This special issue of the Journal for Maritime Research serves as a companion piece to the special issue of Notes and Records 78 (2019), the Royal Society’s journal of the history of science, both of which were commissioned by the organisers to share the fruits of recent research into the practices of and associated with Joseph Banks. The former presented papers on a wide range of topics – Banks and women; patronage; cultures of advancement in Paris and London; and Banks the collector. The articles in this issue take the sea and the maritime world, both critical to Banks’s myriad roles, activities and interests, as its focus and structure.
In her article, Katherine Parker begins by reminding us that Banks, best known as one of the naturalists on James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to the Pacific, was not the first Briton to do this and nor did he travel there in splendid historical isolation. Indeed, as she explains and in her words, Banks chased the legacies of those who came before him, particularly William Dampier. The influences that bore on Banks as a travelling naturalist are further explored by Anna Agnarsdóttir, who remarks that not only did Banks venture across the seas, specifically to Newfoundland and Labrador, before stepping on board the Endeavour but that he also continued to search for fresh ventures, travelling to Iceland with his own band of savants following the debacle of Cook’s second voyage in the Resolution. Taking a wide perspective offered by Parker’s and Agnarsdóttir’s sharp insights, we can see clearly that by the time he was 29 years old, Banks had already spent nearly five years as a naturalist at sea, something that put him, at the time, in a class of his own. It brought him a great deal of attention, as Sünne Juterczenka points out in her article, especially from young men, ‘voluntiers’, who offered themselves to Banks in the service of exploration, hoping to experience what he did. This flow of requests helped shape an increasing tendency towards making exploration more scientific, a feature which continued into the nineteenth century though not always with the support of the Admiralty, under whose auspices these ventures were organised. David Igler’s article picks up precisely on Juterczenka’s focus on those who wanted to walk in Banks’s footsteps by peering into the often hidden world of what was going through the minds of those whom Banks chose to do what he wished he had, and what they in fact experienced when they ended up where they did – ‘the significance of inventiveness, luck, circumstance, and genuine delight in studying their surroundings’. Daniel Simpson continues this interior glance by looking in detail at one of Banks’s surrogate voyages, that of the Lady Nelson in 1800–01 in south-eastern Australia. His argument, supported by fascinating details, is that Banks’s pursuit of plants was inconsistent with the expedition’s other interests and threatened to disrupt them altogether. Simpson raises some disturbing issues in the connection between Banks’s botany and political power. Daniel Clayton takes us to the North Pacific, where Banks had never been, in order to give a sense of place to Banks’s practices. Clayton, too, disrupts prevailing and fairly established views of Banks, arguing that rather than being seen as a ‘presider’ – planning, strategising and leading – Banks was much more like an assemblage of material entities, plants, objects and ships, and people, responding to and writing letters, instructions and formulating ideas, in a dynamic whirl around him with unpredictable results. Finally, Helen McCormack compares Joseph Banks with his contemporary, William Hunter, showing how both in their respective roles as President of the Royal Society and Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy shared similar aims with regard to the production and dissemination of knowledge of the natural world. But, as McCormack demonstrates, despite a common approach – an emphasis on the eyewitness, the importance of collecting, and the study and display of specimens and artefacts in domestic museums – the activities of Banks and Hunter were motivated by contrasting concepts of the purpose of their public roles as president and professor.
This issue shares in the same objective as its Notes and Records companion: to rethink Joseph Banks as a key figure in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. We hope that this will encourage others to do the same.