SEPTEMBER 1766, CHATEAU BAY, LABRADOR
It is a Soup made with a small quantity of salt Pork cut into Small Slices [with] a good deal of Chowder fish and Biscuit Boyled for about an hour[.] unlikely as this mixture appears to be Palatable I have Scarce met with any Body in this Country Who is not fond of it.
BANKS EXPLAINING THE DELIGHTS OF A CANADIAN DELICACY1
AS THE CANADIAN SUMMER of 1766 came to an end, four months of boating excursions along Newfoundland and Labrador made Banks feel like an experienced seafarer. His sea legs were even able to cope with a narrow escape from death on 2 September 1766.
Banks had set out with Thomas Adams on a cruise north, intending to be on the water for a week in the hopes of going where ‘no vessel that we Knew of had Ever been’. He and Adams were ‘Extreemly fond of the Plan & Pushd out of Chatteaux with a foul wind in an open Shallop’. They had hardly made any progress when ‘it began to Blow Very hard and that night Came on a most severe Gale of Wind which Destroyd an infinite number of boats’.2 The French, who had smaller boats than the British, were said to have lost a hundred men in the storm with three of their ships smashed to pieces against the shore.3 Banks lamented that the foul weather ‘totaly Destroyd our scheme to the northward’ and that Adams became ‘very Careful of Letting the boats go out’ with the ‘blowing season’ having arrived. Banks wrote that it was ‘mere accident’ that had ‘preserved’ his life in the gale – but his deeply religious sister, Sophia, thought the hand of God was involved; when copying Banks’s journal six years later, she wrote ‘Providence’ as a marginal annotation.4
Despite the perils of the deep and the serious illness that had plagued him in July, Banks remained in a buoyant mood. He wrote to his sister from Chateau Bay. They had an easy, relaxed relationship, and Banks was a young man of good humour.
Dear Sister
I received yours two days ago with newspapers &c: &c: which I must thank you all for as I can assure you they were the greatest Comfort you can Conceive – we all sat round the Fire & hunted out all the deaths marriages &c: &c: as eagerly as a schoolboy does Plumbs out of a Pudding5
He asked Sophia if James Lee, who ran the well-known Vineyard Nursery at Hammersmith and who had translated Linnaeus into English,6 had been ‘Very Civil’ and given her flowers. If not, he said, he would not give Lee one of his prized insects when he returned from Canada.
We are here in daily Expectation of the Eskimaux Ladies[.] I wish with all my heart they were Come as I might have sent you a sealskin gown & Petticoat Perfumd with train [whale] oil which to them is as Sweet as Lavander water but more of them when I know them better at Present adieu only Beleive
Me Your very affectionate Brother
J Banks7
Banks did not get to see the ‘Eskimaux Ladies’, but after the completion of the blockhouse in Chateau Bay on 3 September – the main purpose of the Niger’s voyage – he continued to explore Canada. He was presented with a porcupine about the size of a hare and kept it for the journey home,8 and he became a fan of a local dish he said was ‘Calld Chowder which I believe is Peculiar to this Country tho here it is the Cheif food of the Poorer & when well made a Luxury that the rich Even in England at Least in my opinion might be fond of.’9
Banks recounted the taking of a huge halibut six feet eleven inches (211 centimetres) from tip to tail and weighing 284 pounds (129 kilograms), almost as heavy as an ox killed for the men a day later. He made notes on what birds were suitable for the table: the Eskimo curlew was good eating, though not as delicate as the golden plover. The curlew came in ‘amazing multitudes’, and Banks liked to sit down to a plate of them broiled.10 Just as often, he filled his belly with handfuls of the local bakeapple,11 an amber-coloured fruit similar to the blackberry. On his table there were also ducks, fat wild geese and plump partridges. Not all the Canadian birds were palatable, though. He couldn’t stomach the ‘Whobby’ (red-throated loon), a bird that terrified even the stoutest hearts with its screeching. He recalled how its night-time cries had once terrified 43-year-old Governor Palliser so much that he had all hands on deck aboard the Niger and Guernsey, thinking an attack was imminent from the indigenous people.12
Banks also studied two types of eagles.13 He heard about owls as big as turkeys,14 and Phipps told him about a shiny black animal he had seen that was built like a small Italian greyhound and emerged from the sea to cross a morass into some low hills; it was most likely a fisher cat.15 Frederick Anchele, the surgeon’s second mate on the Niger, told Banks about similar animals he had seen in a group, diving into the water to bring up trout for their young; these were most likely the now-extinct sea mink.16
BANKS BEGAN THE FIRST LEG of his return journey on 3 October 1766, with the first stop at Croque. The place had been intolerable in the summer, on account of its heat and the ‘mosketos and Gadflies in Prodigious abundance’, but it was ‘tolerably Pleasant’ as winter approached.17
The Niger’s crew collected fresh water, harvested what vegetables had survived the fieldmice, and gathered the poultry left by the weasels and goshawks. The pea haulm was eleven feet high (3.34 metres) and as thick as Banks’s finger, but it produced ‘scarce anything’. Beans ran till they could not support their own weight and fell without producing a pod. Cabbage and lettuce thrived, as did radishes and carrots. The turnips were remarkably sweet, and the onions, after being covered with hammocks on the cold nights, ‘were very small [but] very good’.18
Banks documented the whaling activities in the ‘Streights of Bellisle’ and a thriving seal industry that involved the netting of huge shoals in a week-long frenzy around Christmas.19 There were great flocks of eider sea ducks as well, and Banks thought a huge industry could develop if concerted efforts were made to collect the feathery eiderdown.
On 10 October 1766 Banks sailed on the Niger for St John’s and arrived three days later. While there, he learnt of two men on the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence who made great profit hunting for walrus,20 as ‘their Oil & teeth . . . are Very fine Ivory . . . Projecting from their Mouths 12 or 15 inches’.21 ‘For the Easy method [the hunters] have of taking them,’ he wrote, ‘the people are intirely indebted to the Excessive Laziness of the Animal.’ He described how the walrus herds landed ‘in surprizing numbers’ and lolled about on shore, and how easy it was for men with clubs to chase them further inland so they could not escape into the water: ‘Then [the men] begin to Kill them which they are obligd to do by shooting Every one Singly into a Particular Part of the head which is said to be the only Part about them Penetrable by a musquet Ball.’22
The cold hampered Banks’s field studies and ruined his collection of leaves and he said it remained for other botanists to closely examine the plants in the southern part of Newfoundland in milder weather. He admitted, though, ‘I have Vanity enough to beleive that to the northward not many will be found to have Escapt my observation.’23
He was disappointed that instead of encountering the distinct breed of Newfoundland dog about which he had heard, all he could find ‘were mostly Curs with a Cross of the Mastiff in them . . . Some took the water well others not at all[.] the thing they are valued for here is strenght as they are employd in winter time to Draw in Sledges whatever is wanted from the woods.’24
St John’s still stank of fish, and Banks called it the ‘Most Disagreeable Town I Ever met’.25 However, Governor Palliser did his best to make his guests feel as though they had returned to society, and on 25 October 1766 he turned on a grand ball to celebrate the anniversary of King George III’s coronation six years earlier. Banks said he had to acknowledge the civilities of ‘Mr Palliser . . . as he shewed us all we could expect’.26 The governor’s vessel, HMS Guernsey, was decorated ‘Like a Pedlars Basket at a Horse race’ with ribbons of many colours flying in the wind. It seemed just about everyone in town was invited to the ball, ‘where the want of ladies was so great’ that Banks said his ‘Washer-woman & her sister were there by formal Invitation’.27
Among the men on board the Guernsey during Palliser’s command were Joseph Gilbert, who later became master of the Resolution under James Cook, and John Cartwright,28 who was appointed first lieutenant in 1766. Cartwright and his brother Major George Cartwright29 became Banks’s friends.30 John Cartwright risked his own life on four occasions to save people from drowning and later resigned his commission rather than take up arms against the American colonists. George Cartwright, who became a well-known trader on Canada’s east coast, had a great affinity for the Inuit, taught them to play leapfrog and once had the presence of mind to document his feelings when he feared they were preparing to burn him alive.31 He also foresaw the eventual extinction of the penguin-like great auk and complained bitterly about the mass slaughter of them for their meat and feathers.32 Also on board the Guernsey was James King,33 who would sail on Cook’s third voyage around the world, taking over the command of the Discovery in 1779.
What surprised Banks most about Palliser’s swanky shindig was that after dancing with every woman he could find, Banks was conducted, with his companions, to ‘a realy Elegant Supper Set out with all Kinds of Wines & Italian Liqueurs’.34 It was a 180-degree turn for Banks from life in the wilds watching the ice islands float by.
Two days after Palliser’s ball, James Cook sailed into St John’s in command of HM Brig Grenville,35 the vessel on which he had been surveying the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador, while paying local guides 4 shillings a day to warn him of rocks and hidden dangers.
Cook had just completed astronomical observations, including the eclipse of the sun on 5 August 1766, which would help calculate the longitude of his observation site in Newfoundland. He had been corresponding with the English astronomer John Bevis,36 who brought his work to the notice of the Royal Society in London.
In his journal Banks does not mention meeting Cook, but naval protocol would have required Cook to call on both Palliser, who was Commodore of the Fleet in Canada and who treated Cook as a protégé, and Thomas Adams on board the Niger.37 A month shy of his thirty-eighth birthday, Cook was big and resolute with a fierce gaze. After a late start in life, he was going places in the Royal Navy – in more ways than one.
COOK HAD BUILT A STRONG reputation working on the Whitby coal ships for the Walker brothers, but in 1755, at twenty-six, he had enlisted on the lowest rung of the Royal Navy at Wapping, near Execution Dock in East London.38 With the Seven Years’ War looming, he had decided to enlist rather than be forced into action by the notorious press gangs, who went about England violently pressing recruits into service.
Cook knew of the hard life that awaited lowly sailors on the bottom deck. The naval ships were often like floating prisons where men could be flogged or hanged for misbehaviour, shot or drowned, or blown apart by the enemy. Many arrived for service in rags, impoverished or even homeless. But this was not so for Cook: he was born for the sea.
Cook started his naval career as an able seaman with the resolve to work his way up and eventually command his own ship to distant shores. In contrast to Banks’s investment income of £500 a month, Cook’s monthly starting salary was just £1 4s. In 1755 he was sent to Spithead, just off Portsmouth, to join the four hundred men aboard the 58-gun HMS Eagle.
In October that year, 32-year-old Palliser was given command of the ship after having just escorted a convoy of transports across the Atlantic to the British colony of Virginia. Palliser became Cook’s great mentor and – realising that this young man had a world of discovery in his heart – taught him navigation and mapping. Over the next few years, Cook would also master advanced trigonometry, despite his rudimentary formal education, as he pioneered the craft of modern marine surveying.39
Palliser had sailed the Eagle out of Plymouth on 8 October 1755, at the same time that Banks was wrestling with Greek and Latin at Harrow. The captain soon captured a French fishing boat with a crew of 150 as it was returning home full of salted cod from Newfoundland.
Cook had started keeping a log of his experiences at sea. In mid-November, he jotted down notes after watching the destruction of a 74-gun French ship, the Esperance, which had been returning to France after taking troops to reinforce the fort at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, now part of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. The Esperance was intercepted by British vessels under Admiral Temple West and, while Palliser followed orders to keep the Eagle out of the fight, HMS Orford blew the French ship to pieces. Cook recorded that the Esperance fired two guns in distress, but that there was ‘no possibility of relieving her the sea running so high’.40 Two days later he reported that the Eagle had ‘received on Board from the Esperance 26 Prisoners at 4 o’clock. The Esperance on Fire there being no Possibility of keeping her above water.’41
Banks had just settled into life at Eton when Cook had his first taste of real action in battle. It came on 31 May 1757, after the big Yorkshireman’s promotion to bosun aboard the Eagle. Using this ship along with the similarly sized HMS Medway, the British engaged the French warship Duc d’Aquitaine and its 493 crew about 180 nautical miles off the French island of Ushant. The French ship, shot full of holes, was taken back to Plymouth for repairs, then re-entered into service as HMS Duc d’Aquitaine in the fight against her former masters.42
On his twenty-ninth birthday, Cook was promoted to master on the 64-gun HMS Pembroke while the British assembled 157 warships, forty thousand crew and fourteen thousand soldiers to attack the French in Canada. The British attack plans were aided by the charts of Samuel Holland,43 a Dutch-born royal engineer who would become the first Surveyor General of British North America.44 Holland had been mapping the Canadian coastline when, under orders from General James Wolfe,45 he bravely ventured into French territory, defying musket fire, to map the area around the Fortress of Louisbourg, which fell to the British in July 1758. After the battle, Cook was wandering along the beach at Kennington Cove when he saw Holland using a chest-high tripod to take measurements and notes of the surrounding topography. Holland brought the enthusiastic sailor under his wing as his assistant, while the Pembroke’s skipper46 encouraged Cook to study the works of the Ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, and to learn trigonometry and astronomy to aid his navigational skills.47
While Banks was first studying plants and insects, and telling his fellow Etonians that Greek and Latin were for the birds, Cook and Holland spent weeks in snowbound Halifax compiling charts of the Gulf of St Lawrence and the St Lawrence River, crowded with floating ice, which led up to the French stronghold of Quebec City. The following summer, as the British made plans to attack that city, the navy gave Cook the task of taking depth measurements along the river in order to find a place with deep water and little current for the landing of troops. Although the first wave of the attack failed, in September 1759 Cook provided a decoy downriver as the British made surprise attacks, and by 18 September 1759 Quebec was in British hands.
On 21 December 1762, at St Margaret’s Church in Barking, Essex, Cook married twenty-year-old Elizabeth Batts,48 whose parents ran the Bell Inn at Wapping. Four months later, Cook farewelled his pregnant wife and returned to Canada on the Antelope for more mapping work, but he was back home in November to meet his son James Jr, born on 13 October 1763.49 Cook bought a new home for his little family in a small terrace house at 7 Assembly Row on Mile End Road,50 but in May 1764 he again returned to Newfoundland and on 14 June became master of the Grenville. He was in that role when he arrived at St John’s for the coronation anniversary celebration, while Banks was living it up.
BANKS SAILED FROM St John’s aboard the Niger on 28 October 1766.51 His journey had been a scientific success, though danger was ever-present. Off the Azores on 5 November, the huge, wild waves flooded his cabin ‘in an instant where [the water] washd backward & forward with such rapidity that it Broke in Pieces Every chair & table in the Place[.]’ His box of seeds was ‘intirely demolish’d as was my Box of Earth with Plants in it which Stood upon deck’.52
Twelve days later, on 17 November 1766, the Niger sailed down the River Tagus into Lisbon. It cruised past the Bugio tower, with its lighthouse fuelled by olive oil, and came to anchor under the thirty-metre fortification known as Belém Tower.53
Banks was understandably in a foul mood, having suffered the loss of so many of his precious specimens. In Lisbon he spent the next six weeks shaking his head at the Portuguese, who he said had ‘no idea of Improving Ground tho they have a climate in which wood Grows wonderfully fast’. There was, he thought, ‘Scarce an Instance of a Portugese having Ever Planted any tree but an Olive which by its Oyl brings them in a yearly revenue . . . their Taste in Gardening is more trifling than Can be Conceivd[.] a Pond Scarce Large Enough for a frog to swim in the Sides of Which are lind with Glaz’d tiles and which has two or three fountains in it about as thick as a quill is their Greatest Ornament[.]’54 He found the Portuguese nobility ‘Extreemly Proud & as ignorant’ and wanting in education. There was not one ‘hansome building of any Kind’ in Lisbon, nor did he see ‘one Good Picture’.55 The ‘Valuable Diamonds’ in their churches were arranged in a ‘Clumsey heap . . . with as little taste as brass nails upon a Coffin in England’.
Banks had arrived in Lisbon at a time of political upheaval, and just eleven years after an earthquake had destroyed parts of the city and killed fifteen thousand people. Murders had been frequent until the recent declaration of an edict that forbade all sharp instruments from being carried in the street except swords, which were to be made clearly visible.
Even so, Banks enjoyed some aspects of life in Lisbon. He saw for the first time the rare substance caoutchouc – or India rubber – and put ‘two balls of the elastick substance’ into his luggage.56 He visited an aviary of Brazilian birds belonging to a Portuguese sea captain and wrote about them in a letter to his friend Thomas Pennant, the Welsh naturalist, saying the experience was some consolation for the loss of the Canadian seeds. Pennant gushingly replied, ‘How should I have reveled amidst that Brasilian aviary. What multitude of singular birds does that southern continent afford!’57
Banks met two leading naturalists in Lisbon: the 56-year-old Joao de Loureiro58 – a Jesuit missionary who later worked in Goa, Macao, China and what is now Vietnam – and the 31-year-old Italian Domenico Vandelli.59 Five years earlier Vandelli had given the scientific name to the world’s largest living turtle, the leatherback.60 Banks would later help Loureiro write and publish the Flora Cochinchinensis,61 a book about botany in the Far East, and he would assist Vandelli in building a botanic garden and museum in Lisbon.62
Banks also formed a strong friendship with Gerard de Visme,63 a London merchant based in Lisbon. He was seventeen years older than Banks, but they had a mutual interest ‘in birds, botany, gardens and girls’.64 Banks said de Visme had ‘an ample botanick garden’ and gave him plants from Pernambuco, Brazil.65 De Visme also sent him a hogshead of sweet Portuguese Calcavellas wine.66 In later years, Banks sent his friend plants from North America and some from the voyage of the Endeavour.
Banks was a hit with the women he met in Lisbon, too. He was admitted to the Natural History Society, run by the English colony in Portugal, which had a sizeable female membership.67 De Visme was soon teasing him about the possible erection of a bust or statue to him in a niche of ivy jasmine in Lisbon, saying that all the ladies of the society would provide details on the resemblance of Banks, and that one of his favourites, the ‘Venus of Lisbon’, was as beautiful as ever, retaining a crowd of admirers.68 In later years when Banks was planning another voyage, de Visme ordered clothes for him as well as two pairs of sheets in ‘Panno de Linho which is cottony and very snug, especially at Sea, in your state of Celibacy’.69
AFTER SIX WEEKS IN LISBON, Banks left for London, arriving in Plymouth on 20 January 1767 and sailing down the Thames ten days later. Not yet twenty-four, he was already worldly-wise with a wealth of experience to match the wealth of his landholdings. His journal was filled with notes from a rapid-fire ‘punctuation-free pen’,70 and it provided an invaluable record of a world few Europeans had seen. He had ‘specimens or exact records of at least 340 plants, 91 birds, many fishes and invertebrates, and a few mammals, including the porcupine, that at least began the voyage alive’,71 and he had the beginnings of a herbarium that was soon to become famous.
Banks also had a burgeoning reputation as a young man of action. In the cause of science, he had suffered the claustrophobic confinement of a naval vessel and come close to death from fever. He had known violent storms at sea and seen wild frontiers. He had made friends in some of the most remote corners of the globe, and he knew how to have a good time. Now he wanted to travel to other distant places in order to uncover more scientific treasures. Soon he had the chance to go right off the map.