Chapter 9

DECEMBER 1768, RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

You have heard of the French man laying Swaddled in linnen between two of his Mistresses both naked using every possible means to excite desire but you never heard of a tantalizd wretch who has born[e] this situation with less patience than I have done mine

BANKS ON BEING CONFINED TO THE ENDEAVOUR WHEN EXOTIC DELIGHTS AWAITED HIM ON SHORE¹

BANKS COULD NOT HIDE his anger and frustration. Sydney Parkinson said his boss was ‘much chagrined’,² but that was a massive understatement. Banks cursed, he swore, he raved, and he stamped his stylish buckled shoes all over the Endeavour’s deck. He elbowed everyone aside in the great cabin to command Cook’s desk and then savaged the paper with his quill pen, writing angry demands to the authorities in Rio. But, he complained, ‘They only Laugh at me’, adding that these Portuguese officials were ‘Rascaly’³ and as an ‘illiterate unhumanizd [and] I may say Barbarous a set of people as I am now in the Possession of’.⁴

For three weeks the Endeavour had been lying at anchor in shallow water⁵ off the Isle of Cobras in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay adjacent to the city’s waterfront. The shoreline was crowded with plants and animals of a kind Banks and Solander had never seen before, but all this time they had not been permitted to set foot upon the land. The local authorities did not believe the malarkey of the British about a scientific mission – they doubted the King of England ‘could be such a fool as to put out a ship merely to observe the transit of Venus’.⁶ They surmised more sinister reasons for the visit: illegal trade⁷ or smuggling.⁸

Rio had promised so much after two months at sea from Madeira. ‘We rejoiced to see Land,’ Solander noted of the morning they arrived, ‘and flattered ourselves with the hope of Pleasures unknown to them that are not enthusiastically curious. Every prospect promised us entertainment. We passed by Hills and Shores that we coud see were covered with Palms and fine Trees unknown to us; so were we impatient to get into the harbour.’⁹ As the Endeavour glided into Rio, Banks noted ‘the sea was inconceveably full of small vermes [invertebrates] which we took without the least dificulty . . .’¹⁰

Cook sent his second-in-command, Zachary Hickes, and a midshipman on the pinnace to find a pilot and to acquaint the local viceroy, Dom Antônio Rolim de Moura Tavares, the Count of Azambuja,¹¹ with the reasons for the Endeavour’s arrival and its need for fresh water.¹² He anchored among about forty vessels, three hundred metres from shore, but not before the pinnace returned without Hickes or the midshipman but instead with a Portuguese subaltern¹³ who brought word from the viceroy that the two men had been detained. Soon after, another boat arrived with several of the viceroy’s officers, who quizzed Cook about his mission, his cargo and his guns.¹⁴ Yet another boat, ten-oared ‘with 12 or 14 soldiers’,¹⁵ rowed laps round the Endeavour with orders ‘not to Suffer any one of the Officers or Gentlemen’ except Cook to leave the ship.¹⁶ Cook might have thought Britannia ruled the waves, but the Portuguese let him know that wasn’t the case here.

Early next morning Cook waited for the softly spoken Portuguese general he called ‘Count Rolim’ and told him he needed to purchase provisions for the ship. The viceroy told Cook he had to employ a person to buy them, ‘under a pretence that it was the Custom of the Place’. The viceroy insisted on putting a soldier into the boats that brought anything to or from the ship, ‘alledging that it was the Orders of his Court’. Cook was obliged to submit to ‘this indignity’, he wrote, ‘otherwise I could not have got the supplys I wanted’.¹⁷ The viceroy ‘did not believe a word’ about the Endeavour ‘being bound to the Southward to observe the transit of Venus, but looked upon it only as an invented story to cover some other design we must be upon’.¹⁸

Cook later told Banks that the viceroy ‘gravely askd’ whether the transit of Venus ‘was the Passing of the North star to the South pole’, and an incredulous Banks, trying hard not guffaw at the ignorance of the man, remarked that ‘this alone will I think sufficiently shew . . . the state of Learning in this place’.¹⁹

The viceroy gave orders that neither Banks nor Solander nor any of their team were to leave the ship to gather specimens. Cook was still trying to get his head around the rebuff when, after taking leave from ‘His Excellency’, he found that ‘Count Rolim’ had placed an officer to shadow the Endeavour’s skipper wherever he went. ‘At first the Vice Roy pretended [it] was only meant as a Complement,’ Cook wrote, ‘and to order me all the Assistance I wanted.’ But the angry Yorkshireman soon regarded it as ‘an insult which I am well convinced was never before born[e] by any Commander of a Ship of War belonging to His Britannick Majesty’.²⁰

Cook remonstrated with this ‘unwelcome sentinel’.²¹ But when some of the crew challenged the viceroy’s order to have a local guard in their boat when they went for supplies, they were beaten by the Portuguese soldiers and locked up ‘in a loathsome dungeon where their companions were cheifly Blacks who were chaind’.²² Banks stewed and stewed as beef, greens, rum and water were delivered to the ship for the hungry, thirsty men, most of whom got busy cleaning, caulking and refitting the vessel. Then Cook ordered that John Thurman, who had been pressed into service in Madeira after the drowning of Alexander Weir, receive twelve lashes for refusing to assist the sailmaker with his repairs.²³

Cook tried to land some punishing blows in what he called a ‘Paper War’ with the viceroy, but was instead told that the Endeavour was free to get out of Rio any time the captain liked.

Banks was ropeable over being stuck on board when everything he and Solander ‘so ardently wishd to examine’ was in their sight, and they ‘could almost but not quite touch them’ like ‘the torments of the damnd’.²⁴ All the time a guard boat, rowed by indigenous men of ‘a light copper colour with long lank black hair’, circled the Endeavour to make sure there was no contact with the shore.²⁵

Banks told Cook that the Portuguese dolt running the show in Rio didn’t know who he was dealing with. The young naturalist banged off a volley of ink, telling the viceroy that he was very rich and that part of the expedition was under his ‘direction’: ‘Disagreable as it is for any man to declare his own rank and consequence my situation makes it necessary: I am a gentleman, and one of fortune sufficient to have (at my own expence) fitted out that part of this expedition under my direction; which is intended to examine the natural history of the Countries where we shall touch . . .’²⁶ Banks demanded ‘Leave to go on shore’ with ‘the proper people, who may assist me in Collecting, and examining, such trees, shrubs, Plants, Birds, beasts, fishes, and insects . . .’²⁷ The viceroy wasn’t so much interested in Banks’s pursuit of the birds and the bees – or the plants and the trees, for that matter – and let it be known that this ‘gentleman, and one of fortune’ at that, was to stay right where he was.

Banks could only look on at the natural wonders and the city across the water. He later learnt that ‘the inhabitants here are very numerous, they consist of Portugese, negroes, and Indians aborigines of the countrey. The township of Rio . . . is said to contain 37,000 whites and about 17 negroes to each white, which makes their numbers 629,000.’²⁸ The wealth of Rio came from mines situated far into the hinterland on carefully concealed roads patrolled by soldiers: ‘. . . every body who is found on the road without being able to give a good account of himself is hangd immediately. From these mines a great quantity of gold certainly comes but it is purchasd at a vast expence of lives; 40,000 negroes are annualy imported . . . for this purpose, and notwithstanding that the year before last they dyed so fast that 20,000 more were obligd to be draughted from the town of Rio.’²⁹

Lieutenant Gore discovered that the Portuguese suspected the Endeavour was ‘a Trading Spy and that Mr Banks and the Doctor are both Supercargoes and Engineers and not naturalists’.³⁰ Gore suggested that since the British men had obtained a sufficient knowledge of the river and harbour,³¹ it could be time for some of them to take a trip to shore in disguise. On 22 November, nine days after the Endeavour’s arrival, Banks sent one of his servants ‘ashore at day break who stayd till dark night and brought off many plants and insects’.

Everyone on the Endeavour was mortified when a Spanish packet – a small brig – from Buenos Aires arrived in Rio on its way to Spain and met with what Cook called a ‘very Different Treatment from us. No Guard was put over her, and her Officers and Crew went wherever they pleased.’³²

Banks upped the ante on the twenty-fourth and sent more servants ashore, including the bashful but mischievous Parkinson. Then Solander made a secret excursion disguised as the ship’s surgeon.³³ The little Swede wrote that ‘this Place abounds with variety of Fish; we have been able to pick up from the Markets above fourty or fifty Species not before described. Our few botanical Collections have been made by clandestinely hiring people; and we have got them on board under the name of Greens for our Table.’³⁴

On the twenty-sixth Banks stole into the Brazilian countryside, forcing his large frame through the cabin window at midnight, letting himself down a rope into a boat and drifting away with the tide until he was out of the sentinels’ hearing; he then rowed as quietly as he could to an unfrequented part of the shore.³⁵ When he reached an astonishing wonderland bursting with the viceroy’s forbidden fruit, he proudly declared, ‘The countrey where I saw it abounded with vast variety of Plants and animals, mostly such as have not been describd by our naturalists as so few have had an opportunity of coming here . . .’³⁶

The ‘parasitick plants’ were stunning, ‘especialy renealmias’, and he was amazed by the bromeliads, ‘many not before describd’. He saw Bromelia karatas growing on ‘the decayd trunk of a tree 50 feet high at least, which it had so intirely coverd that the whole seemd to be a tree of Karratas’.³⁷ The whole countryside was alive with spectacular blossoms of passion flowers, poinciana, mimosa and clutia. The wildest places were blessed with flowers in a greater quantity and more beautiful than in the most immaculate English gardens.

Banks also admired the ‘birds of many species especialy the smaller ones sat in great abundance’ on the boughs, many of them covered with ‘most Elegant plumage’. He saw several specimens of crossbill and shot one to take home. Insects were also in great abundance and ‘more Nimble than our Europeans especialy the Butterflies, which almost all flew near the topps of the trees and were very difficult to come at’. He tried to shoot a hummingbird but had to be content with taking a nest.³⁸

The harbour’s sides were covered with small crabs, and the sparse grassland was given over to lean cattle. He saw small garden patches of cabbages, peas, beans, kidney beans, turnips, white radishes, pumpkins, watermelons and pineapples. The melons were sweet and juicy, but the pineapples not a patch on those he had tasted in Europe. He learnt that the locals grew yams and cassava for starch because they could not raise corn for bread.³⁹

Banks later wrote to William Perrin about his clandestine visit and the wild streak he had shown since they were at Eton together. ‘You know that I am a man of adventure,’ he said, ‘& as I scapd hanging in England have now taken it for granted that I am born for a different [end] in pursuance of this opinion I have venturd ashore once evading a boat load of Soldiers who look after us & found such things as well repaid my risk.’⁴⁰

The very next day, though, this ‘man of adventure’ heard that the viceroy was sending out armed search parties for suspected Endeavour breakaways, so he and Solander cooled their heels in the great cabin.⁴¹

Cook’s mood was dark. He had ‘Robert Anderson, Seaman, and William Judge, Marine’ flogged with ‘12 Lashes Each, the former for leaving his Duty ashore and attempting to desert from the Ship, and the latter for using abusive language to the Officer of the Watch’. Then he had ‘John Reading, Boatswain’s Mate’ given twelve lashes, too, ‘for not doing his Duty in punishing the above two Men’.⁴²

Cook noted that ‘Peter Flower, Seaman, fell overboard, and before any Assistance could be given him was drowned’.⁴³ There is no emotion in the note. Cook was all business with his journal for the Admiralty, but he must have felt the loss gravely as Flower had sailed with him for years in Canada.

While Buchan made a pencil sketch of a ‘View of Rio de Janeiro from the anchoring place’,⁴⁴ Parkinson concentrated on Banks’s surreptitious plant haul, making exquisite renditions of the bougainvillea and orchids.

Finally, on 2 December 1768, having given some letters for friends back home to a sea captain heading for Spain, Banks wrote ‘thank God’ as Cook set sail from Rio. The Endeavour crew continued on towards their appointment with the transit of Venus. Cook, with Banks as his ally, had negotiated the dangerous straits of international diplomacy without any lasting damage. Still, a guard boat trailed them, and the fort at Santa Cruz fired two shots over the Endeavour’s bow as they left, one just clearing their mast. Banks was aghast at ‘such extraordinary behavior’, and the Portuguese later said it had been a bureaucratic bungle.⁴⁵

COOK PRODUCED COPIOUS notes on Rio and its military defences.⁴⁶ Once the cannonballs stopped flying, Banks was amazed that the air became ‘crowded in an uncommon manner with Butterflies’,⁴⁷ thousands of them. Two days later he rejoiced when his ‘enemy the guard boat went off, so we were left our own masters’.

Making up for lost time, Cook let everyone disembark at Ilha Rasa. Banks and his team stayed until 4 p.m., gathering as many species of plant and insect as they could until they were ‘heartily tired, for the desire of doing as much as we could in a short time had made us all exert ourselves in a particular manner tho exposd to the hottest rays of the sun’.⁴⁸

Four days later, Banks wrote, ‘This morn took a shark who cast up his stomack when hookd or at least appears so to do, it proves to be a female and on being opend 6 young ones were taken out of her, five of which were alive and swam briskly in a tub of water . . .’⁴⁹ As the Endeavour sailed south towards Rio de la Plata, he saw a pod of killer whales, some ‘4 yards long, their heads quite round but their hinder parts compressd’.⁵⁰

Two days before Christmas, Banks shot an albatross, ignoring the superstition that this would bring bad luck. Sailors often used the cured breasts of such birds for earmuffs, while the beaks became paperclips, the webbed feet tobacco pouches, and the wing bones pipe stems. This albatross measured nine feet one inch across its wingspan,⁵¹ and Banks later provided a recipe for cooking the giant birds, as the men preferred their flesh to fresh pork: ‘The way of dressing [albatross] is thus: Skin them overnight and soak their carcases in Salt water till morn, then parboil them and throw away the water, then stew them well with very little water and when sufficiently tender serve them up with Savoury sauce.’⁵²

On Christmas Day, with the Endeavour 1850 kilometres from Rio and about 2200 from Cape Horn, Cook allowed the crew to get ‘abominably drunk’. Banks noted there was ‘scarce a sober man in the ship . . . wind thank god very moderate or the lord knows what would have become of us’.⁵³

The appearance of sea lions,⁵⁴ small shoals of red lobsters and ‘many whales about the ship’ ushered in the new year as the men of the Endeavour all talked about their dreams for 1769. Under black clouds the sea turned a greenish aquamarine,⁵⁵ but it grew lighter the further south they sailed.⁵⁶ As they neared the Falkland Islands, the weather became bitterly cold even for the penguins and seals they sighted. Cook gave each man a thick woollen ‘Fearnought Jacket and a pair of Trowsers’,⁵⁷ and Banks donned a ‘flannel Jacket and waistcoat and thick trousers’.

The evening of 6 January brought a hard gale. The bureau in Banks’s cabin toppled over and sent all his books across the floor, as the men in the cots below bounced around and banged into each other all through that dark and stormy night. Worse, the weather meant that Cook had to bypass the Falklands, and Banks rued a missed opportunity to study the plants and animals living alongside the small garrison and other hardy souls shuddering against the Antarctic winds.⁵⁸

Only a few months earlier, Banks had decried the Endeavour as a ‘heavy sailer’, but now he was saying, ‘The ship during this gale has shewn her excellence in laying too remarkably well . . . shipping scarce any water tho it blew at times vastly strong; the seamen in general say that they never knew a ship lay too so well as this does, so lively and at the same time so easy.’⁵⁹ In fact, the crew told him that ‘the Loosnen in the Joints’⁶⁰ had improved the ship’s performance no end, so that she seemed to glide like the seals that were ‘leaping out of the water and diving instantly so that a person unusd to them might easily be deceivd and take them for fish’.⁶¹

In the early light of dawn, Banks sighted the Land of Fire, Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago with narrow clefts and deep chasms off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland. He wrote, ‘. . . we could see trees distinctly through our glasses and observe several smokes made probably by the natives as a signal to us. The captain now resolved to put in here if he can find a conv[en]ient harbour and give us an opportunity of searching a countrey so intirely new.’⁶²

Banks thought nearby Staten Island ‘more craggy than Terra del Fuego’ and said the illustration in his copy of the book about Anson’s voyage was ‘exaggerated’.⁶³ Anson had passed this confronting landscape twenty-eight years earlier on a voyage during which two-thirds of his scurvy-ravaged crew died. Here they had experienced cataclysmic weather as the screaming wind devoured sailors in its icy teeth and literally blew ships apart.

Parkinson, the sad-eyed Quaker, said the surrounding rocks and ‘tremendous precipices, covered with snow and uninhabited’ formed ‘one of those natural views which human nature can scarce behold without shuddering’.⁶⁴ The view was awe-inspiring, as he noted, ‘How amazingly diversified are the works of the Deity . . . the more we investigate, the more we ought to admire the power, wisdom, and goodness, the Great Superintendent of the universe; which attributes are amply displayed throughout all his works . . .’⁶⁵

It took three days and three attempts in foul weather and powerful tides before Cook could safely negotiate Le Maire Strait between Tierra del Fuego and Staten Island, and with the cold sea rolling about he provided an officer and boat for Banks and his team who were ‘very desirous of being on shore . . .’⁶⁶ While the Endeavour was anchored in Port Maurice, Banks and Solander spent four hours foraging, collecting about a hundred plants; of these, Banks announced, ‘I may say every one was new and intirely different from what either of us had before seen.’⁶⁷

Alexander Buchan painted a haunting scene of the tiny Endeavour in lonely silhouette upon the vast sea, with the formidable green and brown of the southern tip of South America as her backdrop.⁶⁸

The next day as Cook anchored in the Bay of Good Success, several indigenous people – of ‘a reddish Colour nearly resembling that of rusty iron mixd with oil’⁶⁹ – were in sight near the shore. After dinner Banks and Solander went to meet them with about ten others from the ship, but the indigenous people were scared off. Banks and Solander decided to walk ahead of the rest by a hundred yards, and they were received ‘with many uncouth signs of freindship’. When the two British men distributed beads and ribbons, the indigenous people ‘seem’d mightily pleasd, so much so that when we embarkd again aboard our boat three of them came with us and went aboard the ship. Of these one seemd to be a Preist or conjuror or at least we thought him to be one by the noises he made, possibly exorcising every part of the ship he came into, for when any thing new caught his attention he shouted as loud as he could for some minutes without directing his speech either to us or to any one of his countreymen.’⁷⁰

Banks could be overzealous in his pursuits. On 16 January, underprepared and ill-equipped in an unfamiliar environment, he led Solander, Dr Munkhouse and the astronomer Green, as well as servants and sailors to carry the bags, on a mission to climb a nearby peak. Banks’s greyhound trotted along too. ‘The weather had all this time been vastly fine much like a sunshiny day in May,’ Banks wrote, ‘so that neither heat nor cold was troublesome to us nor were there any insects to molest us . . .’⁷¹ Two-thirds of the way into the journey, he learnt that the weather could change rapidly, and the stress of the hike hit the epileptic Buchan, who had been desperately ill earlier in the voyage with a bowel complaint and now had a fit.⁷² A fire was immediately lit for him, and those who were most tired remained with him, while Banks, Solander, Green and Munkhouse pushed on higher. The air suddenly became much colder, and they faced frequent snow blasts. Banks gave up thoughts of reaching the ship that night, and Green and Munkhouse returned to the others downhill.

It was nearly 8 p.m. While the sun still shone brightly, the cold now ‘increased apace’, causing ‘an effect infinitely beyond’ what Banks had ever experienced. Solander said he could go no further and lay down on the ground although it was covered with snow. Thomas Richmond, one of Banks’s black servants, said he could not go on either, and the other black servant, George Dorlton, was struggling. Banks told Buchan to go back towards the shore with some of the others and to make a fire where they could.

Banks managed to push Solander and Richmond on, but then Richmond collapsed. Banks told him ‘that if he did not [continue] he must be Froze to death’, and Richmond ‘only answered that there he would lay and dye’.⁷³ Dorlton elected to stay with his fellow servant. Banks left a sailor and his greyhound with the two black men, promising to send help.⁷⁴ He and a sailor then carried Solander on their shoulders down to the fire⁷⁵ that the others had lit for Buchan about four hundred metres further on. As soon as two of the men were sufficiently warmed, Banks sent them out to bring the others down to safety. He later wrote, ‘after staying about half an hour they returnd bringing word that they had been all round the place shouting and hallowing but could not get any answer. We now guess’d the cause of the mischeif, a bottle of rum the whole of our stock was missing, and we soon concluded that it was in one of their Knapsacks and that the two who were left in health had drank immoderately of it and had slept like the other.’⁷⁶

For two hours it snowed almost incessantly, so there was little hope for Richmond, Dorlton or the sailor. Banks and the others walked around all night by the fire fearing they would otherwise fall asleep and freeze to death.⁷⁷ At midnight, to Banks’s ‘great Joy’, ‘we heard a shouting, on which myself and 4 more went out immediately’ and found the sailor. Banks set the man by the fire and proceeded into the snow with help to find the other two. Richmond was standing up but unable to walk, while Dorlton lay on the ground, frozen and ‘as insensible as a stone’. The driving snow meant Banks and his helpers could not start a fire to warm the two men, ‘so we were forc’d to content ourselves with laying out our unfortunate companions upon a bed of boughs and covering them over with boughs also as thick as we were able, and thus we left them hopeless of ever seeing them again alive which indeed we never did’.⁷⁸ The next morning, the two were found frozen to death. The greyhound was still alive and reluctant to leave them behind.⁷⁹

Banks feared everyone on the expedition would eventually die. The survivors had nothing to eat but ‘one vulture which had been shot while we were out’; it was divided into ten small pieces,⁸⁰ allowing them to tramp for three hours. When they finally made it to the beach and saw the Endeavour in the distance, ‘[with] what pleasure then did we congratulate each other on our safety no one can tell who has not been in such circumstances’.⁸¹

The ship’s master, hard-drinking Robert Molyneux, noted of the two deaths: ‘This was a heavy loss to Mr Banks as they were both useful . . . However he had the Satisfaction in his late Excursion to make a Valuable Collection of Alpine & other Plants Hitherto unknown in Natural History.’⁸²

Banks had shown that he was up for any sort of adventure, reckless as it might be. But his shipmates were still astounded when on the day of his salvation from an icy death and ‘the Uncertainty of the Weather’,⁸³ he asked for a boat so he could fish some more with a net.

Two subsequent days of confinement on the Endeavour, due to the horrific winds and snow, made Banks and ‘the Dr’ ready to ‘venture any risk’.⁸⁴ At the first opportunity they were back on the snowbound South American rocks, collecting shells, limpets and whelks, and then, regardless of what welcome might await them, searching for the local people again.

Banks and his team tramped for an hour along a slushy path to find fifty or so people living in a dozen ‘huts or wigwams of the most unartificial construction imaginable, indeed no thing bearing the name of a hut could possibly be built with less trouble’.⁸⁵ There was no furniture, just ‘very little dry grass’ on which to sit and sleep.

The indigenous people were not tall relative to the British; in fact, Banks never saw one of their women taller than five feet. Their straight black hair hung over their foreheads, and both men and women wore necklaces,⁸⁶ along with sealskin cloaks thrown loosely over their shoulders and reaching nearly to their knees. A few wore shoes of ‘raw seal hide drawn loosely round their instep like a purse’. The women tied their cloaks round their middle ‘with a kind of belt or thong and a small flap of leather hanging like Eve’s fig leaf over those parts which nature teaches them to hide’. But in Banks’s view, nature seemed to have omitted the lesson to the men ‘for they continualy expose those parts to the view of strangers’.⁸⁷

As Parkinson prepared to sketch these people, who had had few dealings with Europeans, Banks found their language guttural, ‘especialy in some particular words which they seem to express much as an Englishman when he hawks to clear his throat’.

Both men and women painted their faces with seal fat and charcoal, generally in horizontal lines just under their eyes; some whitened the whole region of their eyes. They ate limpets that the women collected from the rocks, and seals that the men hunted with bows and arrows. They drank water communally from an animal’s bladder hanging in the corner of a hut. But despite their lack of European material comforts, Banks noted that ‘to all appearance’ they were ‘contented with what they had nor wishing for any thing we could give them except beads; of these they were very fond preferring ornamental things to those which might be of real use and giving more in exchange for a string of Beids than they would for a knife or a hatchet’.⁸⁸

Banks collected ‘a kind of watercress [cardamine] and a kind of parcley [apium]’,⁸⁹ which were used in soups to fight scurvy. The following day he gave some of the local people a tour of the Endeavour and a meal of bread and beef; they found the food satisfactory but turned their noses up at his rum and brandy, saying it burnt their throats.⁹⁰

THE WIND TURNED IN Cook’s favour, and he set sail again. Two of Banks’s team were dead, and though he was saddened by the loss he was still content, ‘our keeping boxes being full of new plants’, and Parkinson and Buchan were hard at work drawing them in all but the wildest weather.⁹¹

By 25 January 1769 the ship was off the coast of Cape Horn, rounding the tip of South America, but it was too foggy for anyone to see distinguishing landmarks.⁹² Cook followed the Admiralty’s orders to ‘stand well to the Southward in your passage round the Cape’, and he kept the Endeavour on a south-westerly course through the showers of rain and hail⁹³ far away from land, lest there be any rocky surprises.

A Man, Woman & Child, Natives of Tierra del Fuego, in the Dress of that Country. Line engraving based on a sketch by Sydney Parkinson. Library of Congress

By the end of January the Endeavour was in the Southern Ocean at sixty degrees latitude – and, without Cook knowing it, 450 kilometres north of an icebound continent that would be called Antarctica. Cook set a course into the South Pacific for Tahiti seven thousand kilometres to the north-west in a body of water that covered a third of the globe. Soon he would comply again with the Admiralty’s order to ‘fall into the parallel’ of Tahiti, following the latitude of the island west so he would ‘arrive there at least a month or six Weeks before the third day of June . . .’⁹⁴ in time for the transit of Venus. Only about a dozen vessels had sailed a similar course, and there were no reliable British maps marking islands or dangerous reefs. Out in this space, there was no help if anything went wrong.

ON 1 FEBRUARY, Cook noted that ‘the weather was such as to admit Mr. Banks to row round the Ship in a Lighterman’s Skiff shooting birds’,⁹⁵ but before long the captain used every inch of sail he could to catch the wind and make a dash for the transit. Banks came down with a ‘bilious attack which quite slight alarmed [him]’, though he was soon well enough to eat some more albatross that he had shot.⁹⁶ Still, the great swell coming from the Southern Ocean caused him to write two weeks later: ‘During all last night the ship has pitchd very much so that there has been no sleeping for land men.’⁹⁷ By the twenty-fourth he was delighted to note ‘this morn found studding Sails set and the ship going at the rate of 7 knotts, no very usual thing with Mrs Endeavour’.⁹⁸

By the end of the month, killer whales were escorting them into climes so much warmer⁹⁹ that Banks could dispense with his under waistcoat.¹⁰⁰ He collected the floating carcass of a cuttlefish, which birds had pecked to pieces, and had it turned into one of the best soups he had ever tasted.¹⁰¹ By mid-March, Banks reported seeing ‘a tropick bird for the first time hovering over the ship but flying very high . . . the long feathers of his tail red and his crissum black’.¹⁰² Soon there were ‘many tropick birds’ about the ship,¹⁰³ along with Pacific sharks.

He was gratified that land had not yet been sighted, as this seemed to disprove the many theories since the time of Aristotle that there should be a vast Terra Australis Incognita out here to counterbalance the land mass of Europe and Asia. He felt ‘some pleasure’ to prove as a fallacy ‘that which does not exist but in the opinions of Theoretical writers’, most of whom had never been in ‘these seas’.¹⁰⁴ While much of the Pacific was one endless ocean Banks knew that New Holland existed to the west but he also suspected there was another giant landmass to the south where no person had been before.

THE DRINKING WATER that Cook had collected in Tierra del Fuego was still ‘as brisk and pleasant as when first taken on board, or better, for the red colour it had at first is subsided and it is now as clear as any English spring water’.¹⁰⁵ But Banks was feeling poorly: his throat was inflamed, and his glands were swollen.¹⁰⁶ His gums started swelling, and he developed pimples in his mouth. Despite eating the ‘sower crout’ and drinking a pint of wort every day, he feared scurvy, so he reached for Dr Hulme’s concentrated lemon juice and brandy concoction.

There was a tragedy on board, perhaps the result of a mind addled by the disease, despite Cook’s insistence on a strict diet. A young marine, William Greenslade, threw himself overboard because of a matter Banks called ‘trifling’ but which showed ‘the powerfull effects that shame can work upon young minds’.¹⁰⁷ Greenslade had been sentry at the great cabin door, where one of the captain’s servants left him minding a piece of sealskin that was going to be cut into tobacco pouches for some of the men. The young fellow had asked for a pouch several times and been refused, so he pocketed the skin for himself. Banks said Greenslade’s comrades drove ‘the young fellow almost mad by representing his crime in the blackest colours as a breach of trust of the worst consequence’.¹⁰⁸ The marine sergeant, John Edgcumbe,¹⁰⁹ was taking Greenslade to Cook as a disciplinary measure when the youngster suddenly made a run for it and dived to his death.

Banks’s health improved, and was helped no end when Peter Briscoe shouted on 4 April 1769 that he saw land about three kilometres in length. It was what the British then called Lagoon Island, now Vahitahi. Cook took the Endeavour to within 1500 metres of the island, and through his spyglass telescope Banks counted twenty-four inhabitants, tall with ‘very large heads or possibly much hair upon them’. Eleven of them walked along the shore, each with a pole or pike, and ‘every one of them stark naked and appearing of a brown copper colour’.¹¹⁰

Cook continued past dozens of islands in the Tuamoto archipelago, each looking like a tropical paradise to the men on the Endeavour. The skipper saw no reason to attempt to meet the locals, since a conflict would have meant bloodshed and some of these island people being ‘destroyed’ simply for the ‘desire of satisfying a useless curiosity’.¹¹¹

Tahiti was the prize, and on 11 April 1769 Banks at last saw it. Clouds covered the hilltops so he could not yet drink in the full beauty of the place, but he rejoiced that he was on the ‘brink of going ashore after a long passage thank god in as good health as man can be’.¹¹²

Many of the crew were no doubt recalling stories of George Robertson, master on the Dolphin, who had visited Tahiti two years before and written, ‘All the sailors swore that they never saw handsomer made women in their lives and declard that they would to a man, live on two thirds allowance, rather than lose so fine an opportunity of getting a Girl apiece.’¹¹³ The Tahitians relied on stone axes and adzes for their work and weapons, and the crew of the Dolphin discovered that such was the desire of these people for any old iron that the women would readily exchange sex for metal. Soon, the Dolphin’s crewmen were even pulling nails from the hull in order to buy their pleasure.

Sydney Parkinson, on first sight of Tahiti, said the landscape was as uneven as a ‘crumpled piece of paper’ with its soaring mountains and deep valleys, but that ‘a beautiful verdure covered both, even to the tops of the highest peaks’.¹¹⁴ The scene before the British men as they approached the island was like an artist’s palette: the deep blue sea, turquoise lagoons, white surf against black sandy beaches, and lustrous green of the coastal palm trees gave way to a hinterland that beckoned with plants no European had studied closely before.

Banks had been cooped up with more than ninety men for weeks. As he gazed longingly at the spectacular vista, he must have had a feeling that Tahiti would provide every sensual delight he could imagine.