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PART I

Preface

Between 1777 and 1779 Joseph Banks’s life changed in several important ways that set a pattern for the rest of his days. In 1777, he moved with his sister, Sarah Sophia, into his permanent home in Soho Square. It was a large house with enough space to accommodate his domestic life and his professional interests. His great library focused principally on natural history and its associated texts, manuscripts, drawings and specimens. In 1778, Banks was elected President of the Royal Society after having been a Fellow for just over a decade; he was only thirty-five years old. In 1779, he married Dorothea Huggesen, who moved into Soho Square with him and Sarah Sophia. In the same year, Banks leased and subsequently bought Spring Grove, a property with extensive grounds in Heston, Middlesex. Over time Banks had gardens laid out, and greenhouses and hothouses built. Produce grown there was sent to Soho Square and this was where Banks carried out a number of important horticultural experiments. Banks also began what became an annual pilgrimage to manage his Lincolnshire estates, centred on his country home at Revesby Abbey, where he, his wife and sister would spend every September and October.

In contrast to the English focus of his domestic life in London and Lincolnshire, Banks was being drawn in other, more outward-looking and global directions. In 1776, Francis Masson, Kew’s first official collector since 1772, became Banks’s direct responsibility. Masson had already been to the Cape of Good Hope collecting for the royal gardens at Kew, and he was on his way to Madeira to continue his assignment when Banks took over his direction. During the next three decades, while Masson travelled through the Atlantic region, Banks handled all his preparations, telling him where and what to collect, arranging his finances and managing the receipt of his specimens for Kew.

Banks, already a wealthy man, now settled down as a county notable and the President of the Royal Society. His contact with Masson offered Banks something entirely different, something unpredictable that must have reminded him of his experiences on the Endeavour. Banks could share vicariously in the excitement of finding new plants to send to Kew, of making Kew a place where plants from all over the globe could thrive, far from their native habitats. It gave Banks, as he said himself, the greatest of pleasures, to harness the intellectual resources of Soho Square, its library and herbarium, to the practical horticultural experience and knowledge of Kew, all for the benefit of the King and his garden. Banks would continue pushing these projects into new geographic regions, whenever the opportunities arose.

These early collectors, including Masson, were mostly Scots – they were generally better trained and more knowledgeable about botany than their English counterparts. Most of these men sought out Banks rather than the other way round. They expanded their own and Banks’s geographical horizon, collecting plants in parts of the world – the Pacific Northwest, China, southwest Africa and the Coromandel Coast – whose botany was hardly known in Europe.

1
1772: Masson Roams the Atlantic

Joseph Banks did not choose his first collector himself. Francis Masson had been appointed as Kew Garden’s first plant collector by Sir John Pringle. Sir John had been a close friend of the royal family even before 1764 when he was made Physician in Ordinary to Queen Charlotte. Liked and trusted by the King, he had replaced the Earl of Bute as adviser to the royal garden at Kew. Though, as he admitted, ‘I myself am so little a Botanist’, he was very well connected in cosmopolitan scientific circles, and would have acted as the King’s agent in selecting Masson, no doubt taking the advice of the head gardener at Kew, William Aiton.[1]

Masson had been working under Aiton, as a gardener at Kew, and had made a good impression. He was a fellow Scot, born in Aberdeen in 1741, but little is known about his life before Kew.[2] Although Banks took no credit for selecting Masson, saying Pringle did it all, he does seem to have had a hand in deciding where he was sent.[3] According to Masson, writing in 1796, it was Banks who ‘suggested to his Majesty the idea of sending a person, professionally a gardener, to the Cape’.[4]

Aside from recommending the destination, it’s unlikely Banks had anything to do with any instructions for Masson. Banks was busy planning a second voyage to the Pacific with Cook. This, and the intense pressure of classifying the huge botanical collection from the first voyage, and preparing the botanical drawings made on the Endeavour, took up most of his time.[5]

The choice of the Cape as the destination for Kew’s first plant collector, may not seem obvious; it was under Dutch rule for one thing. However, other circumstances did recommend it. Banks and Solander had spent some time there, from 14 March to 16 April in 1771, when the Endeavour made its last substantial stop before returning to England.[6] The plant collecting had not been as productive as they had expected, because, for almost half their stay, Solander had been confined to bed suffering from a fever. Referring to what possible botanical treasures might be found beyond the port, Banks commented ‘I can say but little … not having had an opportunity of making even one excursion owing in great measure to Dr Solanders illness.’[7] Even so, in the vicinity of the ship’s anchorage, they managed to collect more than three hundred varieties of plants, including a gardenia, an acacia and a heather.[8]

Observing the plants being cultivated by Dutch farmers in the fields around, and in the Dutch East India Company’s botanic garden, Banks concluded that though the climate was milder than that of England, the food crops, at least, were pretty much the same. This would have led him to conclude that the Cape area might be ideal for collecting plants that would be easy to grow at Kew, unlike the tropical plants that needed a protective habitat and artificial heat.

This observation would have been confirmed by the fact that Kew was already growing plants from the Cape, many of which had been introduced to the garden in the 1730s by Philip Miller, head gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden.[9] Not only had there been these living plants for Masson to see but Hans Sloane’s herbarium was then at the British Museum, which contained an impressive collection of Cape plants that had come into Sloane’s possession from other collections and collectors.[10] Also, since the early years of the seventeenth century, Cape plants figured in specialised texts, such as the famous Hortus Cliffortianus, compiled by Linnaeus, and many of these publications were at the British Museum or in Banks’s home.[11]

These factors alone recommended the Cape as a collecting destination but also important was the fact that maritime contact between it and Europe was excellent. Table Bay, the Cape’s harbour, was always full of foreign ships, primarily from the Dutch, Swedish and English East India Companies either heading into or returning from the Indian Ocean.[12] When the Endeavour arrived in Table Bay on 14 March 1770, Cook noted that there were already sixteen ships at anchor; over the following month he reported that four British East India Company and seven Dutch East India Company ships left for Europe.[13] With so many ships bound for Europe and with a sailing time of less than three months, living plants would have their best chance of survival at sea if shipped from the Cape.

What may have sealed the decision was that when Banks and Solander were at the Cape, they had met a Swedish soldier, Franz Pehr Oldenburg, who was working for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape and who was very interested in natural history, having already amassed a personal herbarium.[14] Before Banks and Solander left the Cape for England, they had made an agreement with Oldenburg to collect specimens for them after their departure. The specimens arrived in London sometime in 1772.[15] If Oldenburg was still at the Cape when Masson arrived, the benefits would be substantial, since, in addition to his local botanical knowledge, he spoke Dutch, which Masson did not.

It was decided that Masson would travel to the Cape by the beginning of April 1772 at the latest.[16] On 5 May Cook received an order from John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty, informing him that Francis Masson would be joining the ship for a passage to the Cape of Good Hope.[17] He would thus be sailing with Banks for part of the way, but five days after the order from Sandwich, the Resolution was given its first trial for its intended Pacific voyage. At the mouth of the Thames, Robert Cooper, the ship’s first lieutenant, declared to Cook that he would not risk the ship at sea in its present top-heavy state. The Resolution was ordered back to Sheerness, and the superstructure, which Banks had designed and which the Admiralty had built for him, was removed.[18] Learning of this Banks withdrew from the voyage and took his personal, and rather large, entourage with him.

In its new slimmed-down version, the Resolution, in company with HMS Adventure, left Plymouth on 13 July 1772. Masson had new scientific companions – Johann Forster and his son Georg Forster, the two naturalists who were hurriedly assigned to the ship following Banks’s departure. After two short stops, the first at Madeira and the second in the Cape Verde Islands, the ships anchored in Table Bay. Masson stepped into a bustling town at the foot of Table Mountain, a Dutch settlement with a population of around 5000 people, about half of whom were white: the black population was mostly composed of slaves owned by the Dutch East India Company and imported from East Africa and the Indian Ocean region.[19]

What instructions he carried with him we don’t know but within less than two months, on 10 December 1772, Masson headed to the interior, in an easterly direction, accompanied by Franz Pehr Oldenburg, who was still at the Cape, and an unnamed Khoikhoi, who was in charge of the wagon driven by eight oxen.[20]

Masson’s report of his expedition, written to Sir John Pringle, was read to the Fellows of the Royal Society in London. It was short and, apart from providing some information about where the party went, it contained few details. What we do know is that they got as far as the town of Swellendam in the Western Cape, about one hundred and fifty miles to the east of the Cape. (When Cook was at the Cape he reported that the Dutch had settled an area which, at its greatest extent, exceeded 900 miles and 28 days’ journey time.)[21] On 20 January 1773, after a two-day stay in Swellendam, they set off to return to the Cape by the same route they had taken out. Masson mentioned that he had collected and sent seeds of several species of heather back to Kew, which had germinated and been successfully grown there while he was still at the Cape.[22]

On his return to Cape Town, probably in February 1773, Masson was in for an unexpected treat: a fellow plant collector and a trained botanist had arrived in town.[23] Carl Peter Thunberg, who was born in the same year as Banks but in southern Sweden, had studied under Linnaeus at Uppsala University and had taken a medical degree. Like other disciples of Linnaeus, he left Sweden for foreign shores. Thunberg arrived in Amsterdam in August 1770 where he worked on plant collections from other parts of the Dutch Empire. In December 1771, he began his long journey to the East via the Cape where he arrived on 16 April 1772 in order to collect plants and learn Dutch. After acquainting himself with Cape Town and its local botany, including day trips into the surrounding countryside, on 7 September, Thunberg set out with three European companions, two Khoikhois and an oxen-driven cart for the interior: first to the north and then eventually in the direction of Swellendam and beyond. They were back in Cape Town on 2 January 1773.

At some point between February and September 1773, Masson and Thunberg met and decided to travel together on a botanical expedition. On 11 September they set out from Cape Town and headed in a northerly direction for about 100 miles from their point of departure. Masson could see that the decision to go to the Cape to collect was the right one as he looked down on the scene unfolding before him, on the sea coast from St Helena Bay back to the Cape: ‘The whole country’, he wrote, ‘affords a fine field for botany, being enamelled with the greatest number of flowers I ever saw, of exquisite beauty and fragrance.’[24] Having reached their most northerly point, the party turned southeast, heading again to Swellendam, and finally reached the ocean at Mossel Bay on 16 November. There they turned inland and made their way again in a southeasterly direction until they met the ocean for a second time at Algoa Bay (near present-day Port Elizabeth) on 14 December, almost five hundred miles from Cape Town. They had been away for months. They pushed on a little further to the east until they were on the banks of the Sundays River, which flows into Algoa Bay. But the Khoikhoi people they employed refused to go any further. The oxen were sick and the carts near collapse.[25] Reluctantly, they turned back and, retracing their steps, they arrived in Cape Town on 29 January 1774.

Masson referred on many occasions to the beauty of the plants he and Thunberg encountered but, apart from mentioning that he obtained specimens of what he called geraniums, stapelias and ericas near the end of the journey, he failed to specify what else he had collected.[26]

While they were in Cape Town during 1774, Thunberg and Masson met Lady Anne Monson, the highly accomplished botanist and collector, who was on her way from England to Calcutta with her husband, a colonel who was returning to Bengal to serve on the supreme council.[27] She, Thunberg and Masson frequently went botanising together in the surrounding countryside.[28]

After only a few weeks these delightful excursions came to an end. Lady Monson continued her voyage to Calcutta on the Pacific, an East India Company ship. On 29 September 1774, Thunberg and Masson decided to strike out into the interior again. They headed out of town in a northeastern direction to an area they had never visited before. This time they took in mountains and desert, plotting a circular route that took them to a point around three hundred and fifty miles north of Cape Town before swinging to the southeast and eventually to the southwest back to Cape Town, which they reached on 29 December 1774.

Thunberg must have been a real inspiration for Masson: highly educated and one of Linnaeus’s own students – a mine of up-to-date botanical information and an intrepid traveller, not just an accomplished gardener like Aiton. For his education as a travelling botanist, collecting in unfamiliar terrain, Masson could have had no better teacher than Thunberg.

Thunberg’s departure for Batavia, his ultimate destination, on 2 March 1775, may have convinced Masson to leave as well. He left the Cape sometime towards the end of March but before that Masson met Anders Sparrman. Sparrman, born in Sweden in 1748, was another student of Linnaeus’s, who had first arrived at the Cape on 12 April 1772 to study the region’s natural history.[29] His plans, however, were put on hold when he met the Forsters and was invited to join them on the Resolution on its Pacific voyage.[30] The Resolution, having dropped Masson off at the end of October, now collected Sparrman before setting off for the Pacific less than a month later on 22 November 1772. There is no evidence that Masson and Sparrman met at this time.[31] It was only when Sparrman came back to the Cape on 22 March 1775 on the Resolution’s return voyage to England from the Pacific that the pair are known to have met.[32]

Masson was back in London in either July or August 1775.[33] He had been sending seeds and living plants to Kew from the Cape, but now on his return, he had much more to show.[34] Solander was at Kew, where Masson had gone back to live, on Saturday, 26 August and reported to John Ellis, his close friend and fellow botanist, that he had just seen Masson ‘with a great cargo of new plants … a glorious collection’.[35]

Solander did not give many details about the collection but the antiquary Richard Gough alerted his friend and fellow antiquary the Reverend Michael Tyson that Masson had brought home a great variety of new species of plants from the Cape of Good Hope, ‘which grew and blowed at sea’.[36] Tyson, himself, then went to Kew to see Masson and was amazed by what he found: totally new species of heather, protea, geraniums, and an undisclosed number of dried varieties.[37] Tyson spoke of more than two hundred examples of just two species but when Masson wrote to Linnaeus at the end of December 1775, his first letter to ‘the Father of Botany’, introducing himself as having been employed ‘some years past, by the King of great Brittain, in collecting of Plants for the Royal Gardens at Kew’, and remarking that he had made two trips into the interior with his student Thunberg and had met Sparrman, he announced that he had ‘added upwards of 400 new species to his Majesties collection of living plants’.[38]

What no one mentioned was that Masson had also collected a magnificent plant known by its popular name as the bird-of-paradise flower but which, when it arrived at Kew in 1773, was given the name Strelitzia reginae, in honour of Queen Charlotte, Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.[39] It is likely that Thunberg directed him to this plant since he had already come across it on his first journey to the interior.[40] This may have been Banks’s favourite plant:[41] certainly, when, in 1795, it came to putting together a substantial gift of plants for Catherine II, Empress of Russia, among many Cape plants collected by Masson, Strelitzia reginae, which Banks described as ‘one of the most rare, & certainly … one of the most beautiful plants in Europe’, headed the list of plants chosen.[42] Even more remarkable, perhaps, is that Masson collected the first specimen of the cycad Encephalartos altensteinii, which was at Kew in 1775, and which, in 2009, was re-potted: it is believed to be the oldest living pot plant in the world.

Banks, too, was delighted with Masson’s collection, ‘a profusion of Plants unknown till that time to the Botanical gardens in Europe’.[43] In his estimation, ‘by means of these, Kew Gardens has in great measure attained to that acknowlegd superiority which it now holds over every similar Establishment in Europe; some of which, as Trianon, Paris, Upsala, etc., till lately vyed with each other for pre-eminence, without admitting even a competition from any English Garden.’

Masson’s second assignment, also authorised by Sir John Pringle, was to collect for Kew on the Atlantic islands of Madeira, and the Canaries, and in the British West Indies.[44] It is likely that Banks and Solander once again had a hand in deciding where Masson should go: they had both been to Madeira in 1768 on the Endeavour’s outward voyage and, during their stay from 12 to 18 September, had collected many plants that they brought back with them in 1771.[45]

Masson left for Madeira on 19 May and arrived there on 5 June 1776.[46] Around this time, Pringle, who was by now George III’s Physician Extraordinary, in addition to being President of the Royal Society, no longer had time for Kew.[47] Banks took over. He arranged Masson’s finances, sent him instructions and supplies, and, in return, Masson sent Banks plants and seeds and letters.[48]

In what might have been his first letter to Banks, dated 28 July 1776, Masson noted that he hadn’t yet explored very much of the island but he believed he had already found some new plants. He had about fifty plants for Banks and some seeds for Aiton.[49] Apart from that he said little: he remained a man of few words for the next thirty years.

Masson would have arrived well equipped to explore the botany of the Atlantic islands, especially Madeira and the Canaries. The islands’ plants were well represented in Sloane’s herbarium at the British Museum.[50] Both island groups were a common stopover for British ships, both naval and East India Company vessels, on their way into the South Atlantic. It was where they stocked up with wine and fresh fruits for the next part of the voyage. Those who were interested in botany helped themselves to the local flora. There was a good, if small, selection of plants from the area already growing at Kew.[51]

From the summer of 1776 until the summer of 1779, Masson stayed and collected in the Atlantic region – seeds for Aiton and plants for himself and Banks.[52] Madeira was the base where he spent most of his time when he wasn’t travelling. The itinerary he followed during this period began with a stay in Madeira which lasted for almost a year until May 1777; this was followed by a trip to the Azores, not planned originally but which Charles Murray, the British Consul in Funchal, who found Masson very convivial, convinced him he should visit.[53] Masson stayed in the Azores from late May 1777 to early December 1777, during which time he visited the islands of São Miguel and Faial – Johann and Georg Forster had collected on Faial between 14 and 19 July 1775 on the final homeward stretch of Cook’s second voyage, and might have discussed this with Masson – and São Jorge;[54] Masson left the Azores in December for the Canaries, via Madeira, and remained there until early October 1778, and from there he travelled back to Madeira, where he stayed until May 1779.[55]

Because of a lack of plant lists, it is not possible to give a definite account of the shipments, but about one thousand plants, many of them new to European science, would probably be close to the mark. Collecting was not a problem. Masson went well off the beaten track where there was plenty to be found.[56] What was difficult was shipping his collections back to England. The problem, as he said himself, was that while he was in the islands the American revolutionary war was in progress on the other side of the Atlantic. American cruisers were present but not British naval vessels. He had to use whatever shipping was available: a Dutch ship on one occasion; on another a French brig on its way to Dunkirk with a stop at Portsmouth, and even a British privateer making its way back to Plymouth.

However the difficulties of this trip were as nothing when compared to those of his next destination, the West Indies.[57] Masson left Madeira sometime in the early part of 1779 for Barbados. What happened then is unknown, but at some time he went from there to Grenada, where he became embroiled in the war between Britain and France, France by this time fighting on the American side. The French assaulted and captured the island from the British in the early part of July 1779.[58] Masson was, in Banks’s words, ‘call’d upon to bear arms in its defence, which he did, & was taken prisoner’.[59] When he was finally released, he made his way to St Eustatius, a Dutch Leeward Island, between St Kitts and St Martin.

There he found some respite from the conflict and island-hopped, taking in St Kitts and Nevis but found that the people there were unsupportive of his efforts: ‘a philosopher’, he wrote, ‘is [a] monster of nature to the people in this part of the world’.[60] He then headed to Saint Lucia, where rains and an impenetrable forest kept his botanising to a minimum, but he was still able to put together a small collection of thirty plants for Banks. Then things went from bad to worse: in the early days of October 1780, a deadly hurricane hit the island and Masson lost the entire collection he had with him at the time, his clothes and papers, and almost his life.[61]

Masson never gave up. Certainly the hurricane did not stop him. His next port of call was Jamaica. He had already been to six islands. We know that Masson was in Jamaica in March 1781 but not much more than that. He originally planned to try to get into central America from there but was unable to, presumably because of the continuing conflict. Instead, he finally made up his mind to return home and was back in London in November 1781.[62]

Where to go next was always the question for Masson. In December 1778, while he was still in Madeira, Masson had written to Linnaeus’s son, also called Carl (the great Linnaeus had died in early January of the same year) mentioning that he had been in touch with ‘Mr. De Visme’.[63] Indeed, just before he left Madeira for the West Indies, Masson had informed Banks that he was sending the Canary Islands collection to Lisbon to that same De Visme who would then forward it to Banks.[64] So, it is not surprising that in March 1783, Masson went to Lisbon where he met several of Banks’s acquaintances, including Gerard de Visme, who was a central figure in the English merchant community, and whom Banks had met in November 1766 on his way back to England from Newfoundland and Labrador on HMS Niger.[65]

De Visme had a garden in what is now Benfica, a suburb of Lisbon, and it would seem that he invited Masson to write up a catalogue of the plants that were growing there.[66] When he saw the garden, Masson was not particularly impressed by it or its owner – ‘he knows little or nothing of Botany or natural history’, Masson wrote to Banks, ‘but possessed a very great share of vanity and conceit.’[67] Masson declined to do the catalogue. For his part de Visme was very proud of his gardening achievements, reminding Banks that he had seen his garden in its infancy when he visited Lisbon almost twenty years earlier. De Visme claimed to Banks that the reason Masson did not undertake the catalogue was that ‘he has worn himself out with fatigue, in roving over wild grounds, & sands, in search of new productions … I expect he will add one, to ye martyrs of Botany.’[68]

If he was worn out, as de Visme wrote, Masson certainly hadn’t finished travelling for not only did he visit Lisbon, but also southern Spain, Gibraltar, North Africa and Madeira again, though the order is not clear. He was back in London by late 1784 or early 1785.[69]

Whenever he returned, Masson, as we have come to expect, was not one to stay put for very long and so, on 16 October 1785, he boarded the Earl of Talbot in Portsmouth, an East India Company vessel heading to the Cape. He arrived at Table Bay on 10 January 1786.[70] Though his reception does not seem to have been as warm as it had been the first time, and though he expressed a wish to be sent to Madras, where there was a vacancy as the East India Company’s naturalist (see Chapter 5), he remained at the Cape.[71]

Masson had been sent to the Cape a second time, as he told Thunberg, to collect living plants for Kew, as opposed to herbarium samples and seeds, from the mountains in the environs of the Cape.[72] He did not always follow his orders, as he confessed to Thunberg, but ventured further into the interior. Banks knew this as he paid Masson’s bills and though he disapproved of him not fulfilling his instructions, there was little he could do about it.[73] Masson also failed to follow his instructions exactly as to what he collected: he often sent seeds, herbarium plants and bulbs, as well as the living plants he had been sent to get.

It isn’t clear how long Masson intended to remain at the Cape but it appears that no time limit was placed on his stay. On several occasions he complained to Banks that he hadn’t heard from him in almost two years, and he feared that the letters destined for him had ended up in India or Canton as the East India Company convoys often decided to bypass the Cape. Masson carried on as if he had been instructed to stay. He had no problems collecting new and unusual plants – to Thunberg he mentioned heathers, amaryllis and protea, plant varieties he had collected before, but emphasised that he believed he had found more than twenty new species of Stapelia, which he was going to include in a monograph he was planning.[74] The problems that he did encounter were that he couldn’t always find a ship on which to send his plants back to Kew. It wasn’t that there were no ships in harbour but rather that the ones that came in on their way to England, especially from India, were often so crowded with passengers, that there was no room left for plants.

William Aiton, for whom Masson had been working for maybe thirty years, died at the beginning of February 1793 (William Townsend, his son, took over the duties at Kew) and, from this point on, the tone of Masson’s letters to Banks changed. He now began referring increasingly to wanting to return to England and by October 1794, he started settling his affairs in preparation for a return voyage. On 17 March 1795, fearing that he might get caught up in a possible conflict between Britain and the Netherlands, he found passage on a returning East India Company ship, taking his collection of living plants that he had been growing in his garden at the Cape with him, and was back in England in August of the same year.[75]

As far as one can tell from the few references he made to it in his correspondence with Banks, Masson’s botanical haul was substantial – about one half of the number of geraniums growing at Kew by 1795 had been introduced by Masson.[76] It is also clear that of all the plants he collected he was particularly proud of the Stapelia. As he told Thunberg, he intended to publish on this group and during the quiet periods at the Cape, Masson arranged his collection and began to draw the individual plants. He brought this work to fruition in 1796 when his monograph Stapeliae Novae, describing new species of Stapelia, was published in London. The book was dedicated to the King and contained descriptions of forty-one species, all laid out in proper Linnaean fashion, in Latin, and illustrated in colour.