Chapter 18

1773, THE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS AT KEW

As Nature has been his constant study, it cannot be supposed that the most engaging part of it, the fair sex, have escaped his notice; and if we may be suffered to conclude from his amorous descriptions, the females of most countries that he has visited, have undergone every critical inspection by him.

TOWN AND COUNTRY MAGAZINE SPECULATING ON BANKS’S SEX LIFE¹

BANKS WAS STILL ONLY THIRTY, but his position as the botanical adviser to King George III had been permanently established. The monarch had earned the nickname ‘Farmer George’ as a man of the people and was only five years older than Banks; they had many common interests, including botany and agriculture. As their friendship grew, they frequently walked together through royal gardens, and by 1773 Banks was given what he called ‘a kind of superintendence’ over the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, replacing John Stuart, the Earl of Bute.

Peter Collinson, who had been instrumental in bringing Solander to Britain, called the Kew gardens ‘the Paradise of our world, where all plants are found that money or interest can procure’.² Grown from a private garden on the south bank of the Thames, twelve kilometres from the heart of the city, they had been the pride of the King’s recently deceased mother, the dowager Princess of Wales, Augusta. Like Banks’s mother Sarah, the princess had instilled a love for plants in her son, all the more so from 1759 when she established a four-hectare Physic or Exotic Garden outside Kew House devoted to medicinal plants.

Scottish botanist William Aiton,³ who had honed his craft as an assistant to Banks’s friend Philip Miller at the Chelsea Physic Garden, was given oversight of the royal possession. In 1773, Aiton implemented one of Banks’s first policies for restructuring the collection: he replaced a numbering system for plants with name tags, and – with help from Solander and another Swedish botanist, Jonas Dryander⁴ – his catalogue became the basis for the first edition of Hortus Kewensis, a three-volume opus on the 5600 different plants under his care.

Banks was a pragmatic man. He had collected plant and animal specimens chiefly to find practical applications for them in the betterment of humankind – specifically the British Empire. He had been applying the latest scientific techniques to the drainage of his wetlands in Lincolnshire, and the improvements that his botanising could make to agriculture and horticulture were a driving force in his life. His private herbarium and reference library were the envy of British botanists, and he now saw the Royal Gardens at Kew as more than a pleasure ground for recreation: their botanical collection could be the envy of the world. He wanted to ensure that ‘as many of the new plants as possible should make their first appearance at the Royal [Botanic] Gardens’,⁵ and his friends had connections all over the world to make this happen, particularly with the East India Company’s trading partners stretching across the globe. Britain would expand her empire on Banks’s advice, and he saw her colonies, no matter how distant, as potential agricultural powerhouses of the Kingdom’s economy.

Banks still shared his home with his servants and his sister Sophia, who like him was tall and strongly built, and like their mother deeply religious. After his return following three years on the Endeavour, Sophia had written, ‘May we ever remember and adore the Gracious Goodness of God, in permitting us now to enjoy my Dear Brother in health & safety amongst us again; & may he ever remember to be thoughtfull, & join with us in Praises & Thanksgiving.’⁶ That would have been a stretch: Banks was a nominal Christian as social convention preferred, but even though he still saw intelligent design in the universe and nature, he was indifferent to theology. And as he wrote in Tahiti, he made his own rules when it came to sex.

A YEAR AFTER ‘MR BURNETT’ was exposed in Madeira, Banks was linked with another mystery woman by the scandal sheet Town and Country Magazine (or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction and Entertainment). In a September 1773 article entitled ‘Histories of the Tete-a-Tete annexed; or, Memoirs of the Circumnavigator and Miss B –– n’,⁷ the racy magazine claimed that Banks had a secret lover and that she was the reason he had not pursued Harriet Blosset on his return from the South Seas, saying that ‘Miss B –– n’ was not only ‘his first enquiry’ but also the mother of his illegitimate child. The magazine printed illustrations of the handsome couple and sniggered over Banks’s reputation as a vigorous bed-breaker when ‘The Circumnavigator’ was an undergraduate at Oxford.

Banks was ‘a man of extensive fortune’, it said, ‘and like another Columbus, he resolved to go in search of unknown worlds’: ‘That curiosity which leads a voyager to such remote parts of the globe as Mr. B has visited, will stimulate him when at home to penetrate into the most secret recesses of nature.⁸ . . . The queens, and women of the first class, we find constantly soliciting his company, or rather forcing their’s upon him: at other times we find him visiting them in their bed-chambers nay in their beds.’⁹ The writer claimed Banks’s young lover had attended Blacklands House, a French boarding school in Chelsea. ‘This lady is the daughter of a gentle man of fortune, who by gaming and other dissipations, died insolvent. Miss B –– n had, however, received a very polite education . . . Her person was remarkably genteel, and her countenance, particularly engaging. All the elegant accomplishments were united in her . . .’¹⁰

According to the magazine, Banks had met her when she was still at school ‘and felt a peculiar pleasure in conversing with her’ while being taken with her ‘merit and beauty’. It claimed she had left school at seventeen just as he was leaving on the Endeavour, and the absence had made his heart grow fonder for her rather than Harriet. On his return, he was ‘chagrined’ to find that the death of her father had left her destitute and that she had become the companion of an old lady, on whom she totally depended. He moved her first to a ‘decent family’ where she boarded with companions of her own age and where he visited her often, always with a chaperone. But a ‘jaunt to Hampton Court’ became a ‘tete-a-tete party’ when her companion was taken ill: ‘Opportunity and reason proved too powerful for nature’, and Banks became her lover. Who could blame him, the magazine asked, for yielding ‘to the impulse of so much beauty’? He apparently ‘furnished her a genteel house in the New Buildings’ in Orchard Street, London, where she soon became a mother and was known to neighbours as a married woman, in every respect except law.

The article could be dismissed as mere gossip, but records show that in 1773 a ‘Joseph Banks’ was paying rates on No. 24 Orchard Street.¹¹ Further evidence that the article was on the money comes from a letter written by the Danish entomologist Johan Christian Fabricius,¹² who was working on the Endeavour’s insect collection at the time, and who would eventually name six hundred of Banks’s new butterflies. Although Banks never mentioned the mystery woman or the unnamed child, Fabricius wrote to him in November 1773 to say,

My best compliments and wishes in Orchard Street, what has shee brought you? Well, it is all the same, if a Boy, he will be clever and strong like his father, if a girl, she will be pretty and genteel like her mother . . . Life well, dear Banks, remember sometimes you have a friend in Coppenhagen, for really if You think their is a man in the world who is more your friend than I You certainly wrong

Your most obed. humb. servant J. C. Fabricius

Professor of economy.¹³

If Fabricius was writing about Banks’s love child, why did the naturalist never marry the girl, and what happened to their offspring? Perhaps Banks’s forbidding mother, Sarah, intervened, or perhaps in those days of high early mortality rates ‘Miss B––n’ and child died in anonymity. Perhaps Banks paid the beautiful young woman to go away. In any case, by 1774 another name was on the rate roll for Orchard Street.

Banks did not leave any comment about the article, and no correspondence with any other details on the matter seems to have survived. His rakish behaviour had become common knowledge in London, though, and this would not be the last time he faced public ridicule over his not-so-private life.

ON 12 JULY 1772, Banks and Solander had received some lighthearted ribbing in the press with the publication of a caricature by the husband-and-wife team of Matthew and Mary Darly, who had print shops in Fleet Street and the Strand where they sold humorous illustrations of the celebrities of the day. They drew Banks as a globetrotting fop with donkey ears in The Fly Catching Macaroni – ‘macaroni’ being a term used in that era to poke fun at the privileged young men making grand tours of Italy. On 14 November, the Darlys portrayed Banks as a dandy with a magnifying glass in The Botanical Macaroni. He owned copies of the prints, and his sister collected others, so it’s likely that he appreciated the joke.

The publication of Hawkesworth’s account of the Endeavour voyage provoked a satire in 1773 called An Epistle from Oberea, Queen of Otaheiti to Joseph Banks, Esq. On sale for a shilling a copy, it was a skit of 172 lines of rhyming verse purportedly translated by a ‘Professor of the Otaheite Language in Dublin’ and in the style of the Roman poet Ovid; in it, the lusty Tahitian Queen recalls her trysts with Banks. There was a second letter from the ‘Queen’, and in 1774 it was followed by Banks’s apparent reply: An Epistle from Mr. Banks, voyager, monster-hunter, and amoroso, to Oberea, Queen of Otaheite.

The fly catching macaroni, by Matthew and Mary Darly. British Museum

A year later the wounded Harriet Blosset became a character in The Court of Apollo: An Heroic Epistle from the Injured Harriet, Mistress to Mr. Banks to Oberea, Queen of Taheite. The anonymous author portrayed the fair English rose being left by the wayside by the supposedly sexed-up savage woman, a British stereotype of the Polynesians that later appeared in the anonymous poem ‘Transmigration’ – that work, published in 1778, uses the scientific exploration by Banks and Solander in Tahiti to describe a thinly veiled sexual exploration of each ‘cockle shell’.¹⁴ In 1779, a similar mocking poem called ‘Mimosa: or the sensitive plant; dedicated to Mr. Banks’ was published.

‘Oborea’ and all its spelling variations became a household name in London. Mrs Hayes, a brothel madam in Pall Mall, featured live shows around this time with naked dancers of both sexes; she advertised in Jack Harris’s popular Whoremongers Guide to London that ‘at 7 o’clock precisely 12 beautiful nymphs, spotless virgins, will carry out the famous feast of Venus, as it is celebrated in Tahiti, under the instruction and leadership of Queen Oberea’ – Mrs Hayes would play the part of the Queen.¹⁵

But at a time when London was home to ten thousand prostitutes,¹⁶ Banks’s public reputation does not seem to have been harmed by the salacious writings. Within his circle of rich men with few cares in the world, it may even have been enhanced. The Age of Enlightenment of the 1700s was also one of debauchery. Banks’s lawyer friend James Boswell, a laird who was heir to a large Scottish estate, had boasted only ten years earlier of christening the new Westminster Bridge one evening in May 1763: ‘At the bottom of the Haymarket I picked up a strong, jolly young damsel, and taking her under the arm I conducted her to Westminster Bridge, and then in armour complete did I engage her upon this noble edifice. The whim of doing it there with the Thames rolling below us amused me much.’¹⁷

WHATEVER CONTROVERSIES Banks’s love life caused, he had a hide as thick as the crocodiles’ he had seen in the Endeavour River, and science would always titillate him.

In 1774 he was invited to join the Royal Society’s Council, the body of twenty-one fellows who oversaw its operations, and his involvement in all areas of science was growing. In mid-January that year, the Scottish physician George Fordyce¹⁸ had invited Banks, Solander, Constantine Phipps and Charles Blagden to take their chances in experiments on how heat affected the human body. On 23 January, the beefy Solander managed five minutes in a room where the temperature was measured at up to 210 degrees Fahrenheit (98.9 degrees Celsius). Banks, fully clothed and the only participant to sweat profusely, went even better, lasting seven minutes with the mercury throbbing between 198 and 211 degrees Fahrenheit.¹⁹

In July 1774, the return to London of the Adventure, which had left England with Cook’s Resolution two years before, dominated Banks’s immediate thoughts.

The ships had both sailed south beyond the Antarctic Circle, where great icebergs had floated all around them. Cook had still not found the rumoured Southern Continent: he had come within about 120 kilometres of the Antarctic coast in January 1773, before ice forced him back. The ships were separated in a fog, and the Adventure’s skipper, Tobias Furneaux, sailed her towards a prearranged meeting point at Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand, where Cook and Banks had visited in 1770.

On the way there, Furneaux surveyed the southern and eastern coasts of Van Diemen’s Land; Tasmania’s Furneaux Group of islands and Adventure Bay are reminders of his visit. He reported that many of his men were coming down with scurvy, unlike Cook’s men, and the two ships sailed to reprovision in Tahiti. Cook found Oborea, who had aged dramatically, and on the island of Huahine he met a young man named Mai – although, just as the earlier British visitors had been mistaken about the ‘O’ in Otaheite and Oborea, the crew took his name to be ‘Omai’. Like Tupaia, Mai was from Raiatea, and he had escaped to Tahiti after Bora Bora warriors invaded his home. About twenty-two years of age, he had met the crews from the Dolphin and the Endeavour, so he remembered Banks and Solander and asked to sail on the Adventure to their home. Furneaux agreed, and to comply with naval regulations gave Mai the rank of able seaman: he appeared in the muster book as ‘Tetuby Homey Huahine, Society Islands, 22, AB’.

The two ships then steered for New Zealand again but were once more separated. When Furneaux arrived at Queen Charlotte Sound for the second time, he sent a large cutter with a master’s mate, a midshipman and eight hands to gather fresh greens for the voyage – but a fight broke out with the Maori at ‘Grass Cove’, and all his men were killed and eaten.²⁰

Diminishing stores eventually forced Furneaux to return home. The Adventure reached the Cape of Good Hope on 19 January 1774 and sailed for England on 16 April. Mai spent most of the voyage at the captain’s table learning English customs and language, and on 14 July, when the ship arrived at Spithead on the Solent, he gladly accepted the role of visiting dignitary. He carried with him a ceremonial stool.²¹

Banks and Solander rushed to Portsmouth to meet him. Mai recognised the Swede only by his voice, making it known that Solander had ‘much increased in bulk’ since Tahiti. Solander recalled, ‘When [Mai] saw Mr Banks who happen’d to have no powder in his hair he knew him instantly . . . We soon made ourselves known by conversing pretty freely with one another in his Language. It has been very pleasing to us, to him and many others, that both Mr Banks, myself, & Mr Banks’s servant James [Roberts] have not forgot our South Sea Language, – So we all can well keep up a Conversation with him.’²²

Solander told James Lind that Banks and Lord Sandwich were ‘now quite cordial again’, and the First Lord of the Admiralty was glad to meet the first South Sea Islander to visit Britain and the second to visit Europe; Bougainville had brought a Tahitian named Ahutoru²³ back to Paris, and he had died of smallpox on the return journey to Tahiti.

Banks tried to make Mai right at home in New Burlington Street, and Sophia Banks remarked that their guest addressed her brother by his Tahitian name ‘Tapáne’. After Banks had Mai dressed in the finest from London’s best tailors – a brown velvet coat, white waistcoat and grey satin breeches – Sandwich presented him to the King. Mai had trouble pronouncing the letter ‘G’, and when he shook Farmer George’s hand he is said to have exclaimed, ‘How do, King Tosh!’ But Sophia heard from Dr Jeremiah Mills, Dean of Exeter, that Mai in fact declared to His Majesty: ‘Sir, you are King of England, Tahiti, Raiatea and Bora Bora: I am your subject and am come here for gunpowder to destroy the inhabitants of Bora Bora, who are your enemies.’²⁴

George III gave Mai a warm greeting and presented him with a sword that he fixed to his belt as though he had always worn one. The King told Mai he was welcome in England and that he would eventually be returned to his people. Conscious of what had happened to Ahutoru and Cartwright’s Inuit, he recommended inoculation against smallpox. Banks was told to look after Mai in style and send the Crown the bill, which he eventually did for £229 4s.²⁵

Banks then took his guest to Dr Thomas Dimsdale’s institute at Hertford for the inoculation. Mai suffered for a while with a mild infection and its after-effects, and James Roberts stayed with him for weeks, while Banks and Solander were frequent visitors. By October, Mai was completely recovered.

He became a celebrity throughout England, his exotic good looks and gentle manners winning everyone over. During the next few months, he spent some time with Banks and Sandwich at the lord’s Hinchingbrooke estate. Sandwich had given his name to a dish constructed of meat between two slices of bread, designed so he could play cribbage while eating, but he became even fonder of Mai’s cooked meats, prepared in the Polynesian manner using a pit in the ground with hot stones covered by leaves. Banks wrote to his sister: ‘Omai dressed three dishes for dinner yesterday, & so well was his cookery liked that he is desired to cook again today . . . he succeeds most prodigiously: so much natural politeness I never saw in any Man: wherever he goes he makes friends.’²⁶

When Mai returned to London after an extended stay with Sandwich, he handed Banks a letter from the lord that said: ‘Omai is the bearer of this. I am grown so used to him and have so sincere a friendship for him, from his very good temper, sense and general good behaviour that I am quite depressed at his leaving me.’ Sandwich told Banks that they had to do everything they could ‘to prove ourselves his real friends’.²⁷

Portrait of Omai by William Hodges. It is thought to be one of the closest likenesses of him of the many portraits undertaken by artists during Omai’s stay in Britain. National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Mai dined ten times with the Royal Philosophers’ Club, and on 3 December 1774 the botanist Rev Sir John Cullum²⁸ watched him using a small magnifying glass: ‘he was perpetually pulling it out of his pocket, and looking at the Candles etc. with excessive delight and admiration. We all laughed at his simplicity, and yet probably the wisest person present would have wondered as much, if that knick-knack had then for the first time been Presented to him. He had seen Hail before he came to England, and therefore was not much surprized at the first fall of Snow, which he called, naturally enough, white Rain.’²⁹ He was amazed by a piece of ice and when told that it was sometimes thick and strong enough to bear great weights ‘he could scarcely be made to believe it’.³⁰

On 14 December 1774, Banks made his first official visit on behalf of the Royal Society to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and he was also busy showing the city to Mai and introducing him to friends such as Phipps, Dr Johnson, and Johnson’s friend Henry Thales, the politician and brewer.

Banks took Mai to the theatre at Sadler’s Wells, but the Tahitian man – now used to star treatment – declined to visit there again when he heard the aristocracy rarely attended. He much preferred the performance of the King giving a speech at the House of Lords, and immediately after that he dined at the home of James Burney, second lieutenant on the Adventure, and his daughter Fanny, the writer, who recorded that Mai wore ‘a suit of Manchester velvet, lined with white satten, a bag, lace ruffles, and a very handsome sword the King had given to him . . . He makes remarkable good bows – not for him, but for anybody, however long under a Dancing Master’s care. Indeed he seems to shame Education, for his manners are so extremely graceful, and he is so polite, attentive, and easy, that you would have thought he came from some foreign court.’³¹

Mai learnt to play chess and backgammon, and he was captured on canvas by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Nathaniel Dance-Holland – who, under instructions from Banks, would soon paint the best-known portrait of Captain Cook.³² William Parry also painted Mai and depicted him with Banks at his side, the naturalist pointing out the tattoos on the Tahitian man’s hand while the portly Solander sat nearby taking notes.

Banks hoped Mai’s visit to England would dispel some of the stereotypes of the Polynesians as savages after the scandals involving ‘Queen Oborea’ in the press. He presented Mai as an intelligent, well-mannered man of dignity with a complex culture of his own. Although Granville Sharp, the founder of the British and Foreign Bible Society, gave Mai an illustrated edition of the scriptures, Banks made no attempt to convert him.

The naturalist took Mai on a long trip to Phipps’s grand home, Mulgrave Hall, near Whitby in Yorkshire. The Tahitian guest shared Banks’s coach with Phipps, Phipps’s young brother Augustus, George Colman the playwright, and Colman’s son, George Jr. They rumbled out of York, bouncing over rough roads and steep hills, all six passengers along with Banks’s many trunks containing specimens and what the younger Colman called ‘large receptacles for further vegetable materials, which he might accumulate, in his locomotions’. Colman added, ‘We never saw a tree with an unusual branch, or a strange weed, or anything singular in the vegetable world, but a halt was immediately order’d; out jump’d [Banks]; out jump’d the two boys (Augustus and myself) after him; and out jump’d Omai, after us all. Many articles, “all a growing, and a growing”, which seem’d to me no better than thistles, and which would not have sold for a farthing in Covent Garden Market, were pull’d up by the roots, and stow’d carefully in the coach, as rarities.’³³

At Scarborough young George Colman saw the sea for the first time and was about to take his ‘maiden plunge . . . into the briny flood’ when Mai joined him: ‘he look’d like a specimen of pale moving mahogany, highly varnish’d . . . from his hips, and the small of his back, downwards, he was tattow’d with striped arches, broad and black, by means of a sharp shell, or a fish’s tooth, imbued with an indelible die, according to the fashion of his country. He hail’d me with the salutation of Tosh, which was his pronunciation of George.’³⁴ Young Colman said his ‘wild friend’ appeared as at home on the waves ‘as a rope-dancer upon a cord’, and Mai carried him on his back out into deeper water: ‘He constantly cried, “Tosh not fraid”; but Tosh was fraid – and plaguily frighten’d indeed.’³⁵

At Phipps’s huge estate, Banks sent the youngsters out to gather plants. ‘We could not easily have met with an abler master,’ Colman recalled, as Banks ‘turned science into a sport’.³⁶

WHILE MAI ENJOYED the hospitality of his English hosts, Britain’s relationship with some of its subjects across the Atlantic was descending into bloodshed. King George taxed the American colonies heavily to pay for his troops there, and Americans quickly began to resent taxation without representation in a government on the other side of a vast ocean.

Riots had broken out during the 1760s, and in the 1770 Boston Massacre, British soldiers opened fire on an angry mob. Three years later in the same city, a group called the Sons of Liberty – some of whom were disguised as Native Americans – destroyed a shipment of the British East India Company’s tea in what became known as the Boston Tea Party. In late 1774, the Continental Congress was formed to coordinate the fight against both Britain and those American loyalists who still supported the King. Then, on 19 April 1775, at Lexington, about twenty kilometres north-west of Boston, a battle broke out between British redcoats and American freedom fighters. Exactly five years after Banks first saw the coast of New Holland, the American War of Independence had begun.

Fighting the Americans, as well as their supporters from France, Spain and the Netherlands, became the British Navy’s major concern. This curtailed any hopes that Banks had entertained about leading a team with James Lind as astronomer on a Royal Society expedition ‘for making discoveries on the N.W. side of America beyond California’.³⁷ War preparations were at the top of Sandwich’s agenda, and Banks was the lord’s guest, along with Solander, Mai and Sandwich’s mistress Martha Ray, on the yacht Augusta when he officially inspected the naval dockyards in June and July 1775.

On 30 July, Cook triumphantly sailed the Resolution into Spithead, having lost just one man out of 118 on a ship Banks had decried as ‘exceedingly unfit for the intended voyage’. After Banks had stamped his feet on the Sheerness wharf and written off the voyage as having ‘no prospect but Distress & disappointment’, Cook had disproved the theory that Terra Australis Incognita existed between New Holland and South America, while the Forsters had brought home 260 new plants and two hundred new animals.³⁸

Sandwich dashed off to congratulate Cook at once, but Banks kept a low profile, hoping to hide his embarrassment over his tantrums for as long as possible. Early in the Resolution’s voyage, Cook had written to Banks hoping they could still be friends.

Resolution, Cape of Good Hope,

18 November, 1772.

Dear Sir,

Some cross circumstances which happened at the latter part of the equipment of the Resolution created, I have reason to think, a coolness betwixt you and I, but I can by no means think it was sufficient to me to break of all corrispondance with a man I am under many obligations too.³⁹

But that letter, which Cook signed off with ‘great esteem and respect’, had still not assuaged Banks’s humiliation.

When the Resolution returned home, Solander acted as Banks’s lookout, keeping him posted on goings-on at Spithead. Soon he was telling Banks that the coast was clear, and that Cook still held no hard feelings.

Two oClock Monday – This Moment Capt Cook is arrived. I have not yet had an opertunity of conversing with him, as he is still in the board-room – giving an account of himself & Co. He looks as well as ever. By and by, I shall be able to say a little more . . . Capt’ Cook desires his best Compl’ to You, he expressed himself in the most friendly manner towards you, that could be; he said: nothing could have added to the satisfaction he has had, in making this tour but having had your company. He has some Birds, in Sp.V. for you &c &c that he would have wrote to you himself about, if he had not been kept too long at the Admiralty and at the same time wishing to see his wife. He rather looks better than when he left England . . . Inclosed You will find a Letter from [Charles] Clark.⁴⁰

Clerke, who had become an acting lieutenant on the Resolution, had begun a letter to Banks as the ship passed Portland, with a fine fresh north-west gale to conclude his ‘Continent hunting expedition’.

I assure you I’ve devoted some days to your service in very distant parts of the Globe; the result of which I hope will give you some satisfaction; at least it will convince you of my intentions and endeavours in that particular. I shall send this away by one of our civil Gentry, who will fly to Town with all the sail they can possibly make. God bless you and send me one Line just to tell me you’re alive and well, if that is the case, for I’m as great a stranger to all matters in England as tho’ I had been these 3 Years underground . . . Excuse the Paper, its gilt I assure you, but the Cockroaches have piss’d upon it.⁴¹

Banks’s great friendship with Clerke illustrated his sentiments that his wish in life was to ‘enjoy the utmost Familiarity with those whom I can trust’ rather than be of an ‘aristocratic disposition’.⁴²

As Banks waited for another missive from Solander, Cook was promoted to post-captain on 9 August. Five days later, Solander wrote to Banks:

Providentially old Capt’ Clements died 2 or 3 days ago, by which a Captain’s place of Greenwich was made Vacant. This was given to Capt Cook, and a promise of Employ whenever he should ask for it. Mr Cooper was made Master and Commander. Mr Clerke was promised the command of the Resolution to carry Mr Omai home . . . All our friends look as well as if they had been all the while in clover. All inquired after You . . . Mr Clerke show’d me some drawings of Birds, made by a Midshipman, not bad, which I believe he intends for you . . . were on board 3 live Otaheite Dogs, the ugliest & most stupid of all the Canine tribe. Forster had on board the following Live Stock: a Springe Bock from the Cape, a Surikate [meerkat], two Eagles, & several small Birds, all from the Cape. I believe he intends these for the Queen . . .⁴³

Richard Pickersgill, who had been on the Endeavour, made the ladies sick by showing them the head of a Maori man that was missing ‘two or three’ slices – apparently parts of his face had been broiled and eaten by other Maori.

Banks finally swallowed his pride, and he and Cook dined together several times at the Royal Philosophers’ Club. Cook was then unanimously elected a fellow of the Royal Society. Disappointed with Hawkesworth’s handling of the Endeavour story, Cook was persuaded, despite his lack of formal education, to write the account of the second voyage. This sent Forster Sr into a rage, as he claimed Sandwich had promised him the lucrative assignment.

In his introduction to the tome, Cook modestly asked readers to forgive ‘the inaccuracies of Style’ since they were ‘the production of a man who has been constantly at sea from his youth and though, with the assistance of a few good friends, he has passed through all the stations belonging to a seaman from an Apprentice Boy in the Coal trade to a Post-Captain in the Royal Navy, he has had no opportunity of cultivating Letters’.⁴⁴

Banks provided Cook with some botanical drawings and descriptions, and the naturalist helped supervise the publication of the finished manuscript after Cook had set sail for another voyage in the Resolution with many of Banks’s friends from the Endeavour. Banks successfully lobbied for the skipper also to take David Nelson, a gardener from Kew recommended by James Lee, as the botanist for the voyage. Nelson was tasked with collecting as many different plants and insects for Banks and Britain as possible. Banks was determined not to repeat the situation that had followed the Endeavour voyage, when Stanfield Parkinson challenged ownership of his brother’s journals, and he had Nelson sign a contract declaring that he would gather plants, seeds and insects everywhere the ship touched and that they would all be Banks’s property.

In return, Banks gave Nelson an annual wage of £35.

It was hoped that Cook’s ‘third’ voyage would open up the North West Passage thought to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Mai was Cook’s first-class passenger for the journey back to Tahiti, and Gore his first lieutenant. A prickly 21-year-old William Bligh,⁴⁵ the son of a customs officer, was the ship’s master. Charles Clerke was given command of the accompanying vessel Discovery, with James Burney as his first lieutenant. Clerke bizarrely had agreed to serve time in the King’s Bench debtor’s prison for a debt incurred by one of his brothers, Sir John Clerke, and had come out of his cell with a shocking cough.

Benjamin Franklin, who had been thrilled to hear about Banks’s kissing lessons in Tahiti, was one of the most distinguished fellows of the Royal Society and the world’s foremost expert on electricity, but war with America had made him the enemy – he was one of the authors of America’s Declaration of Independence, after all. Banks’s friendship with him never wavered, though, and Franklin gave orders that French ships were not to interfere with Cook’s explorations after he set off on 12 July 1776.⁴⁶

As the skipper waited for the wind to catch his sails, he wrote to Banks from Plymouth Sound to tell him that Mai was being ‘much carressed here by every person of note’ and was happy to be going home. Cook thanked Banks and all his other ‘good friends’ for the ‘unmerited honour’ of the Royal Society’s highest award, the Copley Medal, bestowed for a paper he had presented on the prevention of scurvy. ‘Omai Joins his best respects to you and Dr Solander,’ Cook wrote, ‘with Dear Sir, your Most Old and very humble servt., Jam[e]s Cook.’⁴⁷ Intending to settle Mai on his own farm in Tahiti, Cook carried horses, cows and sheep on the Resolution for him.

EVEN THOUGH BANKS WAS still a young man at thirty-three, he was not inclined to spend another three years at sea. A spectacular new woman had entered his life and he had embarked on a massive publishing venture that was taking all his money. His collection of specimens had outgrown New Burlington Street, and he was in the process of buying a new home.

In mid-1770s London, he wasn’t the only one feeling the need for more space. The city had become intolerably overcrowded, and the thousands of prostitutes working in Covent Garden, Soho and Drury Lane indicated unprecedented levels of poverty, child labour and crime in England. While men such as Cook and Banks illuminated scientific wonders, much of London’s teeming population was still living in a dark age. Under what was called ‘The Bloody Code’, there were 222 crimes in Britain that carried the death penalty, most of them tied to poverty, such as the cutting down of a tree or even the theft of a rabbit.

Transportation was seen as more humane than execution, and England had been sending convicts and prisoners of war to the British colonies in North America for almost two hundred years. The American Revolutionary War now curtailed the transportation of these people to work for planters in Virginia and Maryland, causing massive overcrowding in British jails. Hulks – ships left over from the Seven Years’ War – crowded the Thames as floating prisons, and still the city was running out of room. The war also meant that Britain’s supplies of hemp, tar and timber from the Baltic for its ships were being dried up by the League of Armed Neutrality, an alliance of Russia, Holland and other northern European powers.

England now looked to establish a new penal colony and a supply chain for raw materials. The government wanted to talk to Banks about New Holland.