3. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 46-76

Joseph Banks in Paradise, 9-10; Herschel on the Moon, 1-4

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Banks tried to join Cook's next Pacific expedition in the summer of 1772, enlisting such eminent figures as the chemist Joseph Priestley, the painter Johann Zoffany, and the young physician James Lind, who later taught Shelley at Eton. Cook welcomed them, and had the Resolution outfitted to accommodate them, but the Admiralty not only objected but even had the equipment that Banks had already loaded on the ship dumped on the quayside. It made it clear that it was not interested in another scientific voyage, so Banks underwrote his own, commissioning the Sir Lawrence for an expedition to the Hebrides, Fingal's Cave, and Iceland, but made no significant discoveries.

Back home, he and Solander assembled their collection into "a complete museum of Pacific culture, combining natural history with ethnology and human artefacts in a quite new way." He joined the major scientific societies in London, and became the "unofficial director" of King George's gardens at Kew. He took a mistress, Sarah Wells, whom he set up in an apartment on Chapel Street where "he would meet Solander and his other friends, give noisy dinner parties and have plenty of talk of science and adventure. This ménage seemed an extension of his Tahitian liberties." There were rumors that he and Sarah had a child together, but this is unconfirmed.

In 1774 a member of Cook's fleet returned to England with "a tall and strikingly handsome Tahitian man, who was soon to become known in England as 'Mai' or 'Omai.'" He became a celebrity in England after Banks took him in "partly as an honoured guest, and partly as an exotic specimen.... [Banks] also caused something of a scandal by absolutely refusing to teach Omai to read, or to have him instructed in any form of Christian religion."

"An imposing portrait of Omai, standing formally alongside Banks and Solander, was painted by William Parry, and displayed at the Royal Academy in 1777." 

Omai, by Joshua Reynolds

Omai returned to the South Pacific in 1777 when Cook left on his third voyage. He became a merchant, selling Western goods to the Tahitians, as well as "doing Banks's job in reverse, explaining European culture to the sceptical Tahitians, ... but [he] never fully reintegrated into Tahitian society."

Banks's open relationship with Sarah Wells "suggests that he too had been permanently affected by his Tahitian experience." He shrugged off the scandal because he "genuinely believed that British society was often cruelly restrictive toward women, although he told the author Mrs Ann Radcliffe that he thought women themselves were often responsible" because the way they treated "the smallest deviation of a Female character from the Rigid paths of Virtue is more severe than Death & more afflicting than the tortures of the Dungeon."

The news of Cook's murder by natives in Hawaii in February 1779 didn't reach England until the following year. Some of Cook's officers thought he had become too aggressive in his approach to the islanders, using "heavily armed beach landing-parties, and ... seizing native hostages upon arrival." In England Cook was celebrated as a kind of martyr, but "Cook's violent death, and Omai's strange, alienated return to Tahiti ... were premonitions of the colonial tragedy that was eventually to follow."

Somerset House in 1836

Banks never took another voyage of exploration, and after he was elected president of the Royal Society in 1778, when he was only thirty-five, he seemed to decide to settle down. In March 1779 he married a wealthy heiress, Dorothea Hugessen, after an amicable parting with Sarah Wells. "Banks settled down to a position at the heart of the British scientific establishment for the next forty-one years." He oversaw the move of the Royal Society to Somerset House on the Strand, overlooking the Thames, where it became "a palace of science." Banks was knighted in 1781 for his work on the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which became one of the world's greatest botanical collections.

Solander's death in 1782 "fatally delayed any further work on Banks's great Endeavour travel book." In 1787, only forty-four, Banks suffered a disabling case of gout, which eventually incapacitated him, but didn't stem his enthusiasm for scientific discovery.

He revealed himself as a talent-spotter of genius, encouraging expeditions to Australia, Africa, China, and South America; supporting projects as diverse as telescope-building, ballooning, merino sheep-farming and weather forecasting; helping to found museums of botany, anthropology, comparative anatomy; and above all maintaining through a huge network of correspondence and personal meetings the idea of science as a truly shared and international endeavour, even in a time of war, and even in relentless (if well-mannered) competition with the French. 

But he never finished his own account of the Endeavour voyage, which the French naturalist Georges Cuvier referred to as "forming 'an epoch in the history of science.'"

Banks's Endeavour Voyage may count as one of the great unfinished masterpieces of Romanticism, as mysterious in its own way as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," with which it bears some curious similarities, as an account of a sacred place which has been partly lost, and to which there is no return.... His great Endeavour voyage had launched an Age of Wonder. 

William Herschel, by Lemuel Francis Abbott, 1785

One of the talents that Banks spotted, shortly after becoming president of the Royal Society, was William Herschel. William Watson, secretary of the Royal Society, had heard from his son about an amateur astronomer in Bath whose homemade telescope had an unusually high resolution. The younger Watson had met the man, who spoke with a German accent, on a back street in Bath one night where he was observing the moon. Herschel was at that time the organist at the Bath Octagon Chapel and gave music lessons. After visiting him at his home, which was full of astronomical equipment, and meeting Herschel's sister, Caroline, who was his housekeeper and "astronomical assistant," Watson invited him to join the Bath Philosophical Society. Herschel also began submitting papers to the society, the best of which Watson forwarded on to his father at the Royal Society.

Herschel's papers were "strange ventures into speculative cosmology and the philosophy of science." In one of them, Herschel said that with his home-made telescopes he had seen "forests" on the moon, and he was convinced that the moon was inhabited. When this paper was published in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions in 1780, the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, was outraged, having demonstrated in his own writings that the moon had no atmosphere capable of supporting life. Maskelyne wrote to Watson in Bath challenging Herschel's assertions.

Watson advised Herschel to revise his findings in the light of Maskelyne's criticisms, and Herschel wrote to the Astronomer Royal saying that he had shown "a certain Enthusiasm" in his paper that was the result of his being "young in the Science of Astronomy." But he stuck to his belief that "the moon was 'beyond doubt' inhabited by life 'of some sort or other.'" And he made the teasing suggestion "Perhaps -- and not unlikely -- the Moon is the planet and the Earth the satellite" and expressed the sentiment, "For my part, were I to choose between the Earth and the Moon, I should not hesitate a moment to fix upon the Moon for my habitation!" Maskelyne paid a visit to Herschel in Bath, and, although "the visit seems to have been somewhat stormy," he was impressed by Herschel's home-made telescopes. He also met Caroline, who recorded the visit in her journal, including her brother's exclamation, when Maskelyne left, "That is a devil of a fellow!"

Maskelyne's conclusion was that Herschel and his sister "were provincials, émigrés, and poor self-taught enthusiasts" who were unlikely to contribute anything of potential significance to astronomy. "Less than a year later, in March 1781, Banks was amazed to hear that William Herschel was about to revolutionise the entire world of Western astronomy.... Herschel had discovered what was perhaps a new planet." The Herschels' observations "would change not only the public conception of the solar system, but of the whole Milky Way galaxy and the structure and meaning of the universe itself." 

Herschel was born in Hanover in 1738, and his sister Caroline was twelve years younger. He was in his thirties before he began to devote himself to astronomy. His father, Isaac Herschel, was a musician, a military bandsman with the Hanover Foot Guards. Because the king of England was also Elector of Hanover, the Hanoverian military was integral to the British military. Isaac and his wife, Anna, had ten children, but only six survived infancy. Anna Herschel favored her first-born, Jacob, and her eldest daughter, Sophie. "With the remaining children she was more severe, especially with her youngest and least promising daughter, Caroline."

At fourteen, William joined the Hanover regimental band to which his father and Jacob already belonged. He mastered instruments ranging from the oboe to the organ, and also turned to composing. (Some of Herschel's musical compositions are available on recordings.) He was also interested in philosophy, and Caroline remembered heated arguments between the brothers on philosophical questions. In the spring of 1756, the Hanover Foot Guards were sent to England at the outbreak of the Seven Years War, and Isaac, Jacob, and William went with them. "William fell in love with the country, began to learn the language, and made a small circle of English friends." They returned in December 1756 to fight the French, and though Jacob obtained a discharge from the army, Isaac and William fought in the battle of Hastenbeck in July 1757. The family decided to get William out of harm's way, too, and he and Jacob went to England. They supported themselves by giving music lessons and as freelance musicians, but in 1759 Jacob decided to return to Hanover.

William, now twenty-one, was alone in England. His father had been taken prisoner, making the spoiled and bullying Jacob head of the household, to Caroline's distress. When Isaac was released in 1760, his health had been ruined and he let Anna and Jacob run things, though he did manage to obtain for the AWOL William a formal discharge from the army in 1762. Caroline was in poor health, having come down with smallpox when she was five and typhus when she was eleven. Her growth had been stunted -- she was only about five feet tall -- and her face had been scarred by the smallpox. Considered unmarriageable, she became the family housekeeper and maidservant. She was delighted, then, when William, the only member of the family who had ever treated her well, returned to Hanover in the summer of 1764.

William had supported himself as a musician and music teacher in the north of England, while pursuing his literary, mechanical, and philosophical interests as well. He wrote fluently in French as well as German and English. His speculations on the nature of God had led him to describe the deity "memorably, in German, as 'the unknowable, must-exist Being.' With this formula he was able to set aside, for the time being at least, the problem of a personal Creator." He also composed an oratorio based on Paradise Lost, the score of which has been lost.

He had begun reading widely in astronomy, too, and "began to be preoccupied with various cosmological problems: what was the relation between music, mathematics and star patterns? Was there life on the moon? What was the structure and composition of the sun? How far away were the nearest stars? What was the true size and shape of the Milky Way?" He was "a tall, commanding figure, with a high, intellectual forehead, and very striking dark eyes." He made friends easily, and when he met the philosopher David Hume by accident, Hume invited him to dinner.

William's return to Hanover was brief, only two weeks, and he left on the day of Caroline's first communion, so she didn't even get to see him off. He stayed away for eight more years, and didn't return for his father's funeral in 1767.

2. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 13-46

Joseph Banks in Paradise, 4-8

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The Endeavour arrived in Tahiti six weeks before the transit, having lost only four crew members along the way. Banks had been involved in the incident that took the lives of two of them: On an expedition he led ashore in Tierra del Fuego, his black servants got drunk on a stolen bottle of rum, and froze to death in a snowstorm. Another member of the team, the botanical artist Alexander Buchan, had suffered an epileptic seizure, and Banks's attentions had been directed at seeing to Buchan. Banks had done what he could to rescue his servants, but he was deeply depressed by their deaths. "Cook had not blamed him for his companions' deaths; but for the first time perhaps, [Banks] felt the weight of his responsibilities."

Another death aboard ship also drew Banks's compassion: A young sailor committed suicide after being accused of theft. Banks wrote in his journal about "the powerfull effects that shame can work on young minds." Holmes comments that "it seems clear from Banks's entry that he suspected homosexual bullying by an older member of the crew." He expressed less compassion over the death of Buchan, "from what appeared to be a repeat of the epileptic fit," after their arrival at Tahiti, noting only that the death of the artist made his work harder.

Cook built an armed encampment, Fort Venus, on the beach in Tahiti. It "may have been as much designed to keep the sailors in, as the Tahitians out," but the curfew "was not very strictly observed, especially by the officers." The fort did provide some protection from theft:

To the Europeans theft was a violation of legal ownership, an assault on private property and wealthy. To the Tahitians it was a skilful affirmation of communal resources, an attempt to balance their self-evident poverty against overwhelming European superfluity.

Nails were especially sought after, because they were used to buy sex. "Among the able seamen the initial going rate was one ship's nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in. The Tahitians well understood a market economy." Cook's attempt to regulate this trade was "'quite unsupported,' he later drily observed, by any of his officers." One consequence, however, was the spread of venereal disease, which Cook, who had had his crew medically tested before departure, wanted to blame on the French or the Spanish, but admitted that the Tahitians were probably correct when they called it "the British disease."

Although his artist, Sydney Parkinson, disapproved of the sexual license, Banks didn't. "He was clearly attractive to Tahitian women -- robust, generous, good-humoured -- and it is striking how quickly he gained a footing (if that is the term) in Tahitian society generally." Oborea, the Tahitian queen, was quite taken with him, but he found her ugly and much preferred one of her servants, Otheothea. "Characteristically, Banks was virtually the only member of the Endeavour who bothered to learn more than a very few words of Tahitian." He compiled a basic vocabulary and became the chief trading officer for the Endeavour.

He was also able to partake in Tahitian ceremonies not strictly approved of by Cook. As a result, from May 1769 onwards, Banks's journal entries steadily change their character. They are still full of exquisite botanical and zoological details, but they become more and more anthropological. People begin to replace plants. The daily journal entries begin to cover an astonishing range of phenomena: tattooing, nose-flute-playing, naked wrestling, roasting dogs, surfing.... The Enlightenment botanist, the aristocratic collector and classifier, was steadily being drawn in to share another ethnic culture and its customs.... Banks was becoming an ethnologist, a human investigator, more and more sympathetically involved with another community. The Tahitians are no longer "savages," but his "friends." He was trying to understand Paradise, even if he did not quite believe in it.

For the observation of the transit, Banks led a team to Moorea, an outlying island, where he made an effort to explain to the Tahitians the purpose of the expedition.

Despite his participation in Tahitian culture, on one excursion to explore the western part of the island, Banks woke one morning to find his clothes had been stolen, along with his pistol and his powder-horn. He suspected that Queen Oborea had been a participant in the theft. But on the same excursion he became the first European to witness, or at least to record, the "strange, extreme and quintessentially South Seas sport" of surfing. "The Tahitians had developed what were clearly surfboards, constructed out of the smooth, curved ends of old canoes.... Most extraordinary of all, this perilous activity evidently had absolutely no practical purpose or possible use. It was nothing to do with fishing, or transport, or navigation. The Tahitians did it for the sheer, inexhaustible delight of the thing."

Banks was the exception in his participation, however. "After eight weeks it became clear that many other officers were not integrating so well into the Tahitian way of life." Cook himself treated the Tahitians rather high-handedly for minor offenses, and Banks was critical of the captain in his journal. He began to experience tension with crew. When the Tahitians roasted a dog for a feast, "Banks carefully took down the recipe. Most of the sailors were repelled, but Banks declared the results to be delicious." He also experienced some sort of conflict with the ship's surgeon, Jonathan Monkhouse, that almost led to a duel. "Sydney Parkinson recorded a confrontation between the two, and thought it arose over Monkhouse propositioning Otheothea."

Engraving of Marae Mahaiatea on Tahiti Island, published in 1799.

These tensions may have led Cook to send Banks off on a separate expedition to circumnavigate the entire island in a small sailing boat. "For Banks ... it was a glorious scientific field expedition, and a tantalising extension of his new anthropological investigations." Among the discoveries was "an enormous stone 'marai' or funeral monument, shaped like a pyramid, some forty-four feet high and nearly 300 feet wide, with steps of superbly polished white coral down both sides." It "was unsettling to Banks because its construction seemed technically inexplicable. 'It is almost beyond belief that Indians could raise so large a structure without the assistance of Iron tools to shape their stones or mortar to join them.' Not far away was another mystery: a huge wicker man constructed of basketwork, evidently for some obscure sacrificial rite."

When Banks returned from his expedition, "Cook had completed a beautiful and lucid chart of the island, the figure of eight with its 'marshy isthmus' at the join, which would serve European mariners for generations to come."

The expedition began to plan to leave after its stay of three months. For the Tahitians, Banks planted the seeds of lemon, lime, and orange trees and of watermelons, which he had gathered in South America. And he decided to take up to offer of Tupia, a Tahitian priest, to return with Banks to England, along with his son. Cook questioned the decision until Banks agreed to be responsible for Tupia. Banks wrote about Tupia in his journal as if he were an exotic pet, like the lions and tigers some of his neighbors in England kept. The entry "shows that Banks, for all his sympathy and humanity, could easily revert to his role as Linnaean collector and wealthy European landowner on a jaunt among the natives."

The Endeavour left on July 13, 1769, but not after two sailors tried to defect and stay with their Tahitian wives. Again, it was Banks who did the negotiating that got them back on ship. On the voyage around other Polynesian Islands, on their way to New Zealand, Banks wrote an essay, "On the Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islands," in which he gives technical information about "Tahitian methods of cooking, boat-building, house- construction, tool-making, fishing, dancing, drum-making, navigation, weather-predicting, ceremonial dramas, tattooing." He also writes about the cleanliness of the Tahitians, especially contrasting them with Europeans. Even though the coconut oil that the Tahitians anoint themselves with can turn rancid, he notes, "These people are free from all smells of mortality and surely rancid as their oil is it must be preferrd to the odoriferous perfume of toes and armpits in Europe." Even his comments on Tahitian sexual mores are approving. "The only Tahitian practice that Banks found totally alien and repulsive was that of infanticide, which was used with regularity and without compunction as a form of birth control by couples who were not ready to support children."

By September 1770 they had circumnavigated both islands of New Zealand, mapped the eastern coast of Australia, and almost wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef. In May they had landed on the coast of Australia in a cove that Cook first called Stingray Harbour but later renamed Botany Bay because of the plants that Banks and his fellow botanist Daniel Solander discovered there.

But in November they arrived at Batavia (now Jakarta), where the crew began to come down with malaria and dysentery. "Between November 1770 and March 1771, when they reached the Cape of Good Hope, the Endeavour lost thirty-seven of its men, nearly half the original crew." Tupia and his son died, as did William Green, the astronomer; Monkhouse, the surgeon; and Sydney Parkinson, the young artist. "Solander would have died too, but for Banks's unstinting nursing care."

Banks suffered from dysentery, and was "shattered and disorientated" when they finally reached London on July 13, 1771. He was sick of the sea: "Grass I must have," he wrote. He was welcomed home by his sister, Sophia, who was distressed by his condition and "fondly (and unavailingly) promised that he would mend his ways and his Christian faith." But he made no effort to get in touch with Harriet Blosset. "It was obvious now that, whatever else, his experiences had left Banks utterly unfit for a quiet, regular, married life." There was gossip and scandal about their breakup, but Harriet soon married a clergyman "and was 'blessed by a numerous and lovely family.'"

There was also tattle about Banks's dalliance with Tahitian women, but Banks, along with Cook and Solander, had become a celebrity. He became a friend of George III, who was only five years his senior, and was interested in science. Banks and Solander received honorary doctorates from Oxford. Banks became a friend of Samuel Johnson, and Boswell "described him as 'a genteel young man, very black, and of an agreeable countenance, easy and communicative, without any affectation or appearance of assuming." Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait.

The demand for a full account of the voyage led to John Hawkesworth, a journalist and literary scholar, being commissioned to write it. He was given access to Cook's and Banks's journals and Solander's papers, as well was the drawings of Buchan and Parkinson. "All that was required were accuracy, objectivity and the ability to assemble a vivid narrative. After nearly two years' labour, Hawkesworth achieved none of these." The three volumes were dull and moralizing. Hawkesworth "wrote with delicious outrage of Tahitian dances and sexual practices." But Parkinson's journal, also published in 1773, after some some quarreling among Hawkesworth, Banks, and Parkinson's family, was better. "When it finally appeared, the Tahiti section of Parkinson's journal proved to be brief but strikingly vivid, and left an extremely favourable impression of Banks."

Banks himself wrote his own appreciation of Tahitian culture in a privately circulated "Thoughts on the Manners of the Otaheite." "It was a surprising piece, skittish and suggestive in tone, mannered in its classical references, and verging on the kind of mild pornographic frisson thought to be favoured by the French philosophers of Paradise." After this "glimpse of Banks the Tahitian libertine," Banks was expected to produce a sumptuous edition of his own journal.

1. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. i-13

Prologue; Joseph Banks in Paradise, 1-3

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In his introduction, Holmes refers to his book as "a relay race of scientific stories, and they link together to explore a larger historical narrative" -- that of "the second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science." The first revolution was that of Newton, Locke and Descartes; Coleridge, in 1819, was probably the first to recognize a second, "inspired primarily by a sudden series of breakthroughs in the fields of astronomy and chemistry."

This second revolution was, in Holmes's view, bracketed by two voyages of exploration: that of Capt. James Cook in 1768, and that of Charles Darwin in the Beagle in 1831. "Romantic science" gave us "the dazzling idea of the solitary scientific 'genius,'" often inspired by a "Eureka moment." It "would seek to identify such moments of singular, almost mystical vision in its own history." It would also look back to identify them in the careers of earlier scientists: e.g., Newton in his apple orchard.

There was, too, a subtle reaction against the idea of a purely mechanistic universe, the mathematical world of Newtonian physics, the hard material world of objects and impacts. These doubts, expressed especially in Germany, favoured a softer "dynamic" science of invisible powers and mysterious energies, of fluidity and transformations, of growth and organic change. This is one of the reasons that the study of electricity (and chemistry in general) became the signature science of the period, though astronomy itself, once the exemplary science of the Enlightenment, would also be changed by Romantic cosmology.

The movement was away from the elitism and specialization of seventeenth century science toward "a new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public. Science began to be taught to children. The word "wonder" began to be associated with science and its discoveries.

The book, Holmes tells us, is centered on the astronomer William Herschel and the chemist Humphry Davy, but their stories are backdropped by that of "the botanist, diplomat and éminence grise Sir Joseph Banks, who sailed with Cook on the Endeavour.

Banks was twenty-six when, in April 1769, the Endeavour arrived in Tahiti. He was "tall and well-built, with an appealing bramble of dark curls." He recorded in his journal that Tahiti "was the truest picture of an Arcadia of which we were going to be Kings," though the Endeavour was hardly the first European ship to visit the island: the Spanish had been there in the sixteenth century and claimed it for Spain, the English ship the Dolphin had been there and claimed it for England in 1767, and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville claimed it for France the following year. "The French had racily christened Tahiti 'La Nouvelle Cythère," the New Island of Love," because the Tahitians seemed to be unfettered by European sexual morality.

The Endeavour was there to observe a transit of Venus on June 3, 1769, the last opportunity to see Venus cross the face of the sun until 1874 and thereby "to establish the solar parallax, and hence the distance of the sun from the earth." The observation was threatened when the expedition's quadrant was stolen a few nights before the event. Banks had already figured out that the Tahitians had "some quite different notions of property," and he led the team that negotiated the recovery of the quadrant, earning praise from Capt. Cook for being "always very alert upon all occasions wherein the Natives are concerned." Banks had, in Holmes's words, a "natural openness and enthusiasm, which easily won friends."

Banks had been educated at Harrow, Eton, and Christ Church, Oxford, but he preferred science to the Latin and Greek that those institutions primarily taught. At fourteen, when he was at Eton, he was returning from a swim in the Thames when he came across a "mass of wildflowers along the hedgerows vividly illuminated in the slanting, golden light." It was a characteristic Romantic epiphany that turned him in the direction of botany, and away from the Greek and Latin that his father wanted him to excel in: "it seems that to the young Banks botany implied a kind of Romantic rebellion against his father, as well as against the standard school curriculum of classics."

He became a collector of specimens and a devotee of Carl Linnaeus, "the leading Enlightenment botanist of Europe." When he got to Oxford and discovered there was "no Linnaean lecturer in botany" at the university, he rode over to Cambridge and asked their professor of botany, John Martyn, to recommend one. "He came back triumphantly with a gifted young Jewish botanist, Israel Lyons, who had agreed to teach the subject to Banks and a group of like-minded undergraduates at Oxford." He paid Lyons's salary out of his own pocket.

In 1761, Banks's father died, leaving him very wealthy at the age of eighteen. When he was twenty-two he bought passage on a seven-month expedition to Labrador and Newfoundland. "He wrote witty, faintly scurrilous letters to his sister Sophia, and also kept the first of his great journals, most notable for their racy style, appalling spelling and non-existent punctuation." In 1766, when he was twenty-three, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Two years later, he joined Cook's round-the-world expedition on the Endeavour.

It had four main objectives: first, the observing of the Transit of Venus on Tahiti; second, charting and exploring the Polynesian islands west of Cape Horn; third, exploring the landmasses known to lie between the 30th and 40th parallels -- New Zealand (possibly the tip of a continent) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), possibly part of Australia; and fourth, collecting botanical and zoological specimens from anywhere in the southern hemisphere. It also had a medical aim, to reduce the fatal outbreaks of shipboard scurvy by the use of sauerkraut and citrus fruits.

Banks proposed that he become the expedition's official botanist, just as William Green, the assistant to the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, was the expedition's official astronomer.

Banks was skeptical, as was Cook, about one of the expedition's secret aims: the discovery of a great southern continent of which New Zealand was thought to be the northern tip. "The Admiralty seems to have been unaware of Antarctica." Banks was also "fully aware of how little was known about the Pacific Islands in general, and of the perils of circumnavigation, especially between Tahiti and Indonesia. It had nearly destroyed Bougainville's entire crew the year before."

Encouraging Banks's participation in the expedition was James Lee, who owned the Vineyard Nurseries in Hammersmith, who advised Banks on his collection. One of Lee's assistants was Sydney Parkinson, an eighteen-year-old Quaker who accompanied Banks as a botanical artist on the Endeavour. Another of Lee's assistants was his ward, Harriet Blosset, who wanted to go on the expedition, but women were not allowed on board. Banks was fond of Harriet, but he was reluctant to marry at this stage of his career.

The typical journey for a young man of means at this time was the Grand Tour, "the object of which as Dr Johnson said was to visit the classical civilisations along the shores of the Mediterranean." When he was asked why he was taking such a perilous voyage instead, Banks replied, "Every blockhead does that; my Grand Tour shall be one round the whole Globe."