Chapter 17

25 SEPTEMBER 1772, HEKLA, A SNOW-COVERED VOLCANO IN THE SOUTH OF ICELAND

Many are the mountains which have occasionaly vomited up fire but in this land of emptiness, it has often hapnd that the level ground has opend itself into a crater, & thrown out water, stones, Lava &c. over all the adjacent countrey.

BANKS AFTER CLIMBING THE ‘GATEWAY TO HELL’ IN ICELAND¹

FOR THIRTEEN HOURS Banks had pushed himself against a vicious, freezing wind that kept hitting him hard in the face. The deaths of his two servants in similar weather near Cape Horn were fresh in his memory as he fought on, the wind roaring at him so violently that it was hard to make any progress. Breath escaped him like smoke, and he and his companions were all covered in a thin film of ice so that their clothes resembled the stiffened fabric called buckram. Steam rose from some of the rocks, though, and here and there as Banks’s climbing party pressed on, patches of snow were melted.

Banks had withdrawn from Captain Cook’s voyage to the South Pole, but he was not usually one to let an opportunity pass him by. Four months earlier, his men had still been carrying his firearms off the Resolution when he realised he had shot himself in the foot – even he had to admit that he had more money than sense. As he forlornly left the dock in Sheerness, he also realised that not only would his extremely disappointed cross-dressing friend wait for him in vain, but he had rejected the opportunity of a lifetime as well.

He had squandered an opportunity to revisit Africa. On Banks’s recommendation, the King had sent one of his Kew gardeners, Francis Masson,² to South Africa, travelling there on the Resolution with Cook. Masson would soon be disembarking at the Cape to send more than five hundred different plant specimens back to England.

Banks had also denied a wondrous chance for adventure to all of the employees he had contracted, and he had ripped three years of wages from their grasp when most of them needed the money. The staff he had assembled represented ‘a considerable running expence’, he wrote, ‘[so] I thought it prudent to employ them in some way or other to the advancement of Science, a voyage of some kind or other I wishd to undertake . . .’³ He hoped that, given his celebrity, the East India Company might provide a ship for an important voyage of discovery. In the meantime, though, volcanoes were a hot topic among naturalists of the day, and Banks said he saw ‘no place at all within the compass of my time so likely to furnish me with an opportunity as Iceland . . . the whole face of the countrey new to the Botanist and Zoologist as well as the many Volcanoes with which it is said to abound made it very desirable to explore it’.⁴

Despite the fact that Iceland was comparatively close to London, it was still largely untapped by scientific study, with the attraction to adventurers such as Banks of both danger and mystery. His friend Sir William Hamilton,⁵ a fellow of the Royal Society, was an expert on vulcanology, and J. G. König,⁶ a botanist who had studied under Linnaeus at the same time as Solander, had spent a year there collecting plants. Solander may have initially raised the prospect of a voyage there to Banks, who was likely talking about it before jumping off the Resolution, because Cook had wished him well in all his ‘exploring undertakens’.⁷

Even when Sandwich prepared his rebuttal to Banks against the feared letter to the newspaper, his lordship had signed off by telling his young friend,

on 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, but I would advise you in order to insure that success to fit out a ship yourself; that and only that can give you the absolute command of the whole Expedition; 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.⁸

Now Banks saw his chance to run his own expedition. He still had hopes that he would visit the South Seas again, and he wanted to demonstrate to the public that despite the trouble over the Resolution he had no ‘disinclination to undertake voyages’.⁹ This expedition would be the first to Iceland by British naturalists, and having seen ‘islands of ice’ off the coast of Canada, Banks was relishing the prospect of walking on mountains of fire.

He spent much of June making preparations for the trip. He could not find anyone in London who had been to Iceland, but Claus Heide, a Dane living in the city, gave him information from books. Iceland was under Danish rule at the time, and the Danish ambassador issued passports to Banks and his staff on 2 July, the same day that the naturalist hired the 190-ton brig Sir Lawrence, with Captain James Hunter and a crew of twelve, at £100 a month from 11 July to 4 December.

Banks had retained all his staff except Zoffany, who had gone to Florence to copy paintings for the Grand Duke, taking a letter of recommendation from King George. Banks gave him a parting gift of £300. Horace Walpole, the British writer and politician, reckoned Zoffany was more suited to comic paintings than landscapes anyway, and a well-paying job in a Florentine palace was better than ‘going to draw naked savages and be scalped with that wild man Banks’.¹⁰

The Endeavour’s Lieutenant John Gore, the first kangaroo shooter in history, joined Banks’s expedition, and so did Uno von Troil,¹¹ a Swedish antiquarian and scientist who met Banks in London and went on to become Archbishop of Uppsala. Banks wrote that von Troil had made the ‘Islandich language his study’.¹² There was also midshipman John Riddel, ‘a young Gentleman intended for the sea’; Antoine Douvez, a French cook; ‘Mr Moreland (a Gardiner)’; and Alexander Scot, a servant.¹³

Dr James Lind, who was not in the best financial shape, had been the government’s astronomer for the Resolution with a grant of £4000 but had thrown it in out of loyalty to Banks. He later told the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne that he would only go on another major voyage for the government if ‘my friend Mr Banks goes’.¹⁴ Banks was a generous soul; according to Lind, the naturalist said that he had ‘a good estate’ that he ‘looked on as belonging to his friends as well as himself, that he held me as one of them and begged me to command my share of it. Whenever I wished it, a sum equal to £4000 he looked on as belonging to me.’¹⁵ Banks inhabited a different financial world to Lind; despite their friendship and the Scottish doctor’s professional standing, Banks remarked that Lind was ‘a man accustomed to Obedience & well acquainted with the Station of an inferior.’¹⁶

ON 12 JULY THE SIR LAWRENCE left Gravesend late at night, carrying Banks and his crew past Lord Sandwich’s yacht Augusta the next morning as Cook was leaving Plymouth on the Resolution. The fresh winds early in the voyage made Banks seasick, but it was nothing that he hadn’t endured before.

James Roberts, his globetrotting servant, kept a journal that Banks may have overseen – as, writing in the introduction, Roberts remarked, ‘The enterprising Genius of Mr. Banks is not confined to trifling remarks or useless discoveries, his Philosophical researches were intended to improve the mind and as far as possible become a universal Benifit by observing and explaining the wonderful works of Nature in all her various Elements and productions.’¹⁷

The Sir Lawrence sailed past Deal to Dover, and from 20 July anchored at Cowes on the Isle of Wight for two days. Banks then spent another two days at Plymouth. After the brig was mistaken for a smuggling vessel by fishermen keen to buy contraband near Falmouth on 27 July,¹⁸ they hit more bad weather, ruining Banks’s hopes of seeing the many towering basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway on the northern coast of Ireland.

From 1 to 9 August the ship anchored on the island of Islay as Banks set about dining on mutton and pudding, and seeing as much as he could on this windswept Queen of the Hebrides. He found the locals poor but happy, with an adventurous spirit and a hospitable nature that he felt was lacking in much of England.¹⁹ It was late in the season, but he found what plants he could and had his artists sketch the local ruins. He studied the geology of a lead mine and the surrounding limestone. He heard ‘a very pompous account’ of a supposedly spectacular cave near Laggan and was disappointed to find it was instead ‘a dirty nasty hollow in a rock’.²⁰ On 6 August he visited the nearby island of Jura in thick fog, unable to find alpine plants but shooting two partridges to compare them with mainland birds.

Later in his stay, he and some of the team took a cutter to admire the ruins of a monastery on Oronsay. He had hoped to see the legendary whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan between Jura and Scarba, but the tides were low on the ninth, and the water speed so unremarkable that it would not have ‘endangered the smallest wherry that ever swam’.²¹

The men dined on gulls that Banks had shot, then the brig sailed on through the Sound of Mull, past the imposing ‘Castle Duart . . . the last of the line of forts intended in case of rebellion to cut off the highlands from the Lowlands’.²² The stunning seascapes brought to mind the legends of the mythological hero Fingal and the ‘romantick scenery of Ossian’ from the epic poems of James Macpherson. The Sir Lawrence steered Banks into a rare patch of purple prose as he ‘found sweet affection of the mind, which can gather pleasures from the Empty Elements’.²³

The ship anchored off Morven on the mainland side of the Sound of Mull, and the men ate dinner as guests of Allan Maclean of Drumnen House.²⁴ They were joined by Maclean’s friend Leach, an Englishman who told Banks of an astonishing cave on the tiny island of Staffa, off the west coast of Mull, with ‘pillars like those of the Giant’s Causeway’. Its remote location meant that probably ‘no one even in the highlands’ had seen it.²⁵ Banks and some of his team left the following afternoon in the ship’s yawl and landed at Staffa in the dark eight hours later. They arrived at the only house on the island, pitched their tent next to it and cooked a dinner of ‘Glass Eye’ fish and potatoes over a peat stove. Some of the men slept in the tent, but Solander slept in the small house and complained it gave him lice.²⁶

The next morning, on the south-western corner of the island, Banks gasped in delight at a sea cave almost eighty metres deep, surrounded by hexagonal basalt pillars like organ pipes stretching out of the sea almost twenty metres to the sky, ‘a scene of magnificence which exceeded our expectations’.²⁷ Banks named it Fingal’s Cave, supposing it to be the most sublime ‘that has Ever been described by a traveller’.²⁸ Gazing upon the cave’s immense natural grandeur and the green water flowing deep beneath it, he wrote, ‘Compared to this, what are the Cathedrals or palaces built by man? . . . How amply does nature repay those who study her wonderfull works.’²⁹

The island of Staffa belonged to an impoverished clan chief, Lauchlan MacQuarrie,³⁰ whose young relative Lachlan Macquarie³¹ would one day become governor of the land that Cook had named New South Wales. When Banks visited Staffa, the future governor was a barefoot farm boy from the tiny adjacent island of Ulva. Years later Banks would write to the governor telling him that he would never forget the old chieftain’s hospitalities and kindnesses to a stranger when he visited Staffa.³²

While the Sir Lawrence waited to collect Banks at Tobermory on the northern tip of Mull, he took his team through the rain to the island of Iona, then went stag hunting with Maclean on Oronsay on the fifteenth. Banks had hoped to visit the St Kilda archipelago, but bad weather forced him to press on north towards the mountains of fire.

BANKS FIRST SAW THE coast of Iceland on 25 August 1772, and the Sir Lawrence encountered fishing boats there on the morning of the twenty-eighth. The boats sped off at the sight of an English vessel, their crews believing that war must have broken out with Denmark, but Solander eventually spoke to one of the fishermen in their common tongue of Norwegian, and the local man piloted the ship into Hafnarfjorour, about ten kilometres south of Reykjavík. At 4 p.m. on the twenty-ninth, Banks arrived ‘upon a country rougher & more rugged than imagination can easily conceive’.³³

‘We seemed here to be in another world’, von Troil lamented; ‘we now only saw the horrid remains of many devastations.’ Under Denmark’s ‘rod of iron’,³⁴ the Icelanders were skint: victims of bad politics, famine and all that ice, which according to von Troil caused ‘so violent a cold in 1753 and 1754, that horses and sheep dropped down dead . . . horses were observed to feed upon dead cattle, and the sheep [ate] of each other’s wool’.³⁵ Grit and sand and snow were everywhere; there was very little grass and ‘no wood sufficient to be call’d Trees, the chief being Shrubs of Birch’. ³⁶

No wonder Banks never saw any locals laughing. As recently as four years before his arrival, the volcano Hekla was spewing so much lava that it destroyed land as wide as an English county.³⁷ But he immediately wanted to climb that dangerous mountain, known as the ‘Gateway to Hell’.

He called on the Norwegian-born governor, Lauritz Thodal,³⁸ and was initially mistaken as a servant because he was dressed far more casually than his attendants in their blue coats, scarlet and silver waistcoats, and scarlet breeches.³⁹

Banks was given the use of empty Danish warehouses as his base. He spent the first week in Iceland fishing and botanising, and making notes about two species previously unclassified: Iceland purslane and swamp willow.

On Sunday, 6 September, Governor Thodal and some of his family and staff came to dinner. The two French horn players entertained the dignitaries, and Banks’s chef, Antoine Douvez, turned out his finest fare on his boss’s new Wedgwood Queen’s Ware service. At about 8 p.m., the governor’s servants arrived with sturdy little mountain ponies, and the guests – men and women – galloped away over the rough lava fields.

Later that week, Banks and Solander led a group to see hot springs at Reykjavík, while the artists worked on drawings of local scenes, and Douvez cooked an eagle.

On the Endeavour voyage Banks had shown that he would eat just about anything except human flesh, and he ordered a traditional Icelandic dinner when he dined with Iceland’s surgeon-general Bjarni Palsson,⁴⁰ a fellow naturalist who back in 1750 had made the first ascent on Hekla in conjunction with Eggert Ólafsson.⁴¹ Banks enjoyed the dried fish, sour butter and spirits but turned his nose up at a dessert made from shark and whale meat.

ON 18 SEPTEMBER 1772, in fresh breezes with a few showers, Banks, Solander, Lind, von Troil, Cleveley, Roberts and two of the governor’s servants set out for Hekla, about 250 kilometres away over indifferent tracks. Each man was mounted on horseback, while eleven other horses were loaded with food, liquor (essential for volcano climbing), and a small tent. Each man had two blankets. Roberts boiled fish and mutton in some of the thermal springs they encountered,⁴² though the locals would never cook that way, saying it gave the food the taste of sulphur.

The men reached the hot springs at Haukadalur on 21 September. Water rising from the rocks was boiling, and Banks said that many of the springs built pressure ‘so violently that in the center of them the water was raisd by the agitation of the heat 6 or 7 feet high almost constantly. Others, from the impulse of a power which I confess myself unable to trace, spouted up their water periodicaly to an immense height; particularly that calld Geiser . . . This wonderful volcano of water, if I may use that Expression . . . has continued its eruptions ever since the Island was inhabited about 800 years [ago] . . .’⁴³ Lind calculated the eruption of water from the Great Geysir at ninety-two feet (almost thirty metres), and its name produced a generic word for thermal springs.

View of a mountain, near Hekla with a view of a travelling caravan. A drawing made by John Cleveley Jr, one of three artists who accompanied Banks on his Iceland expedition. Alamy

On 22 September, at Skalholt, Banks was a guest of the local bishop and headmaster, and he listened to tributes to him in Icelandic and Latin. The next day the team crossed the Hvita River by ferry and rode the horses across the Pjorsa. They relaxed after their hard day’s riding in a turf-covered steam bath, then slept in the church of Skaro.

On the twenty-fourth, they set out across a lava field for Hekla, reaching the foot of the mountain that evening. They all had a very short sleep in a very crowded small tent, after drawing lots to see who would get the warmest spot in the middle. Roberts declared the arrangement proved how ‘Amicable our little Society was, and that no distinction was made in regard to Superiority’.⁴⁴

At 1 a.m. on the twenty-fifth, they began their thirteen-hour climb on foot towards the 1500-metre-high summit, unsure when nature might release ‘the combustibles’ below them ‘with all their destroying Violence’.⁴⁵

Halfway up, all their clothes were ‘very damp with the fogs and clouds’⁴⁶ surrounding them. There was some snow, and as they advanced higher the cold became more intense. Balaclavas and goggles were for a later age, so they tied handkerchiefs over their heads and tucked up their hair; some of Roberts’s escaped and froze hard as wire. Often the wind was so fierce that it drove them backwards; sometimes they would all lie down for fear of being blown into craters, and on one occasion Roberts was thrown into one full of cinders, though he emerged unharmed.

Close to the mountaintop, Lind’s thermometer registered seven degrees below freezing in Fahrenheit.⁴⁷ Some of the snow had melted with the volcanic activity beneath, but the water in the team’s bottles remained frozen. Banks thought they had reached the summit, then a cloud parted a little to show a higher peak.

The climb was tough even for a robust young man like Banks, and he left the ageing, portly Solander behind with one of the governor’s men as they finally approached the highest point of Hekla. The air was freezing, but the stones they collected from the ground were so hot that Banks could not hold them. On a patch of rock three metres square that signified the summit, ‘there proceeded so much heat and steam that we could not bear to sit down upon it’.⁴⁸

Their frozen clothes thawed to become wet, heavy and even more uncomfortable, and they left the summit as quickly as they could, the first non-Icelanders to complete the ascent. The next morning Banks observed ‘a great smoke’ arising from the mountain.⁴⁹

THE SIR LAWRENCE LEFT Iceland at 4 a.m. on 8 October after Banks had gathered a remarkable amount of information about the country’s geography, resources, history, customs, laws and potential. He took home as ballast samples of lava and ‘tuff’, the rock made from volcanic ash, which found its way to the Royal Gardens at Kew and the rockery at the Chelsea Physic Garden. He also collected two Icelandic dogs named Hekla and Geysir, made a lifelong friend of the deputy governor Olafur Stephensen, and bought the library of the historian Helfden Einarrson with around 120 books – including copies of the first Icelandic Bible of 1584 – and as many as thirty manuscripts, all of which he presented to the British Museum.

The Sir Lawrence reached Stromness in the Orkney Islands at 3 p.m. on 16 October, and for the next eleven days Banks kept his team busy. He measured the Stones of Stenness, a Neolithic monument with pillars standing more than six metres tall, and at Skara Brae he excavated two Bronze Age burial mounds, with Roberts reporting on one of the tombs: ‘. . . the man was laid with his knees almost up to his Chin, which perhaps was the custom of the times, for without his being Buried in this manner, the place could not have contain’d him, as he must have been about seven feet high in proportion to his thigh bone’.⁵⁰

On 20 October, Banks was honoured with the freedom of the city of Kirkwall, and the Sir Lawrence left Orkney on the morning of the twenty-sixth. It arrived two days later at the port of Leith outside Edinburgh, and the men walked into the city. Banks visited the university and dined once more with James Boswell, thrilling him with stories of his latest adventure.

It was in Edinburgh that he and Solander dined with bug-eyed James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, an eminent if eccentric social theorist who argued that orang-outangs were part of the human race and that some men were born with tails. James Boswell recorded Monboddo asking Solander about the black people of New Holland, ‘Have they tails, Dr Solander?’ The Swede replied, ‘No my Lord, they have not tails.’⁵¹

Banks stayed with the Earl of Hopetoun at the immense Hopetoun House and visited the Carron ironworks where he learnt that his inventive friend Dr John Roebuck,⁵² who had pioneered the industrial-scale manufacture of sulphuric acid, was developing a steam engine with another Scot, James Watt.

Banks had a new visiting card made, engraved with a map of Iceland showing Hekla and the Arctic Circle. His ego, intellect and lust for adventure had been stimulated in an important morale boost for him after the Resolution tantrum; he had now gone much further than any naturalist before, having botanised from virtually the extremities of the known world north and south. The expedition would lead to a bitter fallout with Thomas Pennant after some of the illustrations of Iceland Banks had commissioned were sold to the Welshman for use in his book Arctic Zoology, Banks caustically labelling Pennant ‘an indefatigable searcher after other men’s Observations’.⁵³ Banks had greatly advanced knowledge about the Hebrides and formed links in Iceland that would have great political consequences in coming years. Once again he had weathered many storms, but there were more dark clouds on the horizon.

BANKS RETURNED TO LONDON in December 1772 having travelled overland, but he was hardly back at New Burlington Street when he was making plans to set sail again.

He at last saw the Inuit who had eluded him all the time he was in Labrador and Newfoundland, at Leicester Street of all places, when in January 1773 his friend George Cartwright, the trapper and fur trader, brought a small group of Inuit to London. Large crowds came to look at people seen as novel curiosities. The Inuit at first enjoyed their visit, but it had devastating consequences: all but one, a young woman, succumbed to smallpox. The only survivor took the disease home with her to Labrador, wiping out her whole tribe.⁵⁴

Banks was restless – Solander had been built for desk duty, while Banks was a big, strapping outdoorsman. Just a few weeks after arriving back from Iceland, he was off again.

On 12 February 1773, he left for Holland in a passenger vessel with his friend Charles Greville, the English naval captain John Bentinck, and Bentinck’s son William. Banks wanted to learn as much as he could about the waters of the far north, where the Dutch sent shipping vessels. Daines Barrington was the driving force behind the Royal Society’s support of a voyage to the North Pole, to be led by Constantine Phipps, and Banks wanted to speak to the Dutch about the icy waters of Greenland and beyond.

On 13 February the naturalist and his friends arrived in The Hague, where they were met by their host, the Dutch aristocrat Count Willem Bentinck, Captain Bentinck’s father. Banks later wrote to him with his ‘Thoughts on the manners of Otaheite’.⁵⁵

Banks stayed a week in The Hague. He called on the Prince of Orange to examine his collection of animals and shells, and attended a concert where he found ‘the Musick intolerably indifferent, and stunningly loud’.⁵⁶ He travelled on to Leiden, visiting the zoological collection, the herbarium and the botanical garden at the city’s university. He saw the famous organ at Haarlem, and at Amsterdam, where he watched an opera, he travelled by horse-drawn tram or ‘Track Skoot a most easy cheap and pleasant conveyance’.⁵⁷ Seeing how the Dutch managed flat land that needed constant drainage gave him more ideas on how to work his fens at Revesby.

In Rotterdam, Banks and Greville were inducted into a Society of Literature, but Banks was much more interested in his meeting back at The Hague on 10 March with ‘a Levee of Groenland Captains’ who gave him advice for Phipps’s plan of ‘sailing towards the Pole’.⁵⁸

ON 22 MARCH 1773, Banks returned to London, perhaps still wishing that he was with Cook, who was then at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island.

Banks patched up his differences with Sandwich, and two of the navy’s ‘bomb-vessels’, the Racehorse and the Carcass, were selected for Phipps’s polar voyage. Their hulls already reinforced to withstand mortars during the bombing of a citadel, they were thus thought strong enough to withstand the pressure of ice in the Arctic. Banks sent his old tutor from Oxford, Israel Lyons, on the voyage as the astronomer. He had plans to go as well, telling Thomas Falconer in April that the expedition would ‘penetrate as near to the North Pole as Possible’. ⁵⁹ But in the end Banks stayed in London, and Dr Charles Irving, best known for his work on an apparatus designed to make sea water drinkable, took his place as the naturalist on the voyage.

Eventually Phipps would present Banks with twenty-eight plant and fifty-one animal specimens. While Banks had written to him requesting he bring back a polar bear cub, all the sea captain could manage was the remains of a dead adult one.

Phipps gave the polar bear its current Latin name Ursus maritimus, or ‘sea bear’, in his 1774 account A Voyage Towards the North Pole. He observed that the bears ‘were found in great numbers on the main land of Spitsbergen and also on the islands and ice fields adjacent’. He continued, ‘We killed several with our musquets, and the seamen ate of their flesh, though exceeding coarse.’ He observed that these bears were even bigger than the huge Canadian black bears he and Banks had seen a few years before. One that was shot was more than two metres long and weighed 610 pounds (almost 280 kilograms) ‘without head, skin or entrails’.⁶⁰

On the same voyage, fourteen-year-old Horatio Nelson, serving on the Carcass, decided to kill and skin a polar bear as a present for his father – but his rusty musket misfired. According to the legend, he decided to club it to death with the butt end of his gun, and the reckless future naval commander was saved only by a widening gap in the ice.

The Icelandic journey had sated Banks’s appetite for adventure and instead of going with Phipps towards the North Pole, Banks went on a short botanising tour of Wales with an old friend, Reverend John Lightfoot; a young Scottish doctor, Charles Blagden;⁶¹ and the artist Paul Sandby.⁶²

He was more than content in familiar surroundings and making powerful alliances. While Banks made friends with the King and other royals, he also made enemies who mocked him and wanted to tear him down. He remained the most famous naturalist in Britain but was also earning a reputation as a Lothario. In September 1773, as Constantine Phipps was pushing the Racecourse through ice north of the Seven Islands archipelago off Norway, only to be forced back, Banks was fighting his own battles with the British press.

One of London’s scandal sheets was about to stitch him up, revealing sordid details about his young mistress and their secret love child.