Placing Joseph Banks in the North Pacific

ABSTRACT

The South Pacific was a fulcrum of Joseph Banks's maritime world and global networks. The North Pacific was a distant and intangible fringe. This article is concerned with how Banks should be ‘placed’ in the North Pacific. It tracks how Banks's activities have been delineated in terms of languages and categories of global and local, and centre and margin, and then considers the historical and geographical specifics apposite to his connection to the North Pacific. In this setting, ideas of place (as location and assignment) and capital (as a circulatory and everyday practice of exchange and opportunism) come into view and question the distinction between science and commerce in Banks historiography. The article considers a diverse group of non-Indigenous figures – explorers, traders, cartographers, scientists, collectors – operating in the North Pacific in the 1780s and 1790s whose initiatives and missives passed across Banks's desk, and assesses their place in Banks's archive by drawing on Peter Sloterdijk's ideas about the interiorising and exteriorising logic of capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Joseph Banks
• North Pacific
• capital
• centres of calculation

Correction Statement

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Notes

1 See, Fisher, Contact and conflict; Clayton, Islands of truth, Hoover, ed., Nuu-chah-nulth voices; Igler, Great ocean, chap. 3; Berg, ‘Sea otters and iron’; Carlson, ‘Sea otter man’; Banks, et al., eds., Sir Joseph Banks; and BBC, Taboo.

2 Matsuda, Pacific worlds, 187.

3 The article works chiefly with Sloterdijk, World interior of capital. For a good overview of Stolerdijk's book, and its place in his wider philosophical project, see Moonen, ‘Modern arts of world-making’.

4 The manuscript chart is included in Beaglehole, ed., Journals of Captain Cook, 3, plate 38; and docs. 229.

5 Lamb and Bartoli, ‘James Hanna and John Henry Cox’.

6 Howay, ‘Early days’, 42–3.

7 Howay, ed., Voyages of the Columbia, 345–50.

8 Chambers, ed., Indian and Pacific correspondence, vol. 2, doc. 66, from Richard Cadman Etches, 14 Mar. 1785; and docs. 229, 230, 232, 235.

9 These figures are based on Bob Galois's synthesis of Cadman correspondence and financial records, in Galois, ed., Voyage to the north west side of America, Table 1, 18, also see 6–8, 276–84; The National Archives, Currency converter (accessed 5 Jan. 2019). Shortly thereafter, in December 1787, William Bligh (master of the Resolution on Cook's third voyage) sailed for Tahiti to take breadfruit plants to the West Indies to feed the slave population; and, in January 1788, 11 British ships arrived at Botany Bay with a cargo of convicts to establish a penal colony in Australia. Etches's venture constituted a third leg of this British project, and they were all attempts to ‘derive benefit’ from Cook's ‘distant discoveries’, as Bligh put it. See Bligh, Voyage to the South Seas, 7. Historians have debated whether (in the memorable phrase of Vincent Harlow) these ventures amounted to a ‘swing to the East’ in British imperial strategy in the wake of the Seven Years War (1756–63). Harlow, Second British Empire, vol. 1, chap. 3; and Bowen, ‘British conceptions’. On how these post-Cook voyages can be traced through the collections of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, see McAleer and Rigby, Captain Cook, chap. 7.

10 Gibson, Otter skins, Boston ships, 58.

11 Marx, Capital, 3, 379.

12 Walker, Account of a voyage, 56, 62.

13 Strange, Journal and narrative, 2–3, 26; Mackay, ‘Presiding genius’, 35.

14 Mackay, ‘Myth science and experience’, 100–1.

15 Klein, ‘Politeness’.

16 Meares, Voyages, 142.

17 Cited in Gough, ‘Introduction’, xxxix.

18 Mapp, Elusive west, 432.

19 The full story is told in Tovell, Inglis, and Engstrand, Voyage to the Northwest Coast.

20 On this battle, see Clayton, Islands of truth, part 3.

21 Jewitt, Adventures and sufferings, 30.

22 For an extended discussion, see Clayton, Islands of truth, part 2.

23 Hoppit, ‘Banks's provincial turn’, 403–4.

24 Ibid., 406.

25 Ibid., 407.

26 And one wonders about whether such an orientation might fuel, or be fed by, the current resurgence in nationalist, separatist, identitarian and isolationist sentiment across the world.

27 Jan de Vries, ‘Playing with scales’.

28 See, especially, Livingstone, Putting science in its place.

29 Werritt, Introduction, 426. See Goodman's article in this issue.

30 Rupke, ‘Afterword’, 450.

31 Said, Culture and imperialism, 50.

32 Marx, Grundrisse, 856.

33 UBC, Logbook of the Hancock, f. 38.

34 Cited in Sloterdijk, World interior of capital, 198.

35 Ibid., 169–72.

36 Ibid., 172.

37 See Williams, ‘Common centre’; and Miller, ‘Joseph Banks’.

38 I worked on Banks's scattered papers and the Dawson Turner copies in the British Museum in the early 1990s, before Neil Chambers's project to collate his Indian and Pacific correspondence had come to fruition. Chambers is deferred to here. He has pulled together most of the material pertaining to the North-west Coast, which was previously housed in archives in British Columbia, California, Hawai’i, New South Wales and Scotland, as well as London, although the 1920s British Columbia historians F.W. Howay and C.F. Newcombe collated a good portion of it. Only dribs and drabs of new Banks North-west Coast material has come to light in recent decades, not least in the work of Kenneth Cozens, Bob Galois, and Robert King. For overviews of Banks's connections to the North Pacific, see also Gascoigne, Science in the service of empire, and Rodger, Insatiable earl, 204–8.

39 Mapp, Elusive west; Fichter, So great a proffit.

40 Sloterdijk, World interior of capital, 63.

41 Ibid., 133. The allusion, of course, is to the work of maritime historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh.

42 See Clayton, Islands of truth, chap. 11.

43 Chambers ed., Indian and Pacific correspondence, vol. 3, doc. 139, from Banks, 22 Feb. 1791.

44 See Chambers, ed., Indian and Pacific correspondence, vol. 4, docs. 85, and 156, 187, 188, 311; and vol. 4, docs. 13, 20, 57, 96, 101, 116, 140, 149, 171, 178, 195, 196, 198, 200, 203, 204, 224, 278, 309; Lamb, ed., George Vancouver, vol. 4, app. 5, Selections from Menzies's correspondence with Banks, 1614–1632; Newcombe, ed., Menzies’ journal.

45 Sloterdijk, World interior of capital, 132.

46 Menzies, ‘Description’.

47 Chambers, ed., Indian and Pacific correspondence, vol. 2, doc. 93, from Richard Cadman Etches, 29 Sep. 1786.

48 Mackay, In the wake of Cook, 61; King, ‘Long wish’d for object’. See also, see Carter, Sir Joseph Banks. Banks published Engelbert Kaempfer's Japanese botanical drawings (held in the British Museum), Icones selectae Plantarum quae in Japonia collegit et delineavit Engelbertus Kaempfer, in 1791.

49 Howay, ‘Four letters’.

50 Zilberstein, ‘Objects of distant exchange’, 620.

51 Ibid. See also, Igler, Great ocean; Hoover, ed., Nuu-chah-nulth voices.

52 Chambers, ed., Scientific correspondence, vol. 3, doc. 877, from Thomas Drylander, 9 Oct. 1788.

53 Chambers, ed., Indian and Pacific correspondence, vol. 3, doc. 311, Nootka Sound, 26 Sep. 1792.

54 To add to the intrigue, still the best article on this question is an unpublished paper by Barbara Belyea, ‘Aita-Aita Meares’. A good selection of documents pertaining to Dixon, Meares, Etches, Colnett and the Nootka Crisis are reproduced and annotated in Lang and Walker, eds., Explorers.

55 Gascoigne, ‘Joseph Banks’, 152.

56 Secord, Visions of science, 57.

57 Ronda, Finding the west, 23.

58 For a theoretical overview of geographers’ fascination with assemblages, see Anderson, et al., ‘On assemblages and geography’.

59 Sloterdijk, World interior of capital, 78–9.