Toby Musgrave's "The Multifarious Mr. Banks"

Toby Musgrave is a plants and gardens historian, independent scholar, and consultant. He is the author or coauthor of many books, including The Plant Hunters, An Empire of Plants, The Head Gardeners, Paradise Gardens, Heritage Fruits and Vegetables and The Garden.

Musgrave applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Multifarious Mr. Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, The Natural Historian Who Shaped the World, and reported the following:

From page 99:

[Chapter title:] HMS ENDEAVOUR 

… forbearance and congeniality of both men, who came to be genuinely fond of one another and developed a warm personal friendship. The Endeavour was a happy ship, too, and Cook is due full credit for running a tight yet generally content company. Sailors were renowned for being rough folk, and while Cook had to carry out his fair share of punishment floggings for misdemeanours including drunkenness and theft (especially at Tahiti where, as we have seen, iron nails were used as currency for sexual favours), the officers and men were inspite of this genuinely fond of their captain and followed him between ships. But perhaps too, albeit inadvertently, Banks and Solander contributed to this positive atmosphere. Generally cheerful, easy-going and even-tempered, they ensured that Cook did not become annoyed, exasperated or infuriated with ‘the gentlemen’, and therefore had no frustrations or anger to vent on his officers and crew. Indeed, among their shipmates ‘the gentlemen’ were much liked.

NEW ZEALAND 

Land! The anticipated New Zealand (or what in 1642 its discoverer Abel Tasman, thinking it was part of South America, had called ‘Staten Landt’) was sighted at last by Nicholas Young early in the afternoon of 6 October [1769]. From the masthead at sunset Banks himself gazed at what he and ‘all hands’ were certain was ‘the Continent we are in search of’. But Banks at least should have known better: he was travelling with a copy of Dalrymple’s Chart of the South Pacifick Ocean, Pointing out the Discoveries made therein Previous to 1764, which clearly shows a part of the east coast of New Zealand at the same latitude (albeit with a slightly more westerly longitude position of the sighted land). The Endeavour sailed closer through the 7th, and on the evening of 8 October Banks first set foot on what transpired to be New Zealand’s North Island. The place, known to the indigenous Māori as Te Oneroa, was named Poverty Bay by Cook, ‘because it afforded us no one thing we wanted’.

It disappointed Banks too, who bemoaned the fact that he had collected ‘not above 40 species of plants’. In fact, according to an unpublished checklist-index to Solander’s similarly unpublished Primitiae Florae Novae Zelandiae (1770), the actual tally of taxa collected between 8 and 11 October was sixty-one species …

Page 99 is a small vignette of a key component of the book, Joseph Banks’s participation as naturalist aboard HMS Endeavour during Lieutenant James Cook’s first circumnavigation (1768-71). This was one of Britain’s and science’s most significant of voyages of discovery one which resulted in an increased Western interest in the Pacific and its islands, and ultimately the British colonisation of Australia. The page also reveals something of Banks’s character, the relationship between him, his scientific second-in-command, Dr Daniel Solander, and Cook, and his passion for botany. However, page 99 is not representative of the book because it divulges nothing of the long term impact of the Banksian paradigm for conducting natural history research during such voyages. Nor does it tell anything of the diverse roles performed and significant works undertaken by Banks in the 49 years between his return to terra firma and his death in 1820. I would therefore judge the page not a good test of the work as a whole but it is perhaps an intriguing teaser that leaves the browser wanting to discover more.

Banks was born to a rich family but used his wealth wisely for the advancement of science and Britain, not himself. He was an incredibly charasmatic man, perennially enthusiastic and desirous to learn, and a born organiser. The ‘more’ of his professional work includes pivotal roles as an Enlightenment figure, close friend of King George III and champion of Iceland during the Napoleonic Wars. Banks was an influential promoter of colonial expansion and the ‘father of Australia’. He was a renowned scientific panjandrum who funded his own ‘research institute’ at his London home, corresponded globally with a network over 300 scientists, pioneered a scientific component to voyages of discovery, and established the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew as a scientific institution. Here he organised professional plant hunting expeditions and economic plant transfers, and as such was indirectly responsible for the ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’. He was President of the Royal Society for an unequalled 42 years, a driving force behind the first Ordnance Survey mapping of Britain and founder of various learned societies including the Royal Horticultural Society. Lastly, his ‘aqusition’ of Merino sheep from Spain for the British and indirectly the Australian national flocks revolutionised the wool industry. Yet today he is an overlooked figure.

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--Marshal Zeringue