s provisions and equipment being loaded onto the Resolution, Cook led a review of the ship headed by Sandwich, ‘after which a grand entertainment was given to the Nobility and Gentry who attended on the occasion’.
On 13 May 1772 Resolution sailed from Deptford. The plan was to have a pilot take her downriver, then for Cook to guide her into the anchorage at the Downs. Fully loaded with provisions and men, they sailed east into the morning sun with ‘a moderate breeze with the wind from ENE to ESE’. This should have been an easy prelude to their departure, but it turned out very differently. Having spent as much as £10,000 on fitting the ship out, it was disconcerting to see how poorly Resolution sailed. All the light colliers were ‘working down the river, some with top gallant sails and all their whole top sail and staysails’, Cook wrote, but at the same time they ‘could not with safety (though the wind was steady and without flurries) carry out single Reeft Topsails with the Jib’. Time and again Resolution fell off the wind, and she crouched so low in the water that she was listing almost as much as Endeavour had when punctured with the coral rock off New Holland. It was a shameful performance. This was a ship they hoped to sail to the end of the world. As soon as he was able, Cook drafted a letter to the Navy Board:
The Pilot desires me to inform you that he cannot think of taking her further than the Nore* with security to the ship or without hazarding his reputation in the attempt, unless with a fair wind. I thought it my duty to give you the earliest notice of our situation. I beg leave to offer you my own private opinion and to assure you that I think her an exceeding dangerous and unsafe ship.39
In nautical parlance Resolution was ‘crank’, or ‘so exceeding crank’ as Cook expanded in a later letter: ‘I beg leave to offer it as my opinion that she is too deep in the water to carry sail, being loaded below her bearings, and that by cutting down part of her upper works, shorting her masts and exchanging her guns from 6 to 4 pounders would lighten her to a proper depth of water and make her very fit to proceed on the voyage.’
It is inconceivable that Cook, who had been raised among the yards at Whitby and knew the balances and the lines of colliers like few others, would not have anticipated this. The troubles – he made this crystal clear – had come from Banks’s alterations. That Cook must have known what was coming leaves him open to a charge of subterfuge, one that Banks soon levelled at him. As for Banks himself, the great house of cards that he had spent eight months building was about to come tumbling down.
Banks was to hear the wretched state of affairs from Charles Clerke, who had sailed with him on Endeavour. ‘She is so very bad, that the Pilot declares, he will not run the risk of his Character so far, as to take charge of her, father than the Nore, without a fair Wind’, he explained. Clerke nonetheless displayed admirable esprit de corps:
Hope you known me too well, to impute my giving this intelligence to any ridiculous apprehensions for myself, by God I’ll go to Sea in a Grog Tub if desir’d, or in the Resolution as soon as you please; but must say, I do think her by far the most unsafe Ship I ever saw or heard of; however, if you think proper to embark for the South Pole in a Ship, which a Pilot, (who I think is, by no means a timorous man) will not undertake to carry down the River; all I can say is, that you shall be most chearfully attended, so long as we can keep her above Water.40
The true misery of Banks’s situation was made plain on 20 May, when the Admiralty ordered the Resolution returned to her original condition. For Banks this was public humiliation. Temperamentally disposed to outbursts of passion, Banks now acted in a manner so foolish it would long be remembered in the Georgian navy. On 28 May he ordered all of his equipment, his people and provisions off Resolution, because he ‘declined’ to take the voyage.
His decision was communicated to the Admiralty in an intemperate and poorly judged letter to Sandwich. Banks wrote with a mixture of entitlement, false modesty and high arrogance. He implied that he had only taken the voyage at the request of ‘others’; that he had ‘pledged’ himself ‘to all Europe’; that he had funded generously where others had not. ‘Shall I then my lord who have engagd to leave all that can make life agreable in my own country and throw on one side all the Pleasures to be reapd from three of the best years of my life merely to compass this undertaking pregnant enough with dangers and difficulties … be sent off in a doubtfull ship with accommodations rather worse than those which at first I absolutely refusd.’ Banks now arrived at his main charge: one particularly offensive to any sea officer. He asserted that the ship was ‘unsafe merely in conformity to the official opinion of the navy board who purchasd her without ever consulting me’. For Sandwich this was intolerable. That Banks had increasingly treated the Admiralty as a subservient office was bad enough, but to suggest he knew more of the workings, preparation and management of ships was pure self-righteousness.
Sandwich sent a grave reply on 2 June. Banks had threatened a public letter and Sandwich advised him against this, ‘as it will probably make it necessary that some answer should be given … for it is a heavy charge against this Board to suppose that they mean to send a number of men to sea in an unhealthy ship’. It was logic Banks could not counter.
The same day Sandwich composed his riposte, Cook too was writing to New Burlington Street. ‘The Cook & two French Horn men are at liberty to go when ever they please’, does not rank as one of Cook’s most insightful lines, but it is a memorable one. Elsewhere Cook summarised:
Mr Banks unfortunate for himself set out upon too large a Plan a Plan that was incompatible with a Scheme of discovery at the Antipodes; had he confined himself to the same plan as he set out upon last Voyage, attended only to his own persutes and not interfered with the choice, equipmint and even Direction of the Ships things that he was not a competent judge of, he would have found every one concerned in the expedition ever ready to oblige him, for my self I can declare it: instead of finding fault with the Ship he ought to have considered that the Endeavour Bark was just such another, whose good quallities enabled me to remain so much longer in the South Sea then any one had been able to do before, and gave him an oppertunity to acquire that reputation the Publick has so liberally and with great justice bestowed upon him.41
The affair occasioned another intriguing paper. So long an admirer of Cook’s, Hugh Palliser had watched Banks’s plans explode. Palliser was steeped in the sea. He had enlisted in the 1730s, had fought in the wars of the 1740s and 1750s, and had been involved in numerous single ship engagements. Palliser’s instinct was for pragmatism. In this spirit he wrote a memorandum, Thoughts upon the Kind of Ships proper to be employed on Discoveries in distant Parts of the Globe. It enumerated on the perils of the distant sea voyage, most particularly ‘running ashore upon desart, uninhabited or perhaps savage Coast[s]’. The ideal ship, he reckoned, ‘must be one of a large Burthen, and of a small Draught of Water, with a Body that will bear to take the Ground, and of a Size which in case of necessity may be safely and conveniently laid on shore to repair any accidental Damages or Defect’.
On the whole, I am firmly of Opinion that Ships of no other Kind are so proper for Discoveries in distant unknown Parts, as the Endeavour (formerly employed) was: – for no Ships of any other Kind can contain Stores and Provisions sufficient (in proportion to their Complements) for the purpose, considering the Length of Time it may be necessary they should last, and if they could contain sufficient Quantities. yet on arriving at the Parts for Discovery, they would still from the Nature of their Construction and Size, be less fit and applicable for the purpose: Hence I conclude it is, that so little Progress has hitherto been made in Discovery in the Southern Hemisphere: for all Ships which attempted the Business before the Endeavour, were unfit for it, altho’ those employed did the utmost in their Power: As soon as Mons. Bougainville came in sight of a part of the new discovered coast which Capt Cook compleatly explored, he fled from it as fast as possible and durst not approach it with the Ship he was in: –
It was upon these Considerations that the Endeavour Bark was chosen for that Voyage (the first of the King so employed) and notwithstanding those on board her who are not proper Judges found fault with her during the whole Voyage, yet it was to these properties in her that they owe their Preservation, and that enabled Capt Cook to stay in those Seas so much longer than any other Ship ever did or could do.42
Sandwich thought much the same. Jotting down a few words of advice for Banks, who had vowed to begin a new voyage of exploration, all of his own, he suggested:
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 … and as I have a sincere regard for your wellfare and consequently for your preservation, I earnestly entreat that that ship may not be an old Man of War or an old Indiaman but a New Collier.43
It did not take the newspapers long to get hold of the story. On 29 May, the day after Banks’s angry letter to Sandwich, they reported that ‘The intended Voyage of Mr Banks and Dr Solander to the South Seas, it is now said, is entirely laid aside.’ Various reasons were forwarded in the days to come – that it gave ‘umbrage’ to the Spanish king, ‘for want of necessary accommodation’ – but the material fact remained the same. Banks was not going. Returned to her original state, Resolution was soon on her way to Plymouth for final preparations – once again, sailing like a true Whitby collier.
On 12 July, Banks’s fall was confirmed in true British style with a mischievous Fleet Street caricature. The Fly Catching Macaroni shows Banks dressed in all the gaudy finery of a Pall Mall gentleman, standing astride an upturned globe as if he was straddling a fairground ride. Having gained a perilous balance, Banks’s eyes are fixed on the top-left corner of the print where a lone butterfly flaps past. The action is frozen at the decisive moment, as Banks flails and swots at the creature with his catching nets. To inflate the sense of absurdity, the artist has added a pair of ass’s ears to the subject’s head. ‘I rove from Pole to Pole, you ask me why,’ poses the caption, ‘I tell you Truth, to catch a – Fly.’44
Banks would see nothing of the South Pole, though Cook would get close on his first voyage in HMS Resolution – an expedition the historian Glyndwr Williams has called ‘arguably the greatest, most perfect of all seaborne voyages of exploration’.45 On his outward passage he paused at the Cape of Good Hope to begin the process of mending his friendship with Banks. ‘Dear Sir’, he began, ‘Some Cross circumstances which happened at the latter part of the equipment of the Resolution created, I have reason to think, a coolness betwixt you and I, but I can by no means think it was sufficient to me to break of all correspondence with a Man I am under m[a]ny obligations to.’ Hoping to lighten the mood, Cook found safety in more humdrum matters:
I am in your debt for the Pickled and dryed Salmon which you left on board, which a little time ago was most excellant, but the eight Casks of Pickled salted fish I kept for my self proved so bad that even the Hoggs would not eat it.46
There was no estrangement between Cook and Banks, who retained a mutual regard for the remainder of their lives. Banks, in particular, hung Charles Dance’s iconic three-quarter-length portrait of Cook over the fireplace of his library in later years, doubtless glancing towards it at moments of indecision. As for another old friend, HM Bark Endeavour, even by the time Resolution was purchased in November 1771, she was already long gone.