Chapter 20

23 MARCH 1779, SAINT ANDREW’S CHURCH, HOLBORN, LONDON

Now, my dear & honoured friend, I must bid you a final adieu: may you enjoy many happy years in this world, and in the end attain that fame your indefatigable industry so richly deserves.

CAPTAIN CHARLES CLERKE DICTATING HIS FINAL WORDS TO BANKS FROM HIS DEATHBED¹

BANKS HAD MADE A STRONG case for forming a self-sufficient settlement in Botany Bay, but for the time being Britain’s convicts were going nowhere. War with America meant that England’s naval vessels were preoccupied. Convicts were put to work dredging the Thames and driving in posts to protect it from erosion. Others dug canals and built walls around the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, while the government considered building a prison for nine hundred of them seven kilometres upriver from Westminster Bridge.²

Banks’s voyage through life had taken him to many perilous places, but it turned full circle as the 36-year-old rake morphed into a stay-put scientist and docile country squire after marrying Dorothea on 23 March 1779.

His old Endeavour shipmate, James Matra, now a secretary at the British embassy in Constantinople, wrote to congratulate him. Since being wrongfully accused of cutting off Richard Orton’s ears on that great reef, Matra had become British consul to the Canary Islands and in 1777 gone to New York to claim the family fortune after his father died – but the money was in congressional bills, worthless outside the war-torn colonies. Matra congratulated Banks on his ‘entry into the Matrimonial State’: ‘I wish you would prevail upon your Friend the Doctor in whose good health I rejoice to follow Your example; it is time that You should both be moored, and content Yourselves with travelling by Proxy, and when a man’s Sheet Anchor is down, I believe Matrimony Bay is the most convenient place to ride out the storms of his life.’³

While Banks had once been prepared to drop everything for life on an ocean wave, he was now following Matra’s advice to travel only by proxy: his voyages rarely took him further than around London or Lincolnshire. He had become a trustee of the British Museum, working alongside Solander, and he had a seat on the Board of Longitude and soon would have a seat on the Board of Agriculture, tasked with improving farming practices to prevent famine in light of the disruption to trade caused by war with France.

Less than a week after the wedding, Banks’s steward at Revesby, Benjamin Stephenson, wrote with brief congratulations and a long, detailed, room-by-room description of the disrepair into which the country manor had fallen. Stephenson was given orders for a costly refurbishment lasting from September until early November.⁴

The house at Soho Square was always full of plants, animals and curiosities from around the world, along with visitors wanting to congratulate the happy couple. Sophia Banks and Dorothea’s younger sister Mary lived in the house, too – Banks referred to them as ‘my ladies’ – and Solander was almost always there, taking breakfast with them in the library.⁵

In May 1779, Banks and Dorothea went on a three-month honeymoon. They travelled just twenty kilometres from home to a twenty-hectare estate called Spring Grove at Isleworth, west of London. Banks had chosen the 130-year-old mansion because he wanted a country house close to town and only three kilometres from Heston House, which his uncle Robert Banks Hodgkinson had purchased in 1775. Despite his widening girth, Banks could still walk to Kew Gardens five kilometres away if he chose, and he and Dorothea would take a carriage into the city three times a week.

Banks leased the property from a wealthy young heir named Elisha Biscoe,⁶ and after extending the lease he eventually purchased the property and surrounding grounds for £6000.⁷ Spring Grove initially cost him about £400 a year for rent and taxes, and a further £500 for servants to maintain it. He had hothouses erected and grew Chinese roses, American cranberries, and pineapples, among many other plants.

Directly after the three-month honeymoon at Spring Grove, Banks and Dorothea, accompanied by Mary Hugessen, travelled up to supervise the repair work at Revesby. This started an almost annual migration for the next thirty-eight years as Banks and his household would holiday there between August and October, his carriage overflowing with passengers, luggage, books, files, correspondence, and blank volumes of paper for pressing flowers.

Revesby was always close to his heart, and it supported three hundred head of deer, sheep, cattle and horses. When Arthur Young, the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, visited Banks there, he was astonished at the order of the scientist’s files in his two-room office complete with 156 drawers, each of them ‘thirteen inches wide by eight broad, and five and a half deep, all numbered’: ‘There is a catalogue of names and subjects, and a list of every paper in every drawer; so that whether the inquiry concerns a man, or a drainage, or an enclosure, or a farm, or a wood, the request was scarcely named before a mass of information was in a moment before me . . .’⁸

John Byng, later Viscount Torrington, was far less impressed after a visit to Revesby in 1791, repaying Banks’s hospitality by writing, ‘The park is flat, dismal and unimproved; the house mean and uncomfortable, with a horse-pond in front, with no gardens or comfort, but when a man sets himself up for a wild eccentric character and (having a great estate with the comforts of England at command) can voyage to Otaheite and can reside in a corner house in Soho Square, of course his country seat will be a filthy and neglected spot.’⁹

Regardless of what others thought of Revesby, Banks became a central figure in Lincolnshire life. The spacious village green was famous for its cricket matches and for a yearly ‘Feast’ or ‘Fair’ that drew crowds on the second Monday after Michaelmas, 29 September. Banks was a benevolent landlord and employer for much of the village, and he would drive round the fair with Dorothea, buying generously at the booths while distributing his purchases among the visitors.¹⁰ Ale was downed by the keg at the Revesby Abbey, and a bullock slaughtered for roasting. ‘This is the day of our fair [Banks once wrote] when according to immemorial custom I am to feed and make drunk everyone who chooses to come, which will cost me in beef and ale near 20 pounds, and I am sure there is no quiet in the house all day.’¹¹

Even more popular than the Revesby ‘Feast’ for the local gentry and clergymen were Banks’s fishing parties on the Witham. These were conducted from a tented horse-drawn barge, sometimes with a band on board.¹² After one event, Banks noted, ‘We drew ten miles of fresh water, and in four days caught seventeen hundred-weight of fish; dining always from twenty to thirty masters and mistresses, with servants and attendants, on the fish we had caught, dressed at fires made on the bank: and when we had done we had not ten pound of fish left.’¹³ Some of the expeditions were recorded by Sophia in two books, complete with watercolour illustrations.¹⁴ She also kept score of contests with guests in another of their mutual interests, archery.

Banks was a major wool grower in Lincolnshire. He always tried to maximise the quality and return from his long wool herds, especially as the American war caused prices to plummet from 8 pence a pound to threepence halfpenny. When he joined the Lincolnshire Wool Committee, he hoped to change the export laws so that he and other producers could send more of their fleece abroad. He penned a booklet outlining his case:¹⁵ he quoted Lord Coke from a 1621 speech to the House of Commons extolling ‘freedom of trade’¹⁶ and argued that while the recent surrender of English general Lord Cornwallis to the Americans was a scar that nature could heal, the damage to the wool market as a result was to be dreaded ‘as a gangrene that generally ends in death’.¹⁷ Banks asserted that the prohibition of sending wool overseas, in force since 1660, was ruining farmers and encouraging smugglers. But despite his strident arguments, the owners of the woollen mills, happy with a monopoly and halved costs for raw material, managed to keep an even tighter control of the market. Banks hired a Swede, Charles Hellstedt, to travel to the Continent for a look at the market there, and he reported back that Europeans weren’t so fussed with the long wool of Lincolnshire, thinking their own product was just as good. But there were fears over the American war disrupting the supply of fine wool produced by the merino, a breed fiercely protected by the Spanish.

Weighing the fish after a haul. The tall gentleman in the foreground in this 1791 illustration is Banks with a net full of fish. Boston Stump (St Botolph’s Church) is in the background. Yale Center for British Art

MARY HUGESSEN MOVED out of Banks’s home when she married Edward Knatchbull on 27 July 1780, while Sophia, who never married, lived with Banks and Dorothea until the end of her life. She was a devoted companion to both and an enormous assistance to her brother, exchanging ideas with him about his private museum, copying his journals and writing prayers for him in her own. Banks once declared that he was ‘an able advocate for the natural rights of [the female sex]’¹⁸ but his society offered few opportunities for women to express their intellect, and Sophia devoted much of her life to advancing her brother’s career.

While Dorothea collected Chinese porcelain and displayed it at the Spring Grove dairy where she had her own cows, Sophia built a priceless collections of coins, medals, visiting cards, satirical prints, advertisements, playbills and newspapers, including a detailed scrapbook on a serial killer known as the London Monster. Generously proportioned and with an eyebrow-raising fashion sense that favoured comfort and practicality over style, she wore Revesby wool dresses that she called Hightum (for grand occasions), Titum (for less grand ones) and Scrub (for daily wear). She may have been the subject of James Gillray’s 1804 satirical cartoon ‘An Old Maid on a Journey’,¹⁹ while late in her life another observer noted, ‘Her Barcelona quilted petticoat had a hole on either side for the convenience of rummaging two immense pockets stuffed with books of all sorts . . . Notwithstanding the very singular appearance of Miss Banks she was, in the prime of life, a fashionable whip and drove four-in-hand.’²⁰

Only two years separated Banks and his sister and they were intellectually compatible collaborators. Banks was 15 years older than his new wife, but while she did not seem to share his scientific fascinations, all three lived in apparent harmony. Banks opened his house to anyone with a scientific bent, regardless of their rank or station in life, among them the Irish orientalist William Marsden,²¹ who shared Banks’s fascination for language, and who would later become First Secretary of the Admiralty. One publication recorded that every Thursday morning Banks received his friends, members of the Royal Society and gentlemen introduced by them at a public breakfast in his Soho Square house.²² This home became the meeting place for great thinkers of science and the arts throughout Europe. Horace Walpole, the writer and politician, recalled one of ‘Banks’s literary saturnalia’ where a Parisian watchmaker ‘produced the smallest automaton’ Walpole supposed was ever created: ‘It was a rich snuff-box . . . On opening the lid, an enamelled bird started up, sat on the rim, turned round, fluttered its wings, and piped in a delightful tone the notes of different birds; particularly the jug-jug of the nightingale . . . the price tempting – only five hundred pounds. That economist, the Prince of Wales, could not resist it, and has bought one’.²³

With war between America and Britain still raging, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Banks saying that he longed ‘earnestly for a Return of those peaceful Times, when I could sit down in sweet Society with my English philosophic Friends, communicating to each other new Discoveries, and proposing Improvements of old ones; all tending to extend the Power of Man over Matter, avert or diminish the Evils he is subject to, or augment the Number of his Enjoyments’.²⁴

AFTER YEARS OF LOBBYING the government for bigger premises in which to hold their meetings, the Royal Society finally moved in 1780 from their headquarters in two houses on Crane Court to rooms in the new Somerset House on The Strand. London real estate was not always a goldmine: the Society sold its Crane Court property for £1000, seventy years after a committee including Christopher Wren had paid £1450 for it.

The proposed settlement of Botany Bay had been delayed by war, but Banks took a paternal interest in the idea.²⁵ He well knew, though, that exploration and colonisation came with inherent dangers.

From 10 January 1780, there had been disturbing reports about Cook’s fate from Dutch East Indiamen and Swedish ships coming from China, and Banks was at the forefront of pushing for a pension of £200 a year for the captain’s wife, now that it was almost certain she was a widow. Banks had already prepared a memorial for Cook,²⁶ who had once declared, ‘I . . . had ambition not only to go farther than any one had done before, but as far as it was possible for Man to go’.²⁷

At a meeting of the Royal Society’s council on 20 January, Banks oversaw a proposal that Cook – ‘a worthy Member of this Society’ – warranted a public act of appreciation. The following week it was proposed that a commemorative medal be struck: the Royal Society Cook Medal, to be paid for by a voluntary subscription open only to Society members. The medals were priced at 20 guineas for a gold one, and a guinea for either a silver medal or two bronze. Banks bought one of the thirteen struck in gold as well as twenty-three in silver and thirteen in bronze; he later sent one to Cook’s wife, with a tribute to his friend, expressing heartache at the loss the nation had suffered ‘in the death of so invaluable a man’. Louis Bougainville wanted a medal, too, writing to Banks to remind him that he had been a fellow of the Royal Society since 1756 and that the steps he had taken in the same career as Cook had taught him to appreciate the skipper’s work.²⁸

On their return journey to Britain, the Resolution and Discovery had travelled down the coast of Japan until they reached Macao, China, in December 1779. From there they sailed through the East Indies down to Cape Town and north towards home. An Atlantic gale blew the ships off course on their final leg, so they first made landfall in Britain at Stromness, Orkney, before arriving off Sheerness on 4 October 1780.

Banks wrote to Benjamin Franklin, then an American government minister based in France, to tell him about the Cook medals and thank him for the instructions he had sent out ‘for the Protection of Captn. Cooke’. ‘Adieu, my Dear Sir,’ Banks told Franklin. ‘Beleive my Mind incapable of being Led astray by the influence of political opinions. I respect you as a Philosopher, & sollicit the continuance of your Friendship . . . whatever my wishes may be as a native & inhabitant of a country with which you are at war.’²⁹

The return of Cook’s ships brought much unwelcome news. Charles Clerke, weakened from the tuberculosis he had picked up in the debtor’s prison, had taken command of the Resolution after Cook was killed. A truce had been established with the Hawaiians – who had suffered seventeen deaths, including those of four chiefs,³⁰ in the aftermath of Cook’s demise – and Clerke had retrieved his skipper’s body, or what was left of it. The Hawaiians, who had initially regarded Cook as a god, had prepared him for an honoured burial: disembowelling the body, burning some of it, and stripping flesh from the bones. Clerke collected Cook’s skull, some of the longer bones, and his hands and feet, and gave him a burial at sea on 21 February 1779. He then tried to complete Cook’s Arctic mission, travelling to the Kamchatka Peninsula on the Pacific coast of Siberia.

After returning from another attempt on the Bering Strait, Clerke wrote to Banks. Skeletally thin and terribly weak, he dictated these words to Lieutenant James King, which Banks finally received late in 1780: ‘My ever honoured Friend, The disorder I was attacked with in the King’s bench prison has proved consumptive with which I have battled with various success, although without one single day’s health since I took leave of you in Burlington Street: it has now so far got the better of me, that I am not able to turn myself in my bed, so that my stay in this world must be of very short duration.’³¹ He said that he had ‘most perfectly and justly’ done his duty to his country, ‘as far as my abilities would enable me’. The attention to his health, which he knew was ‘in the most imminent danger’, had never swerved him ‘a single half mile out of the road’ of his duty, ‘so that I flatter myself I shall leave behind me that character it has ever been my utmost ambition to attain, which is that of an honest & faithful servant to the Public whom I had undertaken to serve’.³²

He told Banks, ‘I have made you the best collection of all kinds of matter I could that have fallen in our way in the course of the voyage; but they are by no means so compleat as they would have been, had my health enabled me to pay more attention to them – I hope, however, you will find many things among them worthy your attention and acceptance: in my will I have bequeathed you the whole of every kind: there are great abundance so that you will have ample choice.’ Clerke begged Banks to present his ‘warmest & most affectionate compliments to Dr Solander and assure him I leave the world replete with the most social Ideas of his much esteemed & ever respected Friendship’. It seems that Banks never forgot a friend, and his friends did not forget him.

Will Ellis, one of the surgeon’s mates, would furnish Banks with drawings and accounts of various birds being sent to Soho Square, and Clerke signed off for the last time by telling Banks: ‘Now, my dear & honoured friend, I must bid you a final adieu: may you enjoy many happy years in this world, and in the end attain that fame your indefatigable industry so richly deserves. These are most sincerely the warmest and sincerest wishes of your devoted affectionate departing Servant Chas Clerke.’³³

Clerke died just four days later, and he carried his admiration for Banks to his lonely grave in the Russian city of Petropavlovsk.

BANKS BEGAN TO CANVASS support for a knighthood, an honour bestowed on so many previous Royal Society presidents. Prime Minister Lord North³⁴ raised the issue with the King, and on 23 March 1781 Banks kissed the hands of the monarch at the Court of St James’s and became the first – and only – baronet of Revesby Abbey.

In the same year, Linnaeus’s son Carl Jr,³⁵ not long for this world, arrived at Kew to work on William Aiton’s book Flora Kewensis, and he named a genus Banksia in honour of the man who had brought it back to Europe.

These were the salad days for Banks. Though his weight kept rising, he still had his youth, and he revelled in his marriage, his title, his accolades, and his friendship with royalty. He was stimulated intellectually by the visitors to his house: everyone from the astronomer William Herschel,³⁶ who had just discovered the planet Uranus,³⁷ to Joseph Priestley talking about chemistry and fundamentalist Christianity, and Henry Cavendish who had discovered hydrogen. The round-faced Solander, his bright waistcoats becoming tighter every year, acted as interpreter for all the visiting scientists from Continental Europe.

On the morning of 8 May 1782, Banks was away on business when Solander was at the Soho house recounting to Charles Blagden the story of the fatal blizzard on Tierra del Fuego. Banks had saved Solander’s life that freezing night, and they had been almost inseparable over the next thirteen years, even though the gossiping Swede had his faults. He was unkind to his widowed mother, seldom writing to her and never bothering to open her many letters, and he behaved in a similar way to Linnaeus, his mentor. But he was an extroverted, likeable man, and Banks considered him half of a great scientific team.

When Solander collapsed at Banks’s house while talking to Blagden, an urgent message was sent to Banks, who travelled all night to arrive home the next morning. Over the next few days Solander was ministered to by London’s best physicians, including Blagden, John Hunter, William Heberden and William Pitcairn. But he died at 9.30 p.m. on 13 May, aged forty-nine.³⁸ Dr Hunter performed an autopsy the next day, and Banks revealed that ‘when his head was opened, a haemorrhage in the brain was found to be the cause of death’.³⁹

Six days later, Solander was buried in the Swedish section of Brookwood Cemetery. Banks described him as ‘irreplaceable’. He wrote, ‘This too early loss of a friend I loved during my mature years, and who I shall always miss, forces me to draw a veil over his passing immediately I cease to speak of it. I can never think of it without feeling such acute pain as makes man shudder. If honour, justice, moderation, kindness, diligence, if ever such natural gifts and accomplishments deserve a place in a better world, nothing but my own failings will prevent us from meeting again.’⁴⁰ Banks thought back to the three years he had spent with Solander on the Endeavour, their close calls with death, and the wonders of botany and zoology they had brought home to England. He saw his Florilegium as a tribute: ‘The botanical work I have in progress is nearing an end. Solander’s name will appear on the title page along with mine since everything was done jointly. Hardly a sentence was written while he lived to which he did not contribute.’⁴¹

Although Jonas Dryander took Solander’s place as Banks’s librarian, perhaps the naturalist’s heartbreak eventually curtailed his plans for the book. He sent money to help Solander’s mother and sister, but without the Swede’s guiding hand he became embroiled in crises that threatened the reputation of the Royal Society and its president.

A week before Solander died, James Price,⁴² a young fellow of the Royal Society, had begun making public demonstrations at his lab in Guildford, claiming he could turn mercury into gold or silver by using powders he had devised. He made the last demonstration a week after Solander’s death, and some of the gold was presented to the King. Banks, battling a severe flu himself, feared that damage would be done to the Society by what he suspected were Price’s sleight-of-hand tricks. He demanded that the young scientist come clean. Eventually pushed into a corner, Price invited Society members to witness another experiment on 3 August, again at Guildford. Only three fellows turned up, and he welcomed them for a show like nothing else. He took a flask full of what was later found to be laurel-water poison – hydrogen cyanide – and drank the lot. Before his visitors knew what was happening, he was dead.

WITH THE SOCIAL BUTTERFLY Solander gone, Banks blundered along as the Royal Society’s president, throwing his considerable weight around and treading on toes. The fallout became known at the ‘dissensions’.

In 1782 Dr Charles Hutton, a Newcastle coalminer’s son who had become Professor of Mathematics at the Woolwich Royal Military Academy, was working as the Society’s foreign secretary, dealing with foreign correspondence and translating papers for meetings and the Society’s journal Philosophical Transactions. Hutton had made calculations on the density of the earth, but Banks thought he was out of his depth as foreign secretary. The president essentially forced him to resign, and many felt Hutton had been treated shabbily; at the meeting of 11 December 1783, there was a motion that Hutton receive a vote of thanks for his services. Banks puffed out his chest and declared he did not believe Hutton had performed his tasks efficiently – but the motion was carried and, swallowing his pride, Banks had to thank Hutton in the name of the Society. A week later, Hutton’s written defence of his conduct was read and a motion carried that he had vindicated himself.

A satirical booklet soon appeared in London. It was called The Philosophical Puppet Show, or Snip’s Inauguration to the President’s Chair. Addressed to Sir J—— B——, . . . A Celebrated Connoisseur in Chickweed, Caterpillars, Black Beetles, Butterflies, and Cockleshells. Banks was pictured in the president’s chair crowned with a dunce’s cap, while sitting under the words ‘ignorance, insolence, pride and arrogance’. The copy of the pamphlet in the National Library of Australia bears the signature ‘Charles Hutton’.⁴³ Banks was described by his critics as ‘incurably sick with the lust of domination’. It was claimed that he imagined himself born to rule and that he favoured aristocrats as fellows of the Society over more deserving men because they were ‘not of a certain rank’.⁴⁴ Indeed he claimed with the shadow of the French Revolution looming large from across the Channel and with the ever present threat of social unrest in Britain that he was living in times ‘teeming with the monstrous Birth of Equality’.⁴⁵

Banks’s position as president was under siege as Hutton and Nevil Maskelyne, the astronomer royal, and Paul Maty, who had followed his father as a librarian at the British Museum, backed a coup by clergyman Dr Samuel Horsley.⁴⁶ Banks was accused of being a despot and a bully, of interfering in the election of fellows, and of favouring natural history over mathematics. It was claimed he ran the Society like his own private club, trying ‘to amuse the Fellows with frogs, fleas and grasshoppers’ in what had become a ‘struggle of the men of science against the Macaronis of the Society’.⁴⁷ Horsley, who had edited Isaac Newton’s works, said Banks had made the Society a ‘wretched political cabal’ and even declared that ‘Science herself had never been more signally insulted, than by the elevation of a mere amateur to occupy the chair once filled by Newton’.⁴⁸

Banks declared that while he considered the president’s role as ‘a matter of Glory to me’, he would retire to his ‘plough without a sigh’ if the majority of fellows wanted him out.⁴⁹ In the first week of January 1784, he sent a card to all fellows requesting their attendance at the ordinary meeting on the eighth. A formal motion of confidence in Banks was put to the vote, and despite angry dissent from his opponents it passed by 119 in favour to forty-two against. Horsley withdrew, and Maty resigned as secretary, with Banks’s ally Blagden taking his place. Banks was re-elected president that year and every year until his death as the Society’s longest-serving leader.

While his critics claimed his temper was ‘greatly despotic’, Andrew Kippis,⁵⁰ a clergyman and Cook biographer, wrote of Banks after the ‘dissensions’ that a man who could retain the affections of his friends for years was not likely to have ‘unpardonable faults of temper’; Banks, he said, may have been ‘free with his rebukes’, but he ‘appears to be manly, liberal and open in his behaviour to his acquaintance, and very preserving in his friendships’.⁵¹

Plenty of others would vouch for Banks’s generosity and his desire to further science by all means at his disposal: William Herschel for one. The former oboe player from the Military Band of Hanover had recognised Uranus as a planet with a homemade telescope he and his sister Caroline had made by grinding down mirrors. Their work made Banks consider ‘our Ideas of the immensity of Space, & of the Power Goodness & Wisdom of the Great Creator’.⁵² The Society made William Herschel a fellow and awarded him the Copley Medal, but he was still so poor that he survived by playing the organ and giving music lessons. Banks convinced the King that although Maskelyne was the astronomer royal, His Majesty could do with his own personal astronomer, and while Herschel had no degree, Banks talked Farmer George into giving him a house and £200 a year, and then £50 a year for his sister.

Banks also extended the welcome mat for the French geologist and traveller Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond,⁵³ who grew Chinese hemp from seeds Banks had procured from Canton. Even though Faujas could wear out his welcome, Banks entertained him in style when he visited London, hosting him at Spring Grove, feeding him pineapples and showing him the moss that grew on volcanic rock brought back from Iceland.

On 12 August 1784 Faujas dined at the regular Royal Society banquet as a guest of Alexander Aubert.⁵⁴ Although perhaps startled at being asked to contribute 6 shillings to the dinner tab like all the other guests, the Frenchman recalled a memorable dinner that began at 5 p.m. with Banks presiding. Maskelyne made a short prayer of thanks, then the twenty-five guests⁵⁵ got stuck into roast beef, boiled beef and mutton with potatoes and vegetables, flavoured by sauces and spices from bottles on the table. The steaks and roast beef were drowned with ‘copious bumpers of strong beer called porter, drunk out of cylindrical pewter pots, which are much preferred to glasses because one can swallow a whole pint at a draught’. ⁵⁶ Fine crystal decanters were then produced along with the best port, madeira, and claret from Bordeaux. Several glasses ‘as brilliant in lustre as fine in shape’⁵⁷ were distributed to each guest, and the libations began on a grand scale in the midst of different kinds of cheese, which, rolling in mahogany boxes from one end of the table to the other, provoked the thirst of the drinkers. Banks proposed the health of the Prince of Wales, then they drank to a new fellow of the Society, and then to each of the five foreign guests. Faujas recorded:

The members of the Club afterwards saluted each other, one by one, with a glass of wine. According to their custom, one must drink as many times as there are guests, for it would be thought a want of politeness in England to drink to the health of more persons than one at a time.

A few bottles of champagne completed the enlivenment of every one. Tea came next, together with bread and butter and all the usual accompaniments: coffee followed, humbly yielding the preference to the tea, though it be the better of the two. In France we commonly drink only one cup of good coffee after dinner; in England they drink five or six of the most detestable kind.

Brandy, rum and some other strong liqueurs closed this philosophic banquet, which terminated at half past seven, as we had to be at a meeting of the Royal Society summoned for eight o’clock.⁵⁸

NO WONDER BANKS was putting on weight, and his presence again loomed large over the question of settling New South Wales. A peace agreement between England and America had been drafted on 30 November 1782, and Benjamin Franklin added his signature to the Treaty of Paris at the Hôtel d’York in the French capital on 3 September 1783.

James Matra, back in England after his disappointing trip to New York, was already seeing potential for the land he and Banks had walked over thirteen years before. In July 1783 he had written to Banks to say he’d heard about plans to settle Botany Bay, and to ask if Banks could give him some more details, since he understood that any colonisation would be under the naturalist’s direction.⁵⁹ Matra had started to think of how Britain could regain territories lost to the Americans, and how he in turn could benefit by securing a large landholding for himself. He told Banks he was now leading the restless life of a ‘solitary fugitive’. He had thought many times of New South Wales and its settlement, he said, ‘and I would prefer embarking on such a scheme, to anything much better than what I am likely to get in this hemisphere’.⁶⁰

In order to accelerate the plans and with an eye to becoming the first governor there, Matra fired off ‘A Proposal For Establishing A Settlement In New South Wales’⁶¹ on 23 August 1783 to the coalition government led by Lord North and Charles Fox. There was no distant British territory more inviting than New South Wales, he said. Cook had charted two thousand miles of it and gave ‘the most favourable account’. It had every variety of soil, only a few indigenous inhabitants, and the potential ‘with good management, and a few settlers, in twenty or thirty years’ to ‘cause a revolution in the whole system of European commerce’. Matra saw New South Wales as being perfectly positioned to trade with Japan, China and ‘the peninsula of Korea’ largely ‘unvisited by Europeans’. The climate was ‘parallel to the Spice Islands, and is fitted for the production of that valuable commodity, as well as the sugar-cane, tea, coffee, silk, cotton, indigo, tobacco, and the other articles of commerce that have been so advantageous to the maritime powers of Europe’.⁶²

Repeatedly, Matra dropped Banks’s name. Sir Joseph, he said, ‘highly approves of the settlement, and is very ready to give his opinion of it, either to his Majesty’s Ministry or others, whenever they may please to require it’.⁶³

Matra’s proposal was for the rehoming of American loyalists like himself, who were now outcasts in the United States, but he presented his plan at a time of political upheaval. North’s coalition left office in December 1783 as a new government under William Pitt⁶⁴ came in.

England’s new home secretary, Lord Sydney⁶⁵ – better known to family and friends as Tommy Townshend – told Matra that he had already chosen Canada as a safe haven for American loyalists, but he suggested that Botany Bay might ‘be a very proper region for the reception of criminals’.⁶⁶ In an amended proposal submitted to the home secretary on 2 April 1784, Matra asserted that New South Wales was a far safer option for this function than a penal colony in Africa where in 1775 to ’76 alone, of the 746 convicts sent there, ‘334 died, 271 deserted to no one knows where, and of the remainder no account could be given’.⁶⁷

While Banks was contemplating the idea of sending convicts to New South Wales, a former employee of his, Pierre Broussonet, who had taken Banks’s maidenhair tree to France, wrote to his old boss on 10 March 1785 to say that he had a gift for him: Broussonet had managed to procure one merino ram and one ewe from a Spanish flock that had been raised in France. Perhaps livestock and crops might also be transported to New South Wales.

AS THE PROBLEM OF overcrowding on the prison hulks worsened, on 16 March 1785 the Irish statesman Edmund Burke demanded to know of Parliament ‘what was to be done with these unhappy wretches and to what part of the world was it intended they should be sent’. He hoped it was not to Gambia ‘where all life dies and all death lives’.⁶⁸

Burke and Lord Beauchamp – who had been a contemporary of Banks’s at Eton and Oxford, and who had first introduced him to the King – set up a select committee to investigate and report on the implementation of the Transportation Act. The committee heard from Sir Evan Nepean,⁶⁹ Lord Sydney’s permanent undersecretary at the Home Department, on 27 April 1785. Nepean revealed that the government had already chosen Lemain,⁷⁰ on the Gambia River, as the next convict settlement.⁷¹

On 9 May, Beauchamp’s committee asked Matra what he thought about sending ‘300 or 400’ convicts under guard to New South Wales so that ‘by hard labour, [and] if furnished with proper tools and seeds, they might be able to provide convenient residence and future subsistence for themselves and those appointed to govern and direct them?’⁷² Matra replied that five hundred convicts might be safely sent, provided the guards remained.

Could a free settlement coexist at sufficient distance from the convicts? Matra was certain that it could. He said that when the Endeavour had been on the coast of New South Wales between April and July, its men had found the climate ‘perfectly agreeable to [the] European constitution’ – and since Tahitian women preferred European men, they might be brought to the new settlement ‘in any number’ to keep the colonists satisfied.

Matra was willing, he said, to head the expedition to Botany Bay as ‘the conductor and governor’. If five hundred convicts were sent, he said he would need two hundred marines and a forty-gun ship, while the colony would need to be under military law, and ministers of religion should be sent to help maintain order and humanity. Seeds and livestock could be purchased at the Cape of Good Hope, Madagascar and the Moluccas.

When the committee asked him, ‘do you think Government would run any risk in attempting this plan without further examination than you or anybody you know could give them of that country?’ Matra replied firmly, ‘I think they would not.’⁷³

On 10 May, Banks appeared before Beauchamp. He was asked if convicts could be sent to any place where they might be able by labour to support themselves. Banks replied that he had ‘no doubt that the soil of many parts of the eastern coast of New South Wales between the latitudes of 30°S and 40°S’ was sufficiently fertile to support a considerable number of Europeans who could cultivate it in the ‘ordinary modes’ used in England.⁷⁴ Botany Bay, he said, was ‘in every respect adapted to the purpose’. He did not know enough about Aboriginal language or government to advise about negotiating the takeover of an area, but he said that fish were plentiful on the coast, and that there were no dangerous wild beasts. The timber appeared ‘fit for all the purposes of house-building and ship-building’. He thought European cattle would thrive there, as would grains and legumes. Women might be brought from the Pacific islands. He concluded by saying that ‘from the fertility of the soil, the timid disposition of the inhabitants and the climate being so analogous to that of Europe, I give this place the preference to all [others] that I have seen’.⁷⁵

Still, the Africa option was cheaper. Lord Sydney sent a squadron under Commodore Edward ‘Poet’ Thompson⁷⁶ to investigate Das Voltas Bay⁷⁷ on the south-west coast of that continent.⁷⁸ Banks nominated a naturalist to sail on the Nautilus as part of the expedition, and despite First Lord of the Admiralty Richard Howe⁷⁹ objecting to using a foreigner, Banks chose Anton Hove, a Polish plant collector from the Kew Gardens. Banks gave the young Pole orders to collect specimens of every ‘plant, root or fruit which is cultivated’.⁸⁰

The squadron set sail in September 1785, but Nepean listed the proposal for a penal colony in New South Wales on the Cabinet’s agenda for December, and the Home Office regularly contacted Banks about Botany Bay.

On 23 July 1786, the expedition to Das Voltas Bay returned. Commodore Thompson had died of a fever, and no one could find a suitable bay, river or inlet.

Banks and Matra had embellished their accounts of New South Wales from the notes they had taken in 1770, but at least Cook had charted and surveyed the coastline, and found fresh water there. With Africa now quashed as a destination, Botany Bay became a beacon of hope for a government with convicts spilling out of ships along the Thames.

Nepean sharpened his nib and, with some clever accounting, managed to calculate the cost of a one-way ticket on a convict ship and three years of settlement at Botany Bay to be £32 a year per male prisoner. That was, he said, just £4 more than imprisonment in a hulk, and once in New South Wales the convicts could eventually become self-sustaining.

On 18 August 1786, Lord Sydney informed the Treasury that with Africa now out of the running, ‘His Majesty has thought advisable to fix on Botany Bay.’⁸¹ Sydney gave orders to the Admiralty for a first fleet to be made ready. His instructions for Botany Bay, while not bearing Banks’s signature, had the botanist’s fingerprints all over them.