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By Root 1215 0

out under James Cook’s command expressed the combination of motives which drove the new expansion of empire. Inevitably, competition with the historical enemy was part of it. When, in the 1760s, the Fellows of the Royal Society heard that Paris was planning to dispatch expeditions to watch the transit of Venus across the sun (a predictable astronomical event vital for calculating the distance between the earth and the sun), they were troubled, demanding that Britain should do the same. The vessel which would carry British ambition was a one-time coal-ship, renamed the Endeavour. She was of no great size (a mere 106 feet long and under 30 feet wide) and was so crammed with scientific instruments that when she reached Rio de Janeiro the viceroy there found it impossible to believe that anyone would have embarked on such a dangerous expedition merely in the interests of science. Concluding that they must have some ulterior motive (he suspected spying or smuggling) he refused to allow the crew ashore. The 7,860 pounds of sauerkraut on board might have driven him to the alternative conclusion that the ship’s captain was mad. That was certainly the conclusion the crew came to when Captain Cook attempted to force them to eat it.

Cook got his way by insisting that the officers eat the stuff, at which point the sailors demanded they be given the same privilege. It certainly saved some of their lives – as Cook intended – by protecting them from scurvy, the scourge of long-distance mariners.* This was an experiment with an immediate imperial application, for if British sailors could survive long journeys without becoming sick, the Royal Navy could defend territory anywhere. But the nutritional research was incidental. The main scientific purpose of the Endeavour’s voyage was encapsulated in Joseph Banks. Although much less well known than Captain Cook, in his way – both for what he did and for what he represented – Banks is every bit as significant a figure. In class, background and education he could hardly have stood in greater contrast. Where Cook had made his own way in the world, Banks was the son of an MP, had been educated at Eton and Oxford, was heir to a comfortable estate in Lincolnshire and was fifteen years younger than Cook. He stood over six feet tall, and oozed the confidence of inherited wealth. But he shared Cook’s commitment to exploring and claiming the world for the empire. (If he’d had his way Iceland would have been part of Britain.) In later life, festooned with the usual Establishment garlands of a baronetcy, public appointments and fashionable portraits, he became an enthusiastic proposer of the colonization of Australia; and it was he who supervised the shipping of plants to the new colony and he who contrived to smuggle high-quality merino sheep from Spain and thence, eventually, to Australia where they became the core of the national herd.

But his greatest contribution was in firing a popular belief in the intellectual and scientific purpose of empire. To say Banks was a devoted botanist fails quite to convey his obsession: there are plenty of stories of his being arrested for vagrancy after being discovered rolling around in hedgerows and ditches while out plant-hunting. As a student at Oxford he had paid out of his own pocket for the Cambridge professor of botany to deliver a series of lectures. He corresponded with the great Swedish ‘prince of botanists’ Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy. More than eighty plants carry his name and he is given the credit for introducing species such as the eucalyptus and mimosa to Europe: as a result the domestic gardens of Britain bear the stamp of imperial exploration. Banks’s unquenchable thirst to see, touch, weigh, measure and classify the natural world expressed the European Enlightenment’s belief in science and rationality, and when talk began of an expedition to the South Seas he immediately proposed that he – and an entourage of assistants, two artists, four servants and two greyhounds – be included. The Royal Society endorsed the application of what they