Chapter 2

APRIL 1752, HARROW SCHOOL, NORTH-WEST LONDON

He was not in himself a genius who, by his discoveries, astonished and enlightened mankind; but he was one who, in his early youth, without a guide, discovered the path that led to Science, and from that moment never deviated from it till the end of his life.

THE SURGEON EVERARD HOME, BANK’S FRIEND ¹

AS HE ENTERED THE daunting English public school system, young Joseph Banks was both delicately featured and a ‘strong and active boy’.² Underneath the soft face and genteel background, he had to be tough to survive what could be a brutal introduction to the classroom after years of private tuition.

Harrow had been founded in north-west London in 1572 under a Royal Charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I. Originally, the primary subject taught was Latin and the main sport was archery.³ Although at first most boys were educated for free, a small number of paying students from outside the parish were enrolled to increase the meagre wages of the early masters. These ‘foreign’ boys stayed in the homes of masters or ‘dames’, the village women who became surrogate mothers to the younger children.

For decades after the founding of Harrow, many wealthy families still saw private tutors as providing a better education than that offered by schools. But William Banks saw the need for nine-year-old Joseph to have a more regimented system of schooling than he was receiving amid the distractions of Revesby, and Harrow had an advantage over the Westminster school William had attended: its annual fee of £200 per boy was about £100 cheaper.⁴

Joseph arrived at Harrow when it was still recovering from scandal and potential ruin. In 1746, the Reverend Dr James Cox, who ‘led a disorderly, drunken, idle life’⁵ despite being headmaster for sixteen years, absconded in the face of mounting debts at a time when only forty-six boys were left at the school, a third of the number when he had taken the role.⁶ Faced with this crisis, the school governors appointed the amiable 53-year-old Dr Thomas Thackeray,⁷ who was ‘suave, likeable and literate with a penchant for modern languages’.⁸

At nine, Banks was by no means the youngest pupil. Local boy Samuel Parr,⁹ the son of a surgeon, started at Harrow in the same year as Banks, aged only five. Thanks to his father he was already well versed in Latin and went on to become an eminent writer, known as ‘the Whig Johnson’, a flattering comparison with the renowned man of letters Dr Samuel Johnson. Parr remembered headmaster Thackeray as a ‘strict disciplinarian’,¹⁰ and it was said that he refused to praise good work because he believed this would encourage vanity and laziness. Another of Banks’s schoolmates, the clergyman’s son Tate Wilkinson,¹¹ later a leading actor and theatre manager, recalled that Thackeray was reluctant to beat his pupils but that not all the masters were as ‘benign and humane’ when faced with ‘such an unruly community as a public school’.¹² Wilkinson remembered that the Reverend William Prior ‘loved to lift his arm up for the awful flogging’. He beat children who could not keep up with their studies or who became homesick, and Wilkinson recalled Prior thrashing him in front of the school for running home to his mother.

The blood did flow where the rod was driven,

The flesh did quiver where the birchen tore.¹³

Thackeray had become chaplain to Frederick, Prince of Wales, the estranged son of King George II. A year after Banks arrived at the school, Thackeray was also combining his work there with his duties as Archdeacon of Surrey and as the father of sixteen children. He may have been too busy with other commitments to notice Joseph Banks struggling in his studies.

AT THE SAME TIME THAT Banks was doing his best to avoid the birch at Harrow, James Cook had the wind in the sails of his budding career at sea. Fourteen years older than Banks, Cook was born in the Yorkshire town of Marton-in-Cleveland, about twenty kilometres from the North Sea and a million light-years from the privileged world of Harrow. He was the second child of a Scottish farm labourer, and his first home, in contrast to Banks’s grand abodes in London and Lincolnshire, was a tiny, damp, dark mud-walled cottage with a dirt floor, thatched roof, precious few windows and little warmth against the savage northern winter. Of Cook’s six siblings, four died in childhood, and his brother John made it only to twenty-two.¹⁴

When Cook was eight, his father left the employ of local estate owner George Mewburn, moved the family ten kilometres to the south and became a foreman on Thomas Skottowe’s Aireyholme Farm at Great Ayton, in the shadow of a striking peak, Roseberry Topping.

Cook received an education in reading, writing, arithmetic and religion at the local one-room school before helping his father in the Yorkshire fields. At seventeen, he put his head for figures to good use by becoming an assistant to a merchant and draper named William Sanderson¹⁵ in the nearby coastal village of Staithes, then home to one of the largest fishing fleets in England.¹⁶ The stories Cook heard there stoked his dreams of going to sea.¹⁷ Sanderson recommended Cook to brothers John and Henry Walker, pious Quakers who had a fleet of vessels, based in the nearby port of Whitby, being used to ferry coal from the mines around Newcastle-on-Tyne south to London. Some also carried cargo across the North Sea.

By the standards of the times Cook was a veritable giant, standing over six feet, and he impressed his new bosses with hard work and zeal. By 1752, the year Banks arrived at Harrow, Cook was promoted to the position of mate, first aboard the Friendship and then the Mary sailing to the Baltic and St Petersburg.

BANKS MUCH PREFERRED an active outdoor life to that in austere classrooms. After four years at Harrow he still knew no Greek and little Latin, and his spelling, punctuation and use of capital letters were rudimentary – they would remain so for the rest of his life, as ideas burst from his fertile brain faster than his hand could write. In any case he was so rich that he didn’t need to spell correctly; he could always employ underlings to put words on paper for him, and he once remarked, at the height of his fame and power, ‘I am scarce able to write my own Language with Correctness, and never presumed to attempt Elegant Composition, Either in Verse or in Prose that or any other tongue.’¹⁸

In September 1756, when Banks was thirteen, his father placed him at another of the great English public schools: Eton, near Windsor Castle.

Eton was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as a charity school¹⁹ but became a nursery for English statesmen including many prime ministers and the future First Lord of the Admiralty, John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich,²⁰ a highly sexed kinkster who would become Banks’s great friend.

Banks’s father surely expected that Eton was very different from the institution it had been a couple of centuries earlier, with Nicholas Udall as headmaster.²¹ Udall was a fearsome flogger who presided at the school until 1541 when he was convicted under the Buggery Act²² for committing sodomy on two students.²³ Although the offence usually carried a sentence of death by hanging, Udall had friends in high places and his punishment was reduced to just under a year in Marshalsea prison.²⁴

In the mid-1700s, wealthy boys such as Banks stayed in comfortable private houses at Eton, while the ‘collegers’, whose fees were paid by an endowment to the school, bedded down in Eton’s Long Chamber, a sparsely furnished dormitory from the fifteenth century that housed fifty boys and a junior master who slept at one end. Junior boys faced beatings with birch rods, not just from teachers but also from senior boys who used the younger children as ‘fags’ or servants.²⁵ Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder²⁶ said the cruelty of England’s public schools was such that ‘he had scarce known a boy who was not cowed for life at Eton’.²⁷

Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s son Horace²⁸ remembered games of cricket at Eton, but he also recalled ‘expeditions against the bargemen’,²⁹ when students would take up positions over the river in order to hurl stones down ‘on every poor devoted barge that chanced to pass’.³⁰

An Etonian tradition from the late 1600s was the annual summer hunt. Every August, the students would chase a ram around the school, beating it with clubs until it collapsed and died. In 1730, King George II’s son Prince William, the young Duke of Cumberland, took part in the hunt and struck the first blow, the club ‘bloodyed according to custom’.³¹ In later life the prince was given the nickname ‘Butcher’ Cumberland for his destruction of Jacobite forces at the Battle of Culloden outside Inverness.³²

The hunt was discontinued around 1740, not because of its barbarity but because it was deemed too risky for the boys. After one terrified ram escaped over a bridge across the Thames, the students chased it through the marketplace at Windsor with so much bloodthirsty zeal that ‘such severe exercise in summer’ was deemed dangerous to their health. For a time the unfortunate rams were hamstrung then beaten to death as they tried to wriggle away. Finally, in 1747, the ritual slaughters were curtailed, but during Banks’s time rams were still killed every August to be served in pasties in the Great Hall.³³

Cricket, boating, rowing, hockey,³⁴ hopscotch, fencing, football and ‘sliding down the sides of the stairs from Cloyster to College Kitchen’³⁵ were all popular pastimes for the students. There was also cockfighting³⁶ and the frequent bullying of smaller children – ‘the Weak, the Timid, the Eccentric, and the Unsociable’³⁷ – while ‘bull-baiting went on with vigour in Bachelor’s Acre at the time of Windsor fair, and badger-baits, dog-fights, and cat and duck hunts were organized for the special edification of the Eton boys’.³⁸

The Joseph Banks who arrived at Eton was slim, athletic and fine featured, with a soft, almost feminine face, long auburn hair reaching his shoulders and a neat fringe framing his benign countenance. He was also a big, strong, active lad, used to hiking and swimming. One of his schoolmates was the young Constantine Phipps,³⁹ who shared his enthusiasm for adventure.

Not much scared Banks; his parents had always encouraged his love of the natural world, and as a boy he’d even kissed toads in the name of science. At the urging of his mother, who was ‘void of all imaginary fear’, he would rub the toads across his face and lips: ‘My motive for doing this very frequently is to inculcate the opinion I have held, since I was told by my mother, that the toad is actually a harmless animal; and to whose manner of life man is certainly under some obligation as its food is chiefly those insects which devour his crops and annoy him in various ways. To treat such an animal with cruelty, and to regard it with disgust, I have always considered as a vulgar error . . .’⁴⁰

Around the time Banks started at Eton, he was depicted in a portrait two metres high by a metre and a half wide, which hung for many years at Revesby. ⁴¹ Master Banks was painted sitting sideways in a brass-studded red leather chair, one of his arms resting on the drawing of a flower in an open folio that is draped across a table; next to him, prophetically, is a jar of leaves and berries, a small microscope, and a large terrestrial globe showing the known world – much of what is now Australia is missing. The rich young gentleman looks placidly towards the artist⁴² and wears the height of 1750s fashion: a green coat with gold buttons, fawn waistcoat, ruffled shirt, white stockings, fawn breeches and buckled shoes. The painting is thought to have been the basis for a much later depiction, by the Cornish artist John Opie,⁴³ of a young, rosy-cheeked, alabaster-skinned Banks in a black coat and frilled collar perched over a globe showing an upturned Australia.⁴⁴

Joseph Banks aged about fourteen, artist unknown.

The original portrait captured a time when the Banks family fortunes were continuing their rapid rise – financially and socially. In 1757, Banks’s aunt Eleanora Margaret, better known as the great beauty Miss Peggy Banks,⁴⁵ married the Honourable Henry Grenville, former Governor of Barbados, who was soon to take her with him to Constantinople when he was appointed British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Banks wrote that Peggy was ‘spoken of by her contemporaries as having been one of the handsomest women of the age she lived in and this her portrait at Revesby justifies’.⁴⁶ Peggy’s daughter Louisa, Banks’s cousin and close confidante, became the second wife of the Earl Stanhope. Louisa’s cousins William Pitt the Younger⁴⁷ and William Wyndham Grenville became British prime ministers.

But despite his family’s wealth and connections, and regardless of his pleasant demeanour, Banks did not impress his Etonian masters. One of his classmates, Henry Brougham,⁴⁸ whose family owned Brougham Hall near Penrith in Cumbria as well as great swathes of north-west England, recalled that although Banks’s ‘good disposition and cheerful temper recommended him to his masters’ at Eton, ‘they complained of his extreme aversion to study and inordinate love of active sports’.⁴⁹ Years later Brougham’s son Henry Jr,⁵⁰ who became the Lord High Chancellor of Britain, wrote that his father’s ‘friend Joe cared mighty little for his book, and could not understand anyone taking to Greek and Latin’.⁵¹ The surgeon Everard Home,⁵² who befriended Banks in later life, recalled that ‘He was obviously an open-air boy; fond of sport and play; not incapable of attentive study, yet not disposed to it in a “bookish” sense. Activity and energy in out-of-door pursuits was his most characteristic feature. This, of course, made for honour with his schoolfellows, with whom he speedily became very popular.’⁵³

Banks was fortunate to have arrived at Eton during the tenure of the liberal headmaster Edward Barnard,⁵⁴ a ‘competent and elegant scholar, and an able administrator’,⁵⁵ who preferred to discipline with persuasion rather than force. It was said that he ‘corrected with grace and good humour’, and that his manner was ‘gentlemanlike and dignified although he had some difficulty in restraining a natural tendency to joking and caricature’.⁵⁶

In the mid-1700s there were freedoms at Eton that the cowed boys of earlier times could scarcely have imagined. Students now prepared most of their lessons in their own rooms, and by the time of Banks’s arrival there was an emphasis on the importance of recreation due to the increased number of students from the aristocracy. This suited Banks just fine. Etonian students smoked pipes, and the older boys frequented the Christopher Inn, four nearby coffee houses, and shops that sold oysters, fruit and sweets.⁵⁷

At the end of 1756, following just one term at Eton, Banks headed home to Revesby for a month-long holiday starting on the second Monday in December.⁵⁸ With such a wide world around him to explore and with such onerous Fourth Form subjects as the Latin verse comedies of Terence, Thomas Farnaby’s Delectus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Aesop’s Fables, the Greek Testaments, and Greek Grammar⁵⁹ awaiting him on his return to school, Banks extended his vacation. Edward Young, an assistant master, wrote to Banks’s father on 6 February 1757.

Sir,

I have received the Favour of your letter, and I’m very glad Master Banks was detained by nothing worse than the Badness of the Roads and weather . . .

It gives me great pleasure to find you think Master Banks improved. To be able to construe a Latin author into English with Readiness and Propriety is undoubtedly no less necessary than to be able to turn an English one into Latin.⁶⁰

Young told William Banks that he had been ‘obliged to give particular Attention’ to young Joseph’s Greek grammar. It was a ‘very critical time’, Young emphasised, and Master Banks needed to apply himself or be left behind.⁶¹

For You can’t but be sensible that there is a great Inattention in Him, and an immoderate Love of Play . . . which we must endeavour to get the better of in some degree, or it will be a constant Obstacle to his Improvement. This sometimes occasions Quarrels between us; tho’ in other respects we agree extremely well together; as I really think Him a very good tempered and well disposed boy.⁶²

Banks may have wandered through most of his academic life taking note of nothing except the birds, the bees and the trees, but he later related a change of heart to Dr Everard Home, who no doubt embellished and extended the tale into something of a heroic fable when he addressed London’s College of Surgeons seventy years after Banks’s schooldays. Dr Home told his audience that when Banks was fourteen his tutor ‘had, for the first time, the satisfaction of finding him reading during his hours of leisure’.⁶³ Banks had explained to Dr Home that one fine summer evening ‘he was walking leisurely along a lane, the sides of which were richly enamelled with flowers; he stopped, and looking round, involuntarily exclaimed. How beautiful! After some reflection, he said to himself, it is surely more natural that I should be taught to know all these productions of Nature, in preference to Greek and Latin; but the latter is my father’s command, and it is my duty to obey him; I will, however, make myself acquainted with all these different plants for my own pleasure and gratification.’⁶⁴ According to Dr Home, Banks began ‘immediately to teach himself Botany; and, for want of more able tutors’ submitted to the instruction of women supplying plants and seeds to the druggists and apothecaries, paying sixpence for every material piece of information.⁶⁵ ‘While at home for the ensuing holidays, he found, to his inexpressible delight, in his mother’s dressing-room, a book, in which all the plants he had met with were not only described, but represented by engravings. This, which proved to be Gerrard’s Herbal [sic],⁶⁶ although one of the boards was lost, and several of the leaves torn out, he carried with him to school in triumph; and it was probably this very book that he was poring over when detected by his tutor, for the first time, in the act of reading.’⁶⁷

Banks’s fascination and enthusiasm for nature were infectious, and he wanted to share what he was learning with others. Henry Brougham’s son would later write, ‘My father described him as a remarkably fine-looking, strong, and active boy, whom no fatigue could subdue, and no peril daunt; and his whole time out of school was given up to hunting after plants and insects.’⁶⁸ Banks had a focus and purpose in his privileged life like never before, and his collection of insects and plants continued to grow even as his knowledge of Greek and Latin continued to disappoint his schoolmasters.

Not long after his seventeenth birthday, Banks was at Revesby on vacation when he joined growing numbers among England’s upper class in being inoculated against smallpox. A pioneering medical family, the Suttons of Suffolk, claimed they had made the ‘procedure almost painless, much safer, and much more convenient’. Robert Sutton Sr was a surgeon who had modified the inoculation technique so that it involved only a tiny jab through the skin with a sharp lancet. Sutton’s son Daniel, known as ‘The Inoculator’, claimed there had been just three deaths in the first twenty-two thousand people he treated.⁶⁹ He used his business acumen to establish franchises across England and parts of Europe and North America offering the ‘Suttonian Method’.⁷⁰ This involved the use of mercury, a dangerous but common ingredient in eighteenth-century medical treatments; the Suttons thought it essential to the preparation of patients for inoculation.⁷¹

After the Suttons inoculated Master Banks with the disease, they monitored his reactions as they did with all their patients. The injection site resembled a tiny red fleabite, and if the inoculation worked it began to itch on the fourth day. Banks was fed mercury to make him salivate and given laxatives calculated to produce four stools a day in a favourable patient but sometimes six. If patients were destined to have a mild course of smallpox, a pustule with a domed top was fully formed seven days after inoculation. If the pustule remained flat, having failed to fill, then the patient was likely to develop convulsions and suffer from a high fever and severe back pain; enemas were used to head off the impending crisis. The pustule on Banks’s arm did not fill, and the whole inoculation procedure took fourteen days.

By the time he had gone through a second inoculation and recovered for the necessary amount of time, William and Sarah Banks decided there was no need to send him back to Eton as he had missed so much of the school year. Having matriculated on 16 December 1760, he was on his way to Oxford University.⁷²

His terrestrial globe had not yet been fully mapped, but at seventeen Banks had the world at his feet.