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ABSTRACT
Much of the historiography of European encounters in the Pacific focuses on the period from 1768 onward, when the emerging British scientific community and the growing British Empire consolidated their relationship. In this arena, Joseph Banks remains the example par excellence, thanks to his participation in the Endeavour voyage and his central place in a wide-reaching network of botanists, artists, politicians, and patricians. Banks’ career and life after the Endeavour’s return until his death in 1820 is long and nuanced, deserving the growing body of scholarship dedicated to the intricate and expansive networks he grew. Such has been the focus on the period after 1770, however, that it is not merely pedantic to reinforce that the South Seas were a salient, if not quotidian, topic within British culture prior to 1768, when the Endeavour set sail for Tahiti. This article, therefore, is concerned less with the legacies of Banks and the Endeavour and more with the legacies he chased and the discourses he entered into when he joined the Transit expedition. It will compare Banks’ experiences with shipboard botany and publication with those of William Dampier, who sailed at the turn of the eighteenth century.
Notes
1 A selection of titles includes: Thomas, Islanders; Armitage and Bashford, eds. Pacific histories; Rigby, van der Merwe, and Williams, Pacific exploration; Miller and Reill, eds., Visions of empire, especially part I; Reidy, Kroll, and Conway, Exploration and science; Reidy, Tides of history; Drayton, Nature’s government; Cock, ‘Scientific servicemen’; Lincoln, ed., Science and exploration.
2 Gascoigne, Science in the service of empire; Crosland, ‘Royal Society and the Academie des Sciences’; Smith, ‘Banks, Tupaia, and Mai’; Carter, Sir Joseph Banks.
3 With regard to Banks and collecting, the work of Neil Chambers is especially relevant. See Chambers, Joseph Banks and the British Museum; Chambers and Joppien, ‘Scholarly library’; Chambers, et al., Endeavouring Banks. On collecting and the Pacific, see Hooper, Art and divinity, chap. 3; Brunt, Thomas, Mallon, and Kahanu, ‘Museum collections’; McAleer and Rigby, Captain Cook and the Pacific, chap. 6; Newell, ‘Irresistible objects’. On collecting more generally, see MacGregor, Curiosity and enlightenment; Jasanoff, Edge of empire. The interest in collecting also intersects with the material turn, see Craciun and Schaffer, eds., Material cultures.
4 Craciun, ‘What is an explorer?’; Bourguet, ‘The explorer’; Parker, ‘The savant and the engineer’.
5 For more on the recent discussions on Cook and memorialisation, see Parker ‘Coming to terms with Captain Cook’. For more critique of the misuse of Cook within Australian nationalist rhetoric, see Roberston, The Captain Cook myth. In the New Zealand context, see Ngata, Kia Mau.
6 Quote from Williams, Great South Sea, 166. See also King, ‘Imperial myth-making’; Williams, Death of Captain Cook. While the majority of literature on Pacific history focuses on post-1770, there is of course a lively historiography on the pre-Cook Pacific. Recent contributions include Douglas, Science, voyages, and encounters, chaps. 1–2; Buschmann, Slack, and Tueller. Navigating the Spanish lake; Buschmann, Iberian visions.
7 This periodisation is explained in Chaplin, ‘Pacific before empire’, and Thomas, ‘Age of empire’. As this article bears out, I think this decisive sort of periodisation is limiting in the case of the history of Pacific exploration.
8 For more on the closed nature of the Pacific with reference to the Spanish see Buschmann, Iberian visions. For the Dutch, see Schilder, ‘From secret to common knowledge’.
9 Carr, ‘Books that sailed’, 195.
10 Ryan, ‘Le Président des terres australes’. In his editorial comments in the English translation of de Brosses, Callander replaced the French with the British state. Callander, ed., Terra Australis cognita.
11 Joseph Banks, Endeavour journal, 25 Aug. 1768. Text prepared from a manuscript, ‘The Endeavour journal of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768–1771’, available at the Library of New South Wales, accessed 22 Mar. 2020, http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0501141.txt.
12 Banks, Endeavour journal, vol. 1, 30.
13 Williams, Naturalists at sea, 89. Linnaeus was disappointed to have never received specimens from Banks and Solander after their Pacific voyage. Jonsell, ‘Linnaeus’, 94.
14 For more on the role of natural history at the Royal Society, see Casa, The singular; Gascoigne, ‘Royal Society, natural history’; Thomas, ‘Philosophical storehouse’. See also RS Cl.P/19/7, fos. 9r–10v, ‘Directions for sea-men, bound for far-voyages’; RS RBO/1/33, fos. 149–52, ‘Directions for sea-men bound for farre voyages, by Mr Hooke’; RS MS/58, ‘Usefull and necessary Instructions for Such as undertake long voyages at Sea, 1739’.
15 While this is true for Britain, Sweden, and elsewhere, Linnaeus’s ideas were not readily accepted everywhere, for example in Germany. Nor were they universally accepted in Britain, as evidenced by the derivate system of Robert Brown and the scepticism of Thomas Pennant. The Linnaean system met particular resistance in France, where alternative systems were advocated by the Comte de Buffon and Bernard de Jussieu. Jonsell, ‘Linnaeus’, 93, 95; Torrens, ‘Natural history’, 84.
16 Ibid., 81–2.
17 RS CMO V, 9/6/1768, f. 313.
18 Williams, Naturalists at sea, 75.
19 Hawkesworth, Account of the voyages. For more on the voyage’s publicity upon return, see Williams, Naturalists at sea, 88.
20 Letters surrounding Banks’s exit from Cook’s second voyage are included in Cameron, ‘Failure of the philosophers’. For more on Banks’s Iceland voyage, see Banks, Iceland and the North Atlantic.
21 Their work was only published in the late-twentieth century in a luxurious publication limited to 100 copies, see Banks, Florilegium. A more accessible condensed edition was published in 2017, see Gooding, Mabberley, and Studholme, Banks’ florilegium.
22 This is part of the argument of my forthcoming monograph, originally posited in Parker, ‘Contentious waters’.
23 The Campeachy journals are part 2 in Dampier, Voyages and descriptions.
24 Biographical information is drawn from Williams, Naturalists at sea, chap. 1. See also Dampier, New voyage; A Voyage to New Holland; Capt. Dampier’s vindication. Secondary work on Dampier includes: Gill, Devil’s mariner; Norris, ed., Buccaneer explorer; Preston and Preston, Pirate of exquisite mind; Mitchell, Dampier’s monkey. For Dampier’s continuing relevance to botany, see George, William Dampier in New Holland; Sáerz-Arroyo, et al., ‘Value of evidence about past abundance’.
25 Williams, Naturalists at sea, 74.
26 Baer, ‘Dampier at the crossroads’. For more on Dampier’s editorial process, see Williams, Great South Sea, 113–14; Edwards, Story of the voyage, 17–32; Kelly, ‘Bordering on fact’, 159–65; McCarthy, ‘Who do you trust?’. The extant copy of his manuscript, written long-hand by a scribe and containing editorial notes in Dampier’s hand, is at BL Sloane MS 3236.
27 Evelyn, Diary, vol. 5, 295.
28 Thomas Murray, portrait of William Dampier, oil on canvas, c. 1697–8, 29½ in. x 24¾ in. (749 mm x 629 mm), National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 538.
29 Philosophical Transactions 19 (1695): 426. The reviewer might have been the famed collector Hans Sloane, although Pollock says it was another Fellow of the Royal Society, the botanist John Ray. Pollock, ‘Geographicall compass’, 67.
30 Williams, Naturalists at sea, 21.
31 Eleven plants from New Holland are described in Ray, Historia plantarum, vol. 3. Ray likely wrote the plant supplement in Dampier, Voyage to New-Holland. Some plants also went to Plukenet, botanist to Queen Anne, who published them in Amaltheum botanicum.
32 Others did write their own accounts of the voyage. See Funnell, Voyage round the world.
33 There were two published accounts of that voyage: Rogers, Cruising voyage; Cooke, Voyage to the South Sea.
34 Dampier saw breadfruit when he stopped at Guam, one of the Mariana Islands, then called the Ladrones. Dampier, New voyage, 205. Anson was so struck by breadfruit in Tinian, another of the Marianas, that he ordered a china pattern with the fruit on it. Williams, Prize of all the oceans, 146; Caddy, Shugborough, 64. For more on Bligh’s breadfruit voyages, see Dening, Mr Bligh’s bad language; Oliver, Return to Tahiti.
35 Williams, Naturalists at sea, 27.
36 Dampier, New voyage, 312–13. For more on the fall-out of Dampier’s description of aboriginal peoples, see Douglas, ‘Slippery word, ambiguous praxis’, and ‘Terra Australis to Oceania’; Williams, Great South Sea, 108–10, 125, 130; Edwards, Story of the voyage, 31.
37 Banks, Endeavour journal, vol. 2, 50.
38 For more on the Narbrough expedition, including new research on Don Carlos, see Narbrough, Voyage.
39 First court martial: TNA, ADM 1/5262/14. The second court martial was for the death of the boatswain as well as Fisher’s treatment; he was cleared of the death but found guilty of harsh treatment. TNA, ADM 1/5262, fos. 287–351.
40 Ibid, fo. 287.
41 Halley, Three voyages, introduction.
42 For Halley’s request of Harrison’s court martial, see TNA ADM 2/26, fo. 34. Ironically, Harrison had submitted a longitude scheme to the Royal Society in 1694. For his commission and Halley’s mention of wanting a commissioned officer, see Halley, Three voyages, documents 32 and 50, respectively.
43 Narbrough, Account of several late voyages, xxix. This voyage collection was a collaboration between Fellows of the Royal Society Tancred Robinson, John Ray, and Hans Sloane. Robinson likely wrote the introduction.
44 See the Royal Society instructions to sailors and travellers cited in footnote 14 above.
45 The training of the Royal Navy and its broader role in British society are discussed in Wilkinson, British Navy and the state; Rodger, The wooden world; Wilson, ‘Britain: practising aggression’; Dickinson, Educating the Royal Navy.
46 For more on the ideal observer on exploratory expeditions, see Parker, ‘Savant and the engineer’. For the discussion of Anson’s views in particular, see ibid., 15–19.
47 For the Dalrymple and Cook command debate, Nov. 1767–Apr. 1768, see RS CMO V, fos. 177, 227, 292, 299.
48 See Williams, Naturalists at sea, chap. 6 for an introduction to this point.
49 Dampier, New voyage, dedication.
50 Dampier, Voyage to New Holland, dedication.
51 This was by far the largest payment of its kind in the eighteenth century. By comparison, Robertson received £3400 for Charles V, Hume £1940 for the first two volumes of his History, Johnson £1575 for his Dictionary, and only £100 for Rasselas. For discussions of the Hawkesworth account, see John Lawrence Abbott, John Hawkesworth, ch. 7, esp. 147–7; Edwards, Story of the voyage, ch. 5; and Lamb, Preserving the self, ch. 3.
52 For a discussion of this issue, see Bravo, ‘Geographies of exploration and improvement’.
53 As quoted in Williams, Naturalists at sea, 76.
54 Spate, Monopolists and freebooters, vii. Spate here was referring specifically to the period between the voyages of Abel Tasman (1642–44) and William Dampier (ca. 1700) in the seventeenth century, but the point stands for the period prior to Cook more broadly.