The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

Conscious of European diseases, Banks had Omai undergo Jenner’s new technique of inoculation with cowpox vaccine, against the lethal smallpox. He 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. Their most happy time together came in the summer of 1775, when Banks took Omai with several friends on a field expedition to Whitby and Scarborough. They travelled up in leisurely fashion, comfortably installed in Banks’s large, lumbering coach, stopping off to eat at remote country inns and botanise in the summer fields.

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

(#litres_trial_promo) It again demonstrates the ambiguity of the relationship between patron and protégé. Banks points dramatically towards Omai, who stands gazing out at the viewer, wrapped in the dazzling white robes of Tahitian ceremonial dress, almost Roman in his stately demeanour. His naked feet and tattooed hands are clearly shown. Though there is an extraordinarily calm, almost aristocratic, beauty about his presence, it is not clear if he is Banks’s companion or his trophy. Other portraits were painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who also executed an exquisite pencil drawing of Omai’s head, emphasising his magnificent mane of dark hair, his large, tender eyes and finely formed mouth. Another more prosaic solo portrait was especially commissioned for John Hunter’s anthropological collection, later housed at the Royal College of Surgeons.

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In 1777 Cook departed on his third Pacific voyage, taking Omai with him. He left behind his record of his second expedition, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World. The text was accompanied by extensive illustrations, including pictures of Omai, numerous botanical studies of rare plants, and sketches of the naked Tahitian dances witnessed by Banks and Parkinson. The drawings of Omai were later used by the anatomist William Lawrence in his Lectures on the Natural History of Man (1819).

Cook’s sober book caught the public’s imagination. The poet William Cowper, tucked away in his Buckinghamshire vicarage at Olney, and permanently trembling on the brink of disabling depression, found extraordinary relief and delight in imagining the great voyage southwards. To explain his sensations, Cowper invented the idea of the ‘armchair traveller’: ‘My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators, in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from my fireside.’

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In his long, reflective poem The Task, Cowper accompanied Cook and Banks in his imagination. He transformed Banks, rather suitably, into an adventurous bee, busily foraging for pollen.

He travels and expatiates, as the bee

From flower to flower, so he from land to land;

The manners, customs, policy of all

Pay contribution to the store he gleans;

He sucks intelligence in every clime,

And spreads the honey of his deep research

At his return, a rich repast for me.

He travels and I too. I tread his deck,

Ascend his topmast, through his peering eyes

Discover countries, with a kindred heart

Suffer his woes and share in his escapes,

While fancy, like the finger of a clock,

Runs the great Circuit, and is still at home.

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Omai landed back in Tahiti in August 1777, and set up as a merchant of Western goods. He also became a sort of guide and impresario for visiting Westerners, ironically finding himself doing Banks’s job in reverse, explaining European culture to the sceptical Tahitians. He sold red feathers, cooking pots and pistols, but never fully reintegrated into Tahitian society. Cowper included Omai’s story in The Task, reflecting on the excitement of exploration, but also on the clash between European and Pacific cultures. He suggested that Omai might have become a victim of Romantic scientific enquiry, left permanently alienated from both worlds:

I cannot think thee yet so dull of heart

And spiritless, as never to regret

Sweets tasted here, and left as soon as known.

Methinks I see thee straying on the beach

And asking of the surge that bathes thy foot

If ever it has wash’d our distant shore.

I see thee weep, and thine are honest tears,

A patriot’s for his country.

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Banks’s own liberated behaviour in the years immediately following his return to London suggests that he too had been permanently affected by his Tahitian experience. A visitor to Revesby in 1776 referred to him as ‘a wild eccentric character’ who obviously still dreamed of his ‘voyage to Otaheite’, and neglected his estates.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was reported to have taken a young woman-presumably Sarah Wells-on a scandalous fishing party with Lord Sandwich and his mistress Martha Ray, during which the women sang and danced while the men ‘played the kettle drums’ (perhaps in an attempt to recreate the Tahitian timorodee).

Public opinion might laugh at him as an old-fashioned libertine, as in a satirical poem that went into circulation entitled ‘Mimosa or, The Sensitive Plant, Dedicated to Mr Banks’. Yet Banks genuinely believed that British society was often cruelly restrictive towards women, although he told the author Mrs Ann Radcliffe that he thought women themselves were often responsible: ‘The greater part of the Evils to which your sex are liable under our present Customs of Society originate in the decisions of women…The Penalty by which women uniformly permit 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.’

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But gradually the reputation of the South Seas Paradise became more complicated: innocence gave way to experience. In February 1779 Captain Cook was killed by natives on a beach in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, during his third Pacific voyage. Several of his own officers thought Cook himself was at least partly to blame, for his increasingly aggressive use of heavily armed beach landing-parties, and his method of seizing native hostages upon arrival. His second-in-command, Captain Charles Clerke, wrote in his report: ‘Upon the whole I firmly believe matters would not have been carried to the extremities they were, had not Capt. Cook attempted to chastise a man in the midst of this multitude.’ But he also noted the horror with which the British crew learned that Cook’s body had been dismembered and distributed, piece by piece, among the Hawaiian chieftains across the whole island.

(#litres_trial_promo) The days of the green palm-tree boughs were long over.

The news took over a year to reach Britain. The artist Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg executed a huge and fantastic painting of Cook’s apotheosis, the bony old Yorkshireman leaning back in the arms of a grateful Britannia, who lifts him into the clouds of glory. There was no indication of the dark colonial inheritance that Cook had left behind on earth. The Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean was edited and published by John Rickman in 1781. Its additional material included a controversial account of Cook’s violent death, and Omai’s strange, alienated return to Tahiti. Both in their own ways were premonitions of the colonial tragedy that was eventually to follow.

Tahiti was rapidly turning into a legend, and a somewhat tarnished one at that. When a hugely expensive pantomime entitled Omai, or a Trip Round the World was successfully staged at Drury Lane in 1785, the island had started its long decline into a source of popular entertainment. The extravagant sets and titillating costumes, all designed by Loutherbourg, foreshadowed a world of grass-skirt cliché that would eventually lead to Hollywood. Shrewdly capitalising on this new-found fashion, Madame Charlotte Hayes staged in London a notorious nude ‘Tahitian Review’, in which ‘a dozen beautiful Nymphs…performed the celebrated rites of Venus, as practised at Tahiti’. It was said that wealthy clients could then ‘anthropologically’ sample the native girls (who were all of course London cockneys).

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Meanwhile Banks established a kind of permanent scientific salon at a new house at 32 Soho Square, where his adoring sister Sophia was brought in to act as his housekeeper. The unofficial ménage with Sarah Wells across the park in Chapel Street continued, but perhaps under increasing sisterly protests. Her brother, Sophia felt, should begin to settle, conform to convention and become ‘enlightened with the Bright Sunshine of the Gospel’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, Banks never embarked on any other expedition after his voyage to Iceland in 1772. Instead he continued to develop his enormous archive of scientific papers, drawings and specimens, with the help of Solander, now his official archivist and librarian. Yet still Banks published nothing. The daring young botanist and explorer was slowly turning into a landlocked collector and administrator.

In November 1778 Banks was elected President of the Royal Society at the remarkably early age of thirty-five. Then, quite suddenly it would seem, he decided to marry, and began to pay court to a twenty-one-year-old heiress, Dorothea Hugessen, the cheery daughter of a wealthy landowner from Kent, worth (as Jane Austen would say) 14,000 a year. They married the following March at St Andrew’s, Holborn, and Banks settled down to a position at the heart of the British scientific establishment for the next forty-one years. Dorothea became a much-loved companion, and proved herself a wonderful hostess at Soho Square. Surprisingly she would have no children, but she formed a close alliance with her sister-in-law Sophia. Together the two women succeeded in managing the more chaotic side of Banks’s social life with great success.

This required a final parting with Sarah Wells, which was tactfully and generously managed. Solander again proved himself an avuncular go-between. He later remarked that ‘Banks and Mrs Wells parted on very good terms. She had sense enough to find he acted right, and of course she behaved very well. All her old friends visit her as formerly.’ There was no mention of a child, or of any regrets that Banks may have felt. Instead, Solander added that Banks had now spruced himself up for the weekly Royal Society meetings at Crane Court, off Fleet Street, appearing in ‘Full Dressed Velvet or Silk coat etc’. He would ‘properly fill the President’s chair’.

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For his presidency, Banks took as his heraldic crest the figure of a lizard. He explained his choice as follows: ‘I have taken the Lizard, an Animal said to be endowed by Nature with an instinctive love of Mankind, as my Device, & have caused it to be engraved on my Seal, as a perpetual Remembrance that a man is never so well employed, as when he is labouring for the advantage of the Public; without the Expectation, the Hope or even a Wish to derive advantage of any kind from the result of his Exertions.’

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Yet he settled into the presidential chair uneasily. It was typical of him that, on his election, he wrote as follows to Sir William Hamilton in Naples. ‘That I envy you your situation within two miles of an erupting Volcano, you will easily guess. I read your Letters with that kind of Fidgetty Anxiety which continuously upbraids for not being in a similar situation. I envy you, I pity myself, I blame myself & then begin to tumble over my Dried Plants in hopes to put such wishes out of my head. Which now I am tied by the leg to an Arm Chair, I must with diligence suppress.’

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