TLS on Joseph Banks

on Joseph Banks

August 12, 2009

Linnaeus at the service of England

How an empire depended on Sir Joseph Banks and a systematic approach to botany
by Jim Endersby

On September 29, 1781, Dr Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of this year’s unavoidable Darwin) wrote to Joseph Banks, asking for permission to dedicate a small book of translations to him. The translations were of the botanical writings of Carl von Linné, now better known as Linnaeus. In the letter (collected in the first of six volumes of The Scientific Correspondence), Darwin explained that he and the Lichfield botanical society had decided to translate Linnaeus’s Latin into English with a view to “propagating the knowledge of Botany”, and hoped to secure Banks’s blessing for their enterprise, given “the knowledge of your general love of science & your philanthropy to wish that science to be propagated amongst your countrymen”.
Darwin’s translation appeared two years later as A System of Vegetables according to their Classes, etc, and was prefaced by the dedicatory letter, which congratulated Banks on the rare and excellent example you have given, so honourable to science, of foregoing the more brilliant advantages of birth and fortune, to seek for knowledge through difficulties and dangers, at a period of life when the allurements of pleasure are least resistible, and in an age when the general effeminacy of manners seemed beyond that of former times to discourage every virtuous exertion, justly entitles you to the preeminence you enjoy in the philosophical world.
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Banks had sought for knowledge “through difficulties and dangers” by joining Captain James Cook on the Endeavour’s voyage to Tahiti in 1768, from which he had returned laden with natural history specimens that added hugely to European knowledge of the plant world. Banks transformed his home into a virtual museum of the Pacific, and visitors were often dumbfounded by what they saw, including more than 30,000 plant specimens, which encompassed 110 new genera and 1,400 new species. The collections certainly brought Banks pre-eminence in the “philosophical world”, as the scientific world was known at the time, but his motive was hardly the “philanthropy” that Darwin politely ascribed to him. For Banks and most of his contemporaries, botany was primarily of economic importance; discovering and naming plants was the first step towards exploiting them for commercial gain. As Darwin’s preface to the System of Vegetables proclaimed, “the future improvements in Agriculture, in Medicine, and in many inferior Arts, as dying, tanning, varnishing; with many of the more important Manufactures, as of paper, linen, cordage; must principally arise from the knowledge of BOTANY”.
Neil Chambers’s collections of Banks’s letters not only provide an invaluable scholarly resource, but give a wonderful flavour of the world that produced Banks, and which he then proceeded to shape. The Scientific Correspondence contains over 2,200 items, and the first volume of The Indian and Pacific Correspondence adds another 250 to these (predominantly letters received by Banks). The standard against which projects of this kind must inevitably be compared is The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press), now in its seventeenth volume, and the Banks correspondence emerges fairly well from the comparison. Each letter has been meticulously transcribed, complete with additions and deletions; however, while the footnotes in the newest series are slightly more comprehensive than those in the earlier one, they remain rather basic compared with the wealth of scholarship that accompanies Darwin’s letters.
Banks’s letters clearly demonstrate his commitment to Britain’s imperial interests and to accurate plant classification as a means to those imperial ends. The links between them are evident in a letter from William Roxburgh in India that Banks received in November 1779. Roxburgh had gone to India as assistant surgeon on one of the East India Company’s ships, then set up in general practice in Madras, where he met Johann Gerhard Koenig, a former pupil of Linnaeus, who introduced Linnaean botany to India. Encouraged by Koenig, Roxburgh became a keen botanist, and was eventually appointed the first paid superintendent of the Company’s botanic garden in Calcutta.
In his letter, Roxburgh described some new plants he was sending, and emphasized “the astringent qualities of the Terminalia Myrobalana (Myrobal. Citrin.)”. The genus Terminalia had received its name from Linnaeus himself in 1767 (in the thirteenth edition of the Systema Naturae), but assigning the plant to the correct species was more difficult, as Roxburgh’s parenthesis shows. In 1774 the tree had received the name Myrobalanifera citrina from Petrus Houttuyn, professor of botany at Leiden, and it is now called Terminalia catappa. Yet it still goes by many different common names, including Indian almond, Bengal almond, Malabar almond, Sea bean tree and Umbrella tree; it has several Hindi names, including Baadaam, Deshi badam and Jangli badam; in Malay it’s Ketapang; and in Nepalese Kaathe badaam. And the University of Melbourne’s multilingual, multi-script plant names database (www.plantnames.unimelb.edu.au) lists dozens of others.
Putting an end to this botanical Babel had been a key motive for Linnaeus’s reforms, and while much clearly remained to be done in Banks’s time, the situation was greatly improved compared to that of a generation earlier, when each country’s botanists tended to use their own language and system of names. Roxburgh’s letter also makes it clear why accurate, unambiguous names mattered so much: “I think \[Terminalia Myrobalana\] will prove the strongest vegetable Astringent known”, he wrote, telling Banks that he used it to make ink and that it was also used by the Chinese in dyes and paints: “without it their colours would run like Ink on Blotting Paper”. He was therefore convinced that “it would prove a great acquisition to a Commercial Nation”. But only if the right plant, and the best variety of that plant, could be obtained and grown.
Sweden’s commercial interests had persuaded Linnaeus that new, simpler and more accurate names were needed in order to ensure that botanists’ time and money were well spent. Banks shared these concerns, and the adoption of the new names marked an important shift away from the cultures of curiosity, within which gentlemen like Banks had traditionally operated. Until the mid-eighteenth century, educated virtuosi such as Banks had collected anything and everything that was rare and curious; the practical uses of such collections were beneath a gentleman’s notice. However, Linnaeus’s standardized names were intended to put the plant world to work, to transform rare flowers into commodities that could be bought and sold, traded and transplanted. Linnaeus’s names allowed accurate communication between naturalists around the world. By adopting them, Banks aligned himself with Britain’s mercantile concerns and devoted himself to the use of science in the cultivation of empire. Unsurprisingly, Darwin’s plan to translate Linnaeus into English received Banks’s enthusiastic support.
By the time Erasmus Darwin wrote to him, Banks was becoming one of Europe’s best-known naturalists, but when he had set sail with Cook, he had been just one among many gentleman naturalists. His only previous, brief expedition to Newfoundland had produced neither great discoveries nor a major publication. Hearing that Cook was about to take the Endeavour to Tahiti, an excited Banks told his old school friend, William Perrin, that the South Seas had “never been visited by any man of Science in any Branch of Literature”. Joining the voyage would give Banks an opportunity to make a name for himself among Europe’s men of science.
As an ambitious young naturalist, Banks had one major asset – the huge tracts of land that made up the Revesby estate in Lincolnshire, which his father had left him when he was still in his teens. He soon abandoned his studies at Oxford and spent much of his time in London, attending scientific meetings and studying the natural history collections at the British Museum, where he became close friends with the assistant librarian, Daniel Solander, a Swede who had studied under Linnaeus. Solander advised Banks on the equipment he would need for his first voyage, and when the opportunity to sail with Cook presented itself, Banks persuaded Solander to take leave from the museum and join him – and paid him to do so.
At a time when most British expeditions depended on the ship’s surgeon to make natural history collections when and if their patients allowed them to, Banks’s deep pockets ensured that Cook’s scientific complement would exceed any seen before. Banks wrote to Perrin to tell him that, in addition to Solander, “I take also besides ourselves two men to draw & four more to Collect in the different branches of Nat. Hist. & such a Collection of Bottles Boxes Baskets bags nets &c &c &c: as almost frighten me”. Banks not only paid the salaries of all those who came with him, but provided their equipment and supplies. One of his contemporaries, the naturalist John Ellis, described the expedition’s equipment in a letter to Linnaeus, asserting that:
No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly. They have got a fine library of natural history; they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing; they have even a curious contrivance of a telescope, by which, put into the water, you can see the bottom to a great depth where the water is clear . . . besides there are many people whose sole business it is to attend them for this very purpose.
Ellis added that, according to Solander, the expedition’s equipment had cost over £1,000 (about £1 million in today’s money). Banks’s contribution was a quarter of that provided by the King himself; no wonder he was “almost frightened” by his own ambition.
It was to be July 1771 before Banks would again write “London” at the head of a letter, in which he briefly described to Perrin the expedition’s return. “Mr Buchan Mr Parkinson & Mr Sporing are all dead as is our astronomer & seven officers & about a third part of the Ships crew of Diseases contracted in the East Indies”. Yet despite these losses, the voyage with Cook was a resounding success from Banks’s perspective: he came home even more celebrated than his captain and traded his collections, expertise and fame for a vital role at the heart of Britain’s expanding empire. Despite holding no official government positions for most of his career, he became – as one of his friends put it – “HM minister of philosophic affairs”, de facto science minister to the King.
One striking aspect of these volumes is the range of Bank’s correspondents: in addition to a Who’s Who of naturalists from across Europe, there are also letters from the engineers Matthew Boulton and James Watt, and from Dr Johnson, as well as a considerable collection of noblemen and aristocrats, many of whom were more or less formally in charge of Britain’s government and the management of its empire. The sheer size of Banks’s collections made him famous, and everyone with scientific interests and ambitions came to call – either in person or by letter – seeking his friendship, advice and support. Linnaeus himself wrote (in Latin; he neither spoke nor read English), to congratulate Banks on the voyage and described him as “Tu gloria Angliae non tantum, sed totius orbis; Tu nostrum eris Oraculum!” (You are the glory not only of England, but of the whole world. You will be our Oracle!). Banks began to transform his celebrity into a web of friendship, patronage and influence that allowed him to grant favours, open doors and find positions for his friends and protégés.
Among his most regular correspondents was James Edward Smith, President of the Linnean Society of London, who shared his enthusiasm for promoting the Linnaean system. They had known each other since Smith had been a young medical student with a passion for natural history who, hoping to make a name for himself as a naturalist, had turned to Banks for encouragement and patronage. In December 1783, the two were having breakfast when a letter arrived from Sweden, announcing that Linnaeus’s son was dead (Linnaeus himself had died five years earlier) and offering to sell Banks all the Linnaean collections – for a thousand guineas. Deciding he had no space to store the collections, Banks suggested that Smith should buy them instead, since owning such an important collection would immediately give him the reputation he wanted. Smith, having persuaded his father, a wealthy cloth merchant, to part with the equivalent of over £1 million, bought the whole of Linnaeus’s collections, books, stuffed specimens, dried plants, anthropological artefacts and scientific instruments. A few years later, in 1788, he helped to found the Linnean Society at his home in London to look after the collections, and it rapidly became an important venue for naturalists wanting to meet and exchange ideas and specimens.
By bringing Linnaeus’s collections to London, Smith and the Linnean Society had effectively annexed the Linnaean system of classification, adding a new colony to the British empire of knowledge. And Banks, despite his occasional concern that specialized scientific societies would undermine the prestige of the Royal Society (of which he was President from 1778 until his death), was among the Linnean Society’s earliest members. He proudly told an Italian correspondent that “Linnaeus’s herbarium has been purchased by an Englishman & is safely arrived here so we are masters of the definitions of Species Plantarum”.
Banks shared the Society’s goal of ensuring the simple and easily understood Linnaean system of plant names should be used as widely as possible, especially in all of Britain’s botanic gardens, so that they could help reduce the country’s dependence on imports. In the year that the Linnean Society was founded, Banks received a letter from the politician Charles Jenkinson (who would become the first Baron Hawkesbury and Earl of Liverpool for his services to the King), which complained that importing Chinese tea was costing Britain between £600,000 and £700,000 a year (about £800 million today). Since “there is no possibility of preventing the consumption of tea even to its present amount”, Jenkinson felt that “the only Object We can aim at is, to produce the Article ourselves”, pointing to earlier successes with coffee and sugar, “which we now produce in abundance in our colonies”. Banks used the expertise he had drawn from correspondents like Roxburgh to propose that India, a country he never set foot in, might be suitable for tea-growing. Inspired by his suggestion, British botanists eventually found an Indian variety of Camellia sinensis (known as assamica), which broke the Chinese monopoly on the tea trade.
Jenkinson’s letter has yet to be published in this series; researchers will have to wait for the remaining volumes, which will be appearing annually until 2013, to read it and the many others (most of which have never been published before) that relate to the development and exploitation of India. Given the substantial cost of producing a printed edition like this, and considering the state of most university libraries’ finances, some researchers will no doubt regret the publisher’s decision not to produce these in an electronic format. An online edition would also have allowed the new letters to be added in sequence with those already published, whereas at present the Banks correspondence is becoming scattered over several different series of books. An electronic version would also have made it easier to find specific letters, topics or correspondents (which would be especially valuable given the inadequate index to these volumes).
One of Banks’s last letters to James Smith, December 1817, praised Smith’s article on botany in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, confessing himself to be “highly Gratified by the distinguished situation in which you have Placed me”. He also complimented Smith for his “defence of the Linnaean Natural Classes”, which Banks described as “Ingenious Entertaining & it Evinces a deep Skill in the Mysteries of Classification”. Yet, despite their continuing friendship, Banks was beginning to have his doubts about the venerable Linnaean system and he told Smith that “I Fear you will differ from me in opinion when I Fancy Jussieus Natural Orders to be Superior to Those of Linnaeus”. In referring so favourably to the French natural system of classification, founded by Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu and developed by Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, Banks must have been sure that he and Smith would “differ”, since Smith and the Linnean Society were still zealously defending the Linnaean system (which had come to be seen as essentially British) from its French rival. Their patriotic conservatism had gradually turned British botany into an intellectual backwater, as became clear the following year when Smith attempted to get himself appointed as professor of botany at the University of Cambridge. He failed and, dismayed by his rejection, publicly criticized the university for its prejudices.
The university’s Professor of Greek, James Monk, attacked the upstart Smith in an article in the Quarterly Review which suggested that the very simplicity and ease of use that had made the Linnaean system so popular was now being turned against it. Monk argued that botanical science “was a pursuit which demanded little exertion of the highest powers of intellect” and suggested that the Linnean Society (which had of course supported Smith) should have called in Its auxiliary forces, the Horticultural and Gooseberry Societies, with their irregular troops, the tulip fanciers and prize auricula men: and what with their scientific arrangements, classifications, and pruning hooks, they no doubt would have formed a very imposing body and might have taken the Botanical Chair by storm.
It was precisely the usefulness of botany, which made it so valuable to men like Banks, that damaged its intellectual standing. In the decades following Banks’s death, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which he had done so much to nurture and develop, would become the graveyard of the Linnaean botanical system, as its director, Joseph Hooker, and his colleague, George Bentham, produced their monumental Genera Plantarum (1862– 83), based on the French classificatory system. Nevertheless, the global reach that Kew and its collectors attained under Hooker’s leadership was the fulfilment of Banks’s dream, to see the gardens become “a great botanical exchange house for the empire”.


Neil Chambers, editor
THE SCIENTIFIC CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1765–1820
Six Volumes 3,088pp. £595 (US $1,050).
978 1 85196 766 7

THE INDIAN AND PACIFIC CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR JOSEPH BANKS, 1768–1820
Volume One
464pp. £100 (US $180).
978 1 85196 835 0
Pickering and Chatto



Jim Endersby lectures in History at the University of Sussex. He has recently edited a new edition of the Origin of Species, published earlier this year.