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The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes’s dazzling portrait of the most exciting period in British history is a groundbreaking achievement.The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook’s first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Banks was spurring other great thinkers on to their own voyages of discovery – astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical – which together made up this ‘age of wonder’. In this compelling group biography, Richard Holmes tells the stories of the Romantic period’s celebrated innovators and their great scientific discoveries: from telescopic sight to the miner’s lamp, and from the first balloon flight to African exploration.Breathtaking in its originality and storytelling energy, this is a radical vision of the meeting places of science and art, and an extraordinary evocation of an era of exploration and wonder.



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

Richard Holmes







Copyright (#ulink_b90c7c49-642e-551a-8f44-b87a27e90864)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published by HarperPress in 2008
Copyright © Richard Holmes 2008
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007149537
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007349883
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To Jon Cook at Radio Flatlands
Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more
often and persistently I reflect upon them: the starry heaven above me and the
moral law within me…I see them in front of me and unite them immediately
with the consciousness of my own existence.
IMMANUEL KANT, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)
He thought about himself, and the whole Earth,
Of Man the wonderful, and of the Stars,
And how the deuce they ever could have birth;
And then he thought of Earthquakes, and of Wars,
How many miles the Moon might have in girth,
Of Air-balloons, and of the many bars
To perfect Knowledge of the boundless Skies;
And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes.
BYRON, Don Juan (1819), Canto 1, stanza 92
Those to whom the harmonious doors
Of Science have unbarred celestial stores…
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘Lines Additional to an Evening Walk’ (1794)
Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose our views of
science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are
complete; and that there are no new worlds to conquer.
HUMPHRY DAVY, lecture (1810)
I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, letter (1800)
…Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with wond’ring eyes
He stared at the Pacific…
JOHN KEATS, ms of sonnet (1816)
To the natural philosopher there is no natural object unimportant or trifling…
a soap bubble…an apple…a pebble…He walks in the midst of wonders.
JOHN HERSCHEL, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830)
Yes, there is a march of Science, but who shall beat the drums of its retreat?
CHARLES LAMB, shortly before his death (1834)

Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uf10b9a6c-8bdf-58fe-bf06-8dc49c151234)
Title Page (#uf9478acd-908f-52ef-a3da-60f5450a43d8)
Copyright (#ud826f9c9-903d-59c3-85a7-4699130b5046)
Dedication (#u5e70d9a5-fe75-5884-84b3-89473f83fb66)
Epigraph (#u9253f675-bf5f-564f-af21-e63da512b3fb)
Prologue (#udb77f190-3bb0-5a0d-a2c2-212cb1a500f0)
1. Joseph Banks in Paradise (#u3361de1e-8399-5ccc-adb6-6bb1ab008605)
2. Herschel on the Moon (#u8df92bdb-b0d1-5b21-ac0d-7ad134b7a9d3)
3. Balloonists in Heaven (#litres_trial_promo)
4. Herschel Among the Stars (#litres_trial_promo)
5. Mungo Park in Africa (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Davy on the Gas (#litres_trial_promo)
7. Dr Frankenstein and the Soul (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Davy and the Lamp (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Sorcerer and Apprentice (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Young Scientists (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Cast List (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
References (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Prologue (#ulink_9f574a4a-1891-5851-adb5-23b37795f870)
1
In my first chemistry class, at the age of fourteen, I successfully precipitated a single crystal of mineral salts. This elementary experiment was done by heating a solution of copper sulphate (I think) over a Bunsen burner, and leaving it to cool overnight. The next morning there it lay at the bottom of my carefully labelled test tube: a single beautiful crystal, the size of a flattened Fox’s Glacier Mint, a miniature ziggurat with a faint blue opalescence, propped up against the inside of the glass (too big to lie flat), monumental and mysterious to my eyes. No one else’s test tube held anything but a few feeble grains. I was triumphant, my scientific future assured.
But it turned out that the chemistry master did not believe me. The crystal was too big to be true. He said (not at all unkindly) that I had obviously faked it, and slipped a piece of coloured glass into the test tube instead. It was quite a good joke. I implored him, ‘Oh, test it, sir; just test it!’ But he refused, and moved on to other matters. In that moment of helpless disappointment I think I first glimpsed exactly what real science should be. To add to it, years later I learned the motto of the Royal Society: Nullius in Verba-‘Nothing upon Another’s Word’. I have never forgotten this incident, and have often related it to scientific friends. They nod sympathetically, though they tend to add that I did not (as a matter of chemical fact) precipitate a crystal at all-what I did was to seed one, a rather different process. No doubt this is so. But the eventual consequence, after many years of cooling, has certainly been to precipitate this book.

2
The Age of Wonder is a relay race of scientific stories, and they link together to explore a larger historical narrative. This is my account 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.
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Romanticism as a cultural force is generally regarded as intensely hostile to science, its ideal of subjectivity eternally opposed to that of scientific objectivity. But I do not believe this was always the case, or that the terms are so mutually exclusive. The notion of wonder seems to be something that once united them, and can still do so. In effect there is Romantic science in the same sense that there is Romantic poetry, and often for the same enduring reasons.
The first scientific revolution, of the seventeenth century, is familiarly associated with the names of Newton, Hooke, Locke and Descartes, and the almost simultaneous foundations of the Royal Society in London and the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Its existence has long been accepted, and the biographies of its leading figures are well known.
(#ulink_6e16aa50-fed2-5e64-8510-4a23779cc2fe) But this second revolution was something different. The first person who referred to a ‘second scientific revolution’ was probably the poet Coleridge in his Philosophical Lectures of 1819.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was inspired primarily by a sudden series of breakthroughs in the fields of astronomy and chemistry. It was a movement that grew out of eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalism, but largely transformed it, by bringing a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work. It was driven by a common ideal of intense, even reckless, personal commitment to discovery.
It was also a movement of transition. It flourished for a relatively brief time, perhaps two generations, but produced long-lasting consequences-raising hopes and questions-that are still with us today. Romantic science can be dated roughly, and certainly symbolically, between two celebrated voyages of exploration. These were Captain James Cook’s first round-the-world expedition aboard the Endeavour, begun in 1768, and Charles Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos islands aboard the Beagle, begun in 1831. This is the time I have called the Age of Wonder, and with any luck we have not yet quite outgrown it.
The idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science. That is how William Wordsworth brilliantly transformed the great Enlightenment image of Sir Isaac Newton into a Romantic one. While a university student in the 1780s Wordsworth had often contemplated the full-size marble statue of Newton, with his severely close-cropped hair, that still dominates the stone-flagged entrance hall to the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. As Wordsworth originally put it, he could see, a few yards from his bedroom window, over the brick wall of St John’s College,
The Antechapel, where the Statue stood
Of Newton, with his Prism and silent Face.
Sometime after 1805, Wordsworth animated this static figure, so monumentally fixed in his assured religious setting. Newton became a haunted and restless Romantic traveller amidst the stars:
And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The Antechapel where the Statue stood
Of Newton, with his prism and his silent face,
The marble index of a Mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
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Around such a vision Romantic science created, or crystallised, several other crucial conceptions-or misconceptions-which are still with us. First, the dazzling idea of the solitary scientific ‘genius’, thirsting and reckless for knowledge, for its own sake and perhaps at any cost. This neo-Faustian idea, celebrated by many of the imaginative writers of the period, including Goethe and Mary Shelley, is certainly one of the great, ambiguous creations of Romantic science which we have all inherited. Closely connected with this is the idea of the ‘Eureka moment’, the intuitive inspired instant of invention or discovery, for which no amount of preparation or preliminary analysis can really prepare. Originally the cry of the Greek philosopher Archimedes, this became the ‘fire from heaven’ of Romanticism, the other true mark of scientific genius, which also allied it very closely to poetic inspiration and creativity. Romantic science would seek to identify such moments of singular, almost mystical vision in its own history. One of its first and most influential examples was to become the story of the solitary, brooding Newton in his orchard, seeing an apple fall and ‘suddenly’ having his vision of universal gravitation. This story was never told by Newton at the time, but only began to emerge in the mid-eighteenth century, in a series of memoirs and reminiscences.
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The notion of an infinite, mysterious Nature, waiting to be discovered or seduced into revealing all her secrets, was widely held. Scientific instruments played an increasingly important role in this process of revelation, allowing man not merely to extend his senses passively-using the telescope, the microscope, the barometer-but to intervene actively, using the voltaic battery, the electrical generator, the scalpel or the air pump. Even the Montgolfier balloon could be seen as an instrument of discovery, or indeed of seduction.
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 ideal of a pure, ‘disinterested’ science, independent of political ideology and even religious doctrine, also began slowly to emerge. The emphasis on a secular, humanist (even atheist) body of knowledge, dedicated to the ‘benefit of all mankind’, was particularly strong in Revolutionary France. This would soon involve Romantic science in new kinds of controversy: for instance, whether it could be an instrument of the state, in the case of inventing weapons of war. Or a handmaiden of the Church, supporting the widely held view of ‘Natural theology’, in which science reveals evidence of a divine Creation or intelligent design.
With these went the new notion of a popular science, a people’s science. The scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century had promulgated an essentially private, elitist, specialist form of knowledge. Its lingua franca was Latin, and its common currency mathematics. Its audience was a small (if international) circle of scholars and savants. Romantic science, on the other hand, had a new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public.
This became the first great age of the public scientific lecture, the laboratory demonstration and the introductory textbook, often written by women. It was the age when science began to be taught to children, and the ‘experimental method’ became the basis of a new, secular philosophy of life, in which the infinite wonders of Creation (whether divine or not) were increasingly valued for their own sake. It was a science that, for the first time, generated sustained public debates, such as the great Regency controversy over ‘Vitalism’: whether there was such a thing as a life force or principle, or whether men and women (or animals) had souls.
Finally, it was the age which challenged the elite monopoly of the Royal Society, and saw the foundation of scores of new scientific institutions, mechanics institutes and ‘philosophical’ societies, most notably the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street in 1799, the Geological Society in 1807, the Astronomical Society in 1820, and the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831.
Much of this transition from Enlightenment to Romantic science is expressed in the paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby. Closely attached to the Lunar Society, and the friend of Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley, Wright became a dramatic painter of experimental and laboratory scenes which reinterpreted late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment science as a series of mysterious, romantic moments of revelation and vision. The calm, glowing light of reason is surrounded by the intense, psychological chiaroscuro associated with Georges de la Tour. This is most evident in the famous series of scientific demonstration scenes painted at the height of his career: The Orrery (1766, Derby City Museum and the frontispiece of this book), The Air Pump (1767, National Gallery, London) and The Alchemist (1768, Derby City Museum). But these memorable paintings also ask whether Romantic science contained terror as well as wonder: if discovery and invention brought new dread as well as new hope into the world. We have certainly inherited this dilemma.

3
The Age of Wonder aims to raise and reflect upon such questions. Yet in the end the book remains a narrative, a piece of biographical storytelling. It tries to capture something of the inner life of science, its impact on the heart as well as on the mind. In the broadest sense it aims to present scientific passion, so much of which is summed up in that childlike, but infinitely complex word, wonder. Plato argued that the notion of ‘wonder’ was central to all philosophical thought: ‘In Wonder all Philosophy began: in Wonder it ends…But the first Wonder is the Offspring of Ignorance; the last is the Parent of Adoration.’
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Wonder, in other words, goes through various stages, evolving both with age and with knowledge, but retaining an irreducible fire and spontaneity. This seems to be the implication of Wordsworth’s famous lyric of 1802, which was inspired not by Newton’s prism, but by Nature’s:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!…
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This book is centred on two scientific lives, those of the astronomer William Herschel and the chemist Humphry Davy. Their discoveries dominate the period, yet they offer two almost diametrically opposed versions of the Romantic ‘scientist’, a term not coined until 1833, after they were both dead. It also gives an account of their assistants and protégés, who eventually became much more than that, and handed on the flame to the very different world of professional Victorian science. But it draws in many other lives, and it is interrupted by many episodes of scientific endeavour and high adventure so characteristic of the Romantic spirit: ballooning, exploring, soul-hunting. These were all part of the great journey.
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It is also held together by, as a kind of chorus figure or guide, a scientific Virgil. It is no coincidence that he began his career a young and naïve scientific traveller, an adventurer and secret journal-keeper. However, he ended it as the longest-serving, most experienced and most domineering President of the Royal Society: the botanist, diplomat and éminence grise Sir Joseph Banks. As a young man Banks sailed with Captain Cook round the world, setting out in 1768 on that perilous three-year voyage into the unknown. This voyage may count as one of the earliest distinctive exploits of Romantic science, not least because it involved a long stay in a beautiful but ambiguous version of Paradise-Otaheite, or the South Pacific island of Tahiti.

(#ulink_59e9b177-1fcb-5c1e-9d7b-21e5f9fd20f4) The fine survey by Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution (1999), gives a vivid picture of the leading figures in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution across Europe, and includes a significant introductory essay on the emerging role of science in modern society. See also my bibliography, ‘The Bigger Picture’, page 485.

(#ulink_5bf47e1e-652b-5e5b-87a3-3162b7bfc219) The apple fell in his orchard at Woolthorpe, Lincolnshire, where Newton, aged twenty-five, had retired from Cambridge during the Plague of 1665. Various versions of the story began to appear after his death in 1727. It appears in Stukeley’s unpublished Memoir of Newton, originally written in 1727, but not given to the Royal Society in manuscript until 1752; in unpublished notes for a biography by his nephew John Conduit; and for the first time in print in Voltaire’s Letters on the English Nation (1734). Part of the power of the story was that it replaced the sacred Biblical account of the Fall from Innocence in Genesis (Eve and the apple) with a secular parable of the Ascent to Knowledge. See Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (2005); and for a broad visionary perspective, Jacob Bronowski’s scientific classic The Ascent of Man (1973).

(#ulink_07e8113f-2082-5899-94f6-a9633a08eb5d) A brief guide to the many figures who jostle into this book, some familiar but others obscure or unexpected, appears in my Cast List, page 471.

1 Joseph Banks in Paradise (#ulink_67b1ce66-55c4-58e8-a578-1feb2b243cce)
1
On 13 April 1769, young Joseph Banks, official botanist to HM Bark Endeavour, first clapped eyes on the island of Tahiti, 17 degrees South, 149 degrees West. He had been told that this was the location of Paradise: a wonderful idea, although he did not quite believe it.
Banks was twenty-six years old, tall and well-built, with an appealing bramble of dark curls. By temperament he was cheerful, confident and adventurous: a true child of the Enlightenment. Yet he had thoughtful eyes and, at moments, a certain brooding intensity: a premonition of a quite different sensibility, the dreaming inwardness of Romanticism. He did not like to give way to it. So he kept good company with his shipmates, and had carefully maintained his physical fitness throughout the first eight months of the voyage. He regarded himself-‘thank god’-as in as good mental and physical trim as a man could be. When occasionally depressed, he did vigorous jumping ‘rope exercises’ in his cabin, once nearly breaking his leg while skipping.
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He was capable of working patiently for hours on end in the extremely cramped conditions on board. The quarterdeck cabin, which he shared with his friend Dr Daniel Solander, was approximately eight feet by ten. He had adopted a strict daily routine of botanical drawing, electrical experiments, animal dissections, deck-walking, bird-shooting (when available) and journal-writing. He constantly fished specimens from the sea, shot or netted wild birds, and observed meteorological phenomena, such as the beautiful ‘lunar rainbows’. When his gums had begun bleeding ominously with the onset of scurvy, he had calmly treated himself with a specially pre-prepared syrup (‘Dr Hume’s mixture’) of concentrated lemon juice, taking precisely six ounces a day.
(#litres_trial_promo) Within a week he was cured.
Just occasionally young Banks’s scientific enthusiasm turned to explosive impatience. When rudely prevented from carrying out any botanical field trips by the Spanish Consul at Rio de Janeiro, and confined for three weeks to the sweltering ship in the harbour at Rio, he wrote colourfully to a friend at the Royal Society: ‘You have heard of Tantalus in hell, you have heard of the French man laying swaddled in linen between two of his Mistresses both naked using every possible means to excite desire. But you have never heard of a tantalized wretch who has born his situation with less patience than I have done mine. I have cursed, swore, raved, stamped.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Banks did however unofficially slip over the side at night to collect wild seeds and plants, a hoard which included the exotic purple bougainvillea.
Once among the Polynesian isles, Banks spent hours at the topgallant masthead, his large form crouched awkwardly in the crow’s nest, looking for landfall beneath the heavy tropical cloudbase. At night the crew would hear distant surf roaring through the dark. Now at last he gazed out at the fabled blue lagoon, the black volcanic sand, and the intriguing palm trees (Linnaeus’s Arecaceae). Above the beach the precipitous hills, dense with dark-green foliage and gleaming with white streams, rose sharply to 7,000 feet. On the naval chart Banks noted that the place was marked, prosaically enough, ‘Port Royal Bay, King George the Third’s Island’. ‘As soon as the anchors were well down the boats were hoisted out and we all went ashore where we were met by some hundreds of the inhabitants whose faces at least gave evident signs that we were not unwelcome guests, tho they at first hardly dare approach us. After a little time they became very familiar. The first who aproachd us came creeping almost on his hands and knees and gave us a green bough the token of peace.’
Taking the hint, all the British shore party pulled down green boughs from the surrounding palm trees and carried them along the beach, waving them like ceremonial parasols. Eventually they were shown an idyllic spot close by a stream, where it was indicated that they could set up camp. The green boughs were thrown down in a great pile on the sand, ‘and thus peace was concluded’. Here the British settlement known as Fort Venus was to be established: ‘We then walked into the woods followed by the whole train to whom we gave beads and small presents. In this manner we walked for 4 or 5 miles under groves of Cocoa nut and Bread fruit trees loaded with a profusion of fruit and giving the most gratefull shade I have ever experienced. Under these were the habitations of the people most of them without walls. In short the scene we saw was the truest picture of an Arcadia of which we were going to be Kings that the imagination can form.’
As the men walked back, feeling dangerously like royalty, the Tahitian girls draped them with flowers, offered ‘all kind of civilities’ and gestured invitingly towards the coconut mats spread in the shade. Banks felt, reluctantly, that since islanders’ houses were ‘entirely without walls’ it was not quite the moment to ‘put their politeness to every test’. He would not have failed to have done so ‘had circumstances been more favourable’.
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2
Tahiti lies roughly east-west just below the 17th parallel, one of the largest of what are now the Society Islands, roughly halfway between Peru and Australia. It is shaped not unlike a figure of eight, some 120 miles (‘40 leagues’) in circumference. Most of its foreshores are easily accessible, a series of broad, curving bays with black volcanic sands or pinkish-white coral beaches, fringed by coconut palms and breadfruit trees. But a few hundred yards inland, the ground rises sharply into an entirely different topography. The steep, densely wooded volcanic hills lead upwards to a remote and hostile landscape of deep gullies, sheer cliffs and perilous ledges.
Contrary to legend, the Endeavour, commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, was not the first European ship to make landfall in Tahiti. Spanish expeditions, under Quiroz or Torres, had probably touched there in the late sixteenth century, and claimed it for Spain.
(#litres_trial_promo) A previous English expedition, under Captain Wallis of the Dolphin, had definitely landed there in 1767, when it was described as ‘romantic’, and claimed for England. A French expedition under Louis-Antoine de Bougainville had anchored there the following year, and claimed it for France.
The French had racily christened Tahiti ‘La Nouvelle Cythère’, the New Island of Love. Banks’s opposite number, the French botanist Philibert Commerson (who named the bougainvillea after his captain), had published a sensational letter in the Mercure de France describing Tahiti as a sexual ‘Utopia’. It proved that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was right about the existence of the Noble Savage. But then, the French had only spent nine days on the island.
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Cook was more sceptical, and had every member of his crew (including the officers) examined for venereal infections four weeks before arriving, by their surgeon Jonathan Monkhouse. He issued a series of Landing Instructions, which stated that the first rule of conduct ashore was civilised behaviour: ‘To Endeavour by every fair means to cultivate a Friendship with the Natives and to treat them with all Imaginable Humanity.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was no coincidence that he enshrined the ship’s own name in this instruction.
Joseph Banks had his own views on Paradise. He gave a whimsical account of his first night ashore in his Endeavour Journal. He dined deliciously on dressed fish and breadfruit, next to a Tahitian queen, who ‘did me the honour with very little invitation to squat down on the mats close by me’. However, the queen was ‘ugly enough in conscience’. Banks then noticed a very pretty girl, ‘with a fire in her eyes’ and white hibiscus in her hair, lingering in the ‘common crowd’ at the door. He encouraged her to come and sit on his other side, studiously ignored the queen for the rest of the evening, and ‘loaded’ the Polynesian beauty with bead necklaces and every compliment he could manage. ‘How this would have ended is hard to say,’ he observed later. In fact the amorous party broke up abruptly when it was discovered that his friend Solander had had a snuffbox picked from his pocket, and a fellow officer had lost ‘a pair of opera glasses’. It is not explained why he had brought opera glasses ashore in the first place.
This thieving proved to be completely customary in Tahiti, and led to many painful misunderstandings on both sides. The first occurred the following day, when a Tahitian quite openly made off with a marine’s musket, and was immediately shot dead by a punctilious guard. Banks quickly grasped that some quite different notion of property must be involved, and noted grimly: ‘We retird to the ship not well pleased with the days expedition, guilty no doubt in some measure of the death of a man who the most severe laws of equity would not have condemnd to so severe a punishment. No canoes about the ship this morning, indeed we could not expect any as it is probable that the news of our behaviour yesterday was now known every where, a circumstance which will doubtless not increase the confidence of our friends the Indians.’ Nonetheless, to Banks’s relief and evident surprise, good relations were restored within twenty-four hours.
The Endeavour expedition remained for three months on Tahiti. Its main object was to observe a Transit of Venus across the face of the sun. (Cook stated that this was the reason their settlement was named Fort Venus, though his junior officers gave a different explanation.) This was due on the morning of 3 June 1769, and there would be no other transit for the next hundred years (not until 1874). It was a unique chance to establish the solar parallax, and hence the distance of the sun from the earth. This calculation depended on observing the exact timing at which the silhouette of Venus first entered, and then exited from, the sun’s disc.
Banks was not part of the astronomical team, but when the expedition’s quadrant was stolen one night shortly before the transit was due, he reacted with characteristic energy and courage. He knew that without this large and exquisitely calibrated brass instrument, used to measure precise astronomical angles, the entire observation would be rendered valueless. Not waiting for Cook or his marine guards, Banks roused the expedition’s official astronomer, William Green, and set off immediately on foot in pursuit of the thief. In the dizzy heat, Banks followed the trail far up into the hills, accompanied only by a reluctant Green, one unarmed midshipman and a Tahitian interpreter. They penetrated seven miles inland through the Tahitian jungle, further than any European had been before: ‘The weather was excessive hot, the Thermometer before we left the tents up at 91 made our journey very tiresome. Sometimes we walk’d sometimes we ran when we imagind (which we sometimes did) that the chase was just before us till we arrived at the top of a hill about 4 miles from the tents. From this place [the interpreter] Tubourai shew’d us a point about 3 miles off and made us understand that we were not to expect the instrument till we got there. We now considerd our situation. No arms among us but a pair of pocket pistols which I always carried; going at least 7 miles from our fort where the Indians might not be quite so submissive as at home; going also to take from them a prize for which they had ventured their lives.’
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Banks decided to send back the midshipman with a brief message to Cook that armed reinforcements would be welcome. Meanwhile he and Green would press on alone, ‘telling him at the same time that it was impossible we could return till dark night’.
Before dusk, Banks ran the thief to ground in an unknown and potentially hostile village. A crowd quickly gathered round them, ‘rudely’ jostling them. Following a Tahitian custom he had already learned, Banks quickly drew out a ring on the grass, and surrounded by ‘some hundreds’ of faces, sat quietly down in the centre. Here, instead of threatening or blustering, he began to explain and negotiate. For some time nothing transpired. Then, piece by piece, starting with its heavy wooden deal case, the quadrant was solemnly returned. ‘Mr Green began to overlook the Instrument to see if any part or parts were wanting…The stand was not there but that we were informed had been left behind by the thief and we should have it on our return…Nothing else was wanting but what could easily be repaired, so we pack’d all up in grass as well as we could and proceeded homewards.’
By the time armed marines came up, sweating and jittery, about two miles down the track, Banks had completed the transaction and made several new friends. Everyone returned peacefully to Fort Venus on the shore. For this exploit, all conducted with the greatest calm and good humour, Banks earned the profound gratitude of Cook, who noted that ‘Mr Banks is always very alert upon all occasions wherein the Natives are concerned.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Banks concluded mildly in his journal: ‘All were, you may imagine, not a little pleased at the event of our excursion.’
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Banks and Cook were a seemingly ill-matched pair. They were divided by background, education, class and manners. Yet they formed a curiously effective team. Cook’s cool and formal manners towards the Tahitians were balanced by Banks’s natural openness and enthusiasm, which easily won friends. With their help he would gather a mass of plant and animal specimens, and make what was in effect an early anthropological study of Tahitian customs. His journal entries cover everything from clothes (or lack of them) and cookery to dancing, tattooing, sexual practices, fishing methods, wood-carving, and religious beliefs. His accounts of a dog being roasted, or a young woman having her buttocks tattooed, are frank and unforgettable. He attended Tahitian ceremonial events, slept in their huts, ate their food, recorded their customs and learned their language. He was pioneering a new kind of science. As he wrote in his journal: ‘I found them to be a people so free from deceit that I trusted myself among them almost as freely as I could do in my own countrey, sleeping continually in their houses in the woods with not so much as a single companion.’
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3
Educated in the traditional classics at Harrow, Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, young Joseph Banks had discovered science and the natural world at the age of fourteen. Towards the end of his life he told a sort of ‘conversion’ story about this to his friend the surgeon Sir Everard Home. It was later enshrined by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier in his obituary speech or Éloge to the Institut de France. Emerging late one summer afternoon from a schoolboy swim in the Thames at Eton, the teenage Banks found himself alone on the river, all his schoolfriends gone. Walking back through the green lanes, solitary and preoccupied, he suddenly saw the mass of wildflowers along the hedgerows vividly illuminated in the slanting, golden evening light. Their beauty and strangeness came to him like a revelation. ‘After some reflection, he said to himself, it is surely more natural that I should be taught to know all the productions of Nature, in preference to Greek and Latin; but the latter is my father’s command and it is my duty to obey him…He began immediately to teach himself Botany.’
Despite the stilted form of this recollection (it is in Home’s words and dates from fifty years after the event), 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. Even more important, it brought him into contact with a race of people who would normally have been quite invisible to a privileged Eton schoolboy such as he. These were the wise women of the country lanes and hedgerows, the gypsy herbalists who collected ‘simples’ or medicinal plants ‘to supply the Druggist and Apothecaries shops’ of Windsor and Slough. They were a strange but knowledgeable tribe, whom he soon learned to treat with respect. More than that, he paid them sixpence for every ‘material piece of information’ they supplied.
Banks also told Everard Home that it was his mother-not his father-who handed over her lovingly worn copy of Gerard’s Herbal, kept ‘in her dressing room’, with wonderful engravings that entranced him. It is thus that he is shown in a family portrait (possibly by Zoffany): an attractively long-haired and long-legged teenager, alert and faintly insolent, confidently posed in a studded leather chair with a portfolio of botanical engravings spread before him. Just under his left elbow, extraordinarily prophetic, is a large geographer’s globe in its mahogany cradle, with a rhumb-line of sunlight curving down towards the equator.
From then on Banks saw his destiny as a naturalist, and began avidly collecting rare plants, wildflowers, herbs, shells, stones, animals, insects, fish and fossils. His conversion story reveals other elements of his life and character: self-confidence, wealth, surprising sensitivity, unconventional directness, and an attraction to women. At university he made himself a disciple of the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, the leading Enlightenment botanist of Europe. Linnaeus had redefined the taxonomy of plants by identifying them according to their reproductive organs, re-cataloguing them in Latin according to genus, species and family, and collecting an unmatched array of specimens in his gardens at Uppsala.
Finding that there was no Linnaean lecturer in botany at Oxford, Banks reacted in a characteristic way. He rode to Cambridge, begged an interview with the Professor of Botany there, John Martyn, and simply asked to be recommended the best young botanist available. 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. Banks paid Lyons a good salary out of his own pocket. Later he recommended him to an Admiralty expedition, and he remained his friend and patron for life. Lyons was Banks’s first scientific protégé. From the start Banks displayed the commanding air, as well as the charm, of a wealthy man. This trait was given free rein when his father died in 1761. At the age of eighteen he was now sole heir to large estates in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire (they included over 200 farms) which would bring him £6,000 per annum (eventually rising to over £30,000), an enormous income for the period.
The family money made Banks a complete gentleman of leisure, a potentially fatal development, and he moved with his beloved mother and his only sister, Sophia, to a large house in Chelsea, near the Physic Garden. The conventional thing would have been for him to embark, like most of his friends, on the Grand Tour of Europe. Instead, the twenty-two-year-old Banks bought himself a berth on HMS Niger, and embarked on a strenuous seven-month botanical tour to the bleak shores of Labrador and Newfoundland. The Professor of Botany at Edinburgh wrote to him with some astonishment that it was ‘rumoured that you was going to the country of the Eskimaux Indians to gratify your taste for Natural Knowledge’.
Banks demonstrated his energy and commitment on this expedition, earning the approval of all the naval officers, including his friend Captain Constantine John Phipps, and a certain Lieutenant James Cook, who was in charge of chart-making. 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. On his return in November 1766, with a vast quantity of plant specimens (and some caoutchouc from Portugal), Banks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, still aged only twenty-three. He began what was to become his famous herbarium, scientific library and collection of prints and drawings. His rapidly expanding circle of scientific friends included the rakish Lord Sandwich, future head of the Admiralty, and the quiet, portly and dedicated Daniel Solander, a young Swedish botanist, trained under Linnaeus at Uppsala, who managed the Natural History section of the British Museum.
Two years later, Banks heard of the round-the-world expedition in HM Bark Endeavour. The ship was in fact a specially converted coastal ‘cat’ from Whitby, broad-beamed, shallow-draughted and immensely strong, capable of being beached for repairs, and of carrying large quantities of stores and livestock below decks (and on them). But she was little more than a hundred feet from stem to stern, and had extremely restricted quarters. She was to be commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, forty years old, lean and reserved, the tough and experienced mariner from the little port of Staithes in Yorkshire who had made his name charting the Newfoundland coast.
The expedition was organised by the Admiralty, but also partly financed by the Royal Society, which supplied £4,000 towards astronomical observations. 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.
The Royal Society had already appointed as the expedition’s official astronomer William Green, assistant to the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Banks immediately proposed himself as its official botanist. He would finance his own eight-man natural history ‘suite’, including two artists, a scientific secretary, Herman Spöring, two black servants from the Yorkshire estate, his friend Dr Solander and-characteristically-a pair of greyhounds. For these, and a mass of equipment, Banks laid out as much as £10,000, nearly two years’ income. For him it was to be a voyage in search of pure knowledge, and he laid in specialist equipment which created a considerable stir. A colleague reported admiringly, and with perhaps a touch of envy, to Linnaeus in Uppsala: ‘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 water, you can see the bottom at a great depth.’ He concluded reassuringly to Linnaeus: ‘All this is owing to you and your writings.’
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But there was, of course, an element of imperial competition. Cook had sealed Admiralty instructions to look out, after leaving Tahiti, for a possible ‘great Southern continent’ lying between latitude 30 and 40 degrees South. This was much further south than those parts of Australia’s eastern seaboard which were already known through the Dutch navigators. It was believed that New Zealand might form the northern tip to this continent, and that it might contain huge natural resources. If this continent existed, it had to be claimed and mapped (with a view to possible colonisation) before the French did so. The Admiralty seems to have been unaware of Antarctica.
The imperial instructions were not really so secret. Both Banks and Solander knew about them before departure, and even Linnaeus was informed.
(#litres_trial_promo) Moreover, neither Banks nor Cook really believed in the mysterious southern continent. Banks made a long, sceptical journal entry as they crossed the Pacific in March 1769, concluding: ‘It is however some pleasure to be able to disprove that which does not exist but in the opinions of Theoretical writers, of which sort most are who have wrote any thing about these seas without having themselves been in them. They have generaly supposed that every foot of sea which they beleived no ship had passed over to be land, tho they had little or nothing to support that opinion but vague reports…’ Nevertheless, he was 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.
Among the many friends Banks was leaving behind was Solander’s colleague the botanist and horticulturalist James Lee, who took an intense professional interest in the Pacific voyage. Lee owned the remarkable Vineyard Nurseries at the village of Hammersmith on the Thames. He was the author of a best-selling plant manual, An Introduction to Botany extracted from the works of Dr Linnaeus (1760), which ran into several editions, and he advised Banks on plant-collecting. Lee also trained up young naturalists at the nurseries. Among his assistants was an eighteen-year-old Scottish Quaker, Sydney Parkinson, a quiet, observant young man, whom Banks decided to employ as his second botanical artist aboard the Endeavour. It was a good choice, but with tragic consequences.
Another young person in Lee’s charge was twenty-year-old Harriet Blosset, to whom he was legal guardian. Lee was teaching her to study plants, and she would eagerly have signed up for the expedition herself. But of course no women were officially allowed on board His Majesty’s vessels, although the French botanist Philibert Commerson had smuggled his mistress aboard Bougainville’s ship, disguised as a cabin boy. It was rumoured at the nurseries that Harriet was ‘desperately in love with Mr Banks’, and there was a good deal of gossip about them immediately before the expedition’s departure.
(#litres_trial_promo) A fellow botanist, Robert Thornton, extravagantly catalogued Harriet as a young lady who ‘possessed extraordinary beauty, and every accomplishment, with a fortune of ten thousand pounds. Mr Banks had often seen her, when visiting the rare plants of Lee’s, and thought her the fairest among the flowers.’
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In fact Harriet was one of three sisters who lived with their widowed mother in Holborn. Banks does seem to have been genuinely fond of her, and subsequent events suggest there was some kind of understanding between them. Her guardian James Lee looked upon it as an unofficial engagement, which would be announced if Banks should return alive from the Pacific. There was also some joke about Harriet knitting a set of ‘worked’ waistcoats for Banks while he was away, patterned with wildflowers-perhaps one for each season he was absent.
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Yet Banks was certainly cautious about marriage at this stage in his career, remarking drily to a friend that though he loved experiments, matrimony was ‘an experiment…with uncertain consequences’, and rarely brought lifelong happiness. The eve of his great voyage was certainly not the moment to try it.
(#litres_trial_promo) In a rare introspective entry Banks would reflect in his journal that he would probably never see Europe again, and that there were only two people in the world who would truly miss him. ‘Today for the first time we dined in Africa, and took our leave of Europe for heaven alone knows how long, perhaps for Ever; that thought demands a sigh as a tribute due to the memory of freinds left behind and they have it; but two cannot be spared, t’would give more pain to the sigher, than pleasure to those sighd for. Tis Enough that they are rememberd, they would not wish to be too much thought of by one so long to be seperated from them and left alone to the Mercy of winds and waves.’
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If these two were his mother and his sister Sophia, then he did not wish to sigh unduly for Harriet Blosset. A certain bluffness was in order. When asked why he did not settle for the security of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, the object of which as Dr Johnson said was to visit the classical civilisations along the shores of the Mediterranean, he replied briskly: ‘Every blockhead does that; my Grand Tour shall be one round the whole Globe.’
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Banks spent his last night before going aboard at the opera. Then he dined in company with Harriet Blosset at her mother’s house, accompanied by a Swiss geologist, Horace de Saussure, who assumed from their behaviour that they were ‘betrothed’. Saussure described Harriet as very pretty and attentive, but ‘a prudent coquette’, and Banks as quite reconciled to their imminent parting, and drinking rather too much champagne.
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When the naturalist Gilbert White, snug in his Hampshire village, heard of Banks’s departure on the high seas, he wrote thoughtfully to their mutual friend Thomas Pennant: ‘When I reflect on the youth and affluence of this enterprizing young gentleman I am filled with wonder to see how conspicuously the contempt of dangers, and the love of excelling in his favourite studies, stands forth in his character…If he survives, with what delight we shall peruse his Journals, his Fauna, his Flora! If he falls by the way, I shall revere his fortitude, and contempt of pleasures and indulgences: but shall always regret him.’
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4
Through the brilliance of Cook’s navigation, and the skill of his crew management, the Endeavour arrived at Tahiti with over six weeks in which to prepare for its main task, the transit observations. Previous expeditions had often been decimated by this stage, but Cook had lost only four men, and none to disease. The crew’s diet included a serving of cabbage sauerkraut ‘fresh every morning [as] at Covent Garden market’, and Banks had shot seabirds wherever possible for fresh meat, including several large albatross with nine-foot wingspans.
The first death was the result of an accident with an anchor chain in Madeira. The next two occurred on land, and involved Banks. A field expedition he was leading had been overtaken by a snowstorm on Tierra del Fuego. It was a grim and confused story, which revealed something of Banks’s qualities in a crisis. The party of twelve men (including Green, Solander and several sailors) had first run into trouble when one of Banks’s young artists, Alexander Buchan, suffered an epileptic fit. Then a sudden blizzard cut off their retreat to the ship, several hours away down the mountains, and the party became separated in a birch wood as night fell.
Overcome by the biting cold, Banks’s two black servants drank a stolen bottle of rum, and lay down in the snow and refused to go on. Meanwhile Solander, always rather stout and unfit, simply collapsed. Disintegration and disaster threatened the entire expedition. As darkness came on and the temperature plummeted, Banks tried to hold them together. First he regrouped the scattered men further down the mountainside with Green, made a fire and organised a brushwood ‘wigwam’, where Buchan was revived. Then Banks went back through the sub-zero night, with as many hands as he could muster, to drag the half-conscious Solander down through the birch wood to safety. It was an act which cemented their friendship. Banks also sent hands to save his black servants, but they were ‘immoderately drunk’, and could not-or would not-be carried back to the camp.
It was now past midnight, and everyone was stunned with cold, but Banks went out again in a last attempt to save them. ‘Richmond was upon his legs but not able to walk, the other lay on the ground insensible as stone.’ Banks tried to light a fire, but it was doused by falling snow. It was ‘absolutely impossible’ to bring the two men down. Finally he laid them out on a bed of branches, covered them with brushwood, and left them, hoping they would survive the night, insulated by alcohol. Going back at dawn, he found them both dead.
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When the rest of the party finally returned to the Endeavour, Cook noted that they all retired to their hammocks except Banks. After making his report and classifying his specimens, he insisted on going out in one of the ship’s small boats alone, and spent the rest of the day in the bay, a solitary figure hunched over the stern, fishing with a seine net. Cook had not blamed him for his companions’ deaths; but for the first time perhaps, he felt the weight of his responsibilities.
The third death was a suicide in the Pacific. This revealed another side to Banks. He made a long, thoughtful entry over the incident, in which a young able seaman, ‘remarkable quiet and industrious’, had apparently jumped overboard after being accused of stealing a sealskin tobacco pouch from the captain’s cabin. Banks was struck by the melancholy event, remarking thoughtfully that ‘it must appear incredible to every body who is not well acquainted with the powerfull effects that shame can work upon young minds’. Cook did not pursue the incident, but it seems clear from Banks’s entry that he suspected homosexual bullying by an older member of the crew.
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The initial days on Tahiti were obviously exciting, but curiously tense. There was the unfortunate shooting in the first week, and the scare over the quadrant in the third. Young Alexander Buchan was taken ill again, and died from what appeared to be a repeat of the epileptic fit in Tierra del Fuego. Banks wrote in his journal: ‘Dr Solander Mr Sporing Mr Parkinson and some of the officers of the ship attended his funeral. I sincerely regret him as an ingenious and good young man, but his Loss to me is irretrievable, my airy dreams of entertaining my freinds in England with the scenes that I am to see here are vanishd.’ Banks’s comments seem curiously harsh, and suggest his instinctive sense of entitlement. ‘No account of the figures and dresses of men can be satisfactory unless illustrated with figures: had providence spared him a month longer what an advantage would it have been to my undertaking. But I must submit.’
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This note would be repeated elsewhere in his journal. Yet the expedition’s other artist, the eighteen-year-old Sydney Parkinson, had no doubts about his employer’s humanity. He had witnessed how Banks had nursed Buchan in the Tierra del Fuego débâcle, and wrote a long entry in his own journal reflecting on Banks’s response to the unnecessary shooting of the Tahitian over the stolen musket. ‘When Mr Banks heard of the affair, he was highly displeased, saying, “If we quarrel with these Indians, we should not agree with Angels.” And he did all he could to accommodate the difference, going across the river, and through the mediation of an old man, prevailed upon many of the natives to come over to us, bearing plaintain trees, which is a signal of peace among them; and clapping their hands to their breasts, cried “Tyau!”, which signifies friendship. They sat down by us; sent for coa nuts; and we drank milk with them.’
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With the security of the entire expedition in his hands, Cook was naturally cautious. He decided that a permanent armed encampment, Fort Venus, should be built on the beach to protect the expedition ashore and assert its authority. Banks says the Tahitians approved of this, and helped with the construction. Drawings by Parkinson, though the fort’s situation among the palm trees is intended to look idyllic, show a square earthen stockade surmounted by a wooden palisade with naval swivel cannons mounted along the top. The fort was fifty yards wide by thirty yards deep, commanding a stretch of river on the inland side. In front along the shore was a trading area, where boats and canoes were drawn up, but all stores and arms were kept inside under guard, except for barrels of water by the stream. There were wooden gates which were closed at dusk, with armed sentries.
Within the perimeter, Cook established an official reception area, with a flagstaff flying a large Union Jack. There was a big rectangular marquee for gatherings and feasts, surrounded by an encampment of smaller supply tents and sleeping quarters, together with a bakery, a forge and an observatory. Banks had brought his own bell tent, only fifteen feet in diameter, but obviously the most well-equipped and comfortable. It soon became a popular destination with visiting Tahitians, and there was great rivalry for invitations to dine and sleep there. He noted in his journal: ‘Our little fortification is now compleat, it consists of high breastworks at each end, the front palisades and the rear guarded by the river on the bank of which are placed full Water cask[s]. At every angle is mounted a swivel and two carraige guns pointed the two ways by which the Indians might attack us out of the woods. Our sentrys are also as well releived as they could be in the most regular fortification.’
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This security was regarded as important for good relations, and the fort may have been as much designed to keep the sailors in, as the Tahitians out. Cook enforced a basic naval discipline, which included having one able seaman flogged on the quarterdeck for threatening a Tahitian woman with an axe.
(#litres_trial_promo) Naturally there was a night curfew, but it was not very strictly observed, especially by the officers.
The constant theft of goods, especially of anything made of metal, regularly disrupted relations between the two communities. It was theft, too, that most clearly demonstrated the cruel gulf between the two civilisations. To the Europeans theft was a violation of legal ownership, an assault on private property and wealth. To the Tahitians it was a skilful affirmation of communal resources, an attempt to balance their self-evident poverty against overwhelming European superfluity. There was no source of metal anywhere on the island. The Tahitians’ hunting knives were made out of wood, their fish hooks out of mother-of-pearl, their cooking pots out of clay. The Europeans clanked and glittered with metal.
As Cook himself observed, the Endeavour was an enormous treasure trove of metal goods: from iron nails, hammers and carpenters’ tools to the most puzzling of watches, telescopes and scientific instruments. To the Tahitians it was wholly justifiable to redistribute such items. Banks, who had to keep a watchful eye on his scientific equipment, noticeably his dissection knives and his two solar microscopes, noted: ‘I do not know by what accident I have so long omitted to mention how much these people are given to theiving. I will make up for my neglect however today by saying that great and small Chiefs and common men all are firmly of opinion that if they can once get possession of any thing it immediately becomes their own.’
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Ruminating on these larger ethical questions did not allow Banks to ignore simple practical problems, like the ubiquitous flies: ‘The flies have been so troublesome ever since we have been ashore that we can scarce get any business done for them; they eat the painters colours off the paper as fast as they can be laid on, and if a fish is to be drawn there is more trouble in keeping them off it than in the drawing itself.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The men tried many expedients: fly swats, flytraps made of molasses, and even mosquito nets draped over Parkinson while he worked.
Much time was spent in bargaining for sexual favours. The basic currency was any kind of usable metal object: there was no need for gold or silver or trinkets. 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. There was a run on anything metal that could be smuggled off the ship-cutlery, cleats, handles, cooking utensils, spare tools, but especially nails. It was said that the Endeavour’s carpenter soon operated an illegal monopoly on metal goods, and nails were leaving the ship by the sackful.
Later in June there was a crisis when one of the Endeavour’s crew stole a hundredweight bag of nails, and refused to reveal its whereabouts even after a flogging: ‘One of the theives was detected but only 7 nails were found upon him out of 100 Wht and he bore his punishment without impeaching any of his accomplices. This loss is of a very serious nature as these nails if circulated by the people among the Indians will much lessen the value of Iron, our staple commodity.’
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Cook disapproved of sexual bartering, and made attempts to regulate the trade in love-making-‘quite unsupported’, he later drily observed, by any of his officers. He remained philosophical, observing, not without humour, that there was a cautionary tale told about Captain Wallis’s ship the Dolphin: when leaving Polynesian waters two years previously, so many nails had been surreptitiously prised out of her timbers that she almost split apart in the next Pacific storm she encountered. It was only later that the full, disastrous medical consequences of this spontaneous sexual trade became apparent.
Yet Cook was already aware of the terrible risk and burden of spreading venereal disease, and wrote a long entry in his journal for 6 June 1769 reflecting on them. Certainly he had taken every precaution that his own crew were free from sexual infection when they arrived. They had been examined by Mr Monkhouse, the Endeavour’s surgeon, and they had in effect been in shipboard quarantine for eight months. But the Tahitian ‘Women were so very liberal with their favours’ that venereal disease had soon spread itself ‘to the greatest part of the Ship’s Company’. The Tahitians themselves called it ‘the British disease’, and Cook thought they were probably correct, though he wondered if it was already endemic, brought either by the French or by the Spanish. ‘However this is little satisfaction to them who must suffer by it in a very great degree and may in time spread itself over all the Islands of the South Seas, to the eternal reproach of those who first brought it among them.’
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Some crew members had moral scruples from the start. Young Sydney Parkinson noted disapprovingly in his journal: ‘Most of our ship’s company procured temporary wives amongst the Natives, with whom they occasionally cohabited; an indulgence which even many reputed virtuous Europeans allow themselves, in uncivilised parts of the world, with impunity. As if a change of place altered the moral turpitude of fornication: and what is a sin in Europe, is only a simple innocent gratification in America; which is to suppose that the obligation of chastity is local, and restricted only to particular parts of the globe.’
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Banks appeared to have no such scruples. He made a point of leaving the camp most nights and, as he put it, ‘sleeping alone in the woods’. He told himself, perhaps with the easiness of birth and privilege, that his intentions were as much botanical as amorous, and that no moral code was seriously infringed. After all, it was all research. Yet it is difficult to see him as a simple predator. 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.
He reached an important and lasting understanding with the Tahitian queen, Oborea. This included the pretty girl ‘with fire in her eyes’, who conveniently turned out to be one of the queen’s personal servants, Otheothea. But it was much more than a sexual agreement. Almost uniquely, Banks was welcomed into many hidden aspects of Tahitian life, including dining, dressing and religious rituals. It also brought him his most vital contact, with one of the Tahitian ‘priests’ or wise men, Tupia, who taught him the language and many of the island customs.
Characteristically, Banks was virtually the only member of the Endeavour who bothered to learn more than a very few words of Tahitian. His journal contains a basic vocabulary. The words fall into four main sections, which perhaps suggest his particular areas of interest: first, plants and animals (’breadfruit, dolphin, coconut, parroquet, shark’); then intimate parts of the human body (’breasts, nails, shoulders, buttocks, nipples’); then sky phenomena (’sun, moon, stars, comet, cloud’); and finally qualities (’good, bad, bitter, sweet, hungry’). There are also some verbs, including those for stealing, understanding, eating, and being angry or tired. But the list cannot be very complete, since there are no words for love, laughter, music or beauty-and it would be difficult to talk Tahitian without any of these.
Banks’s skill with language gave him a new role as the chief trading officer or ‘marketing man’ for the Endeavour. He established himself in a canoe drawn up on the shore outside Fort Venus, and every morning would negotiate for food and supplies. He was acutely aware of the shifting trading rates, noting on 11 May: ‘Cocoa nuts were brought down so plentifully this morn that by ½ past 6 I had bought 350. This made it necessary to drop the price of them least so many being brought at once we should exhaust the country and want hereafter. Not withstanding I had before night bought more than a thousand at the rates of 6 for an amber coulourd bead, 10 for a white one, and 20 for a fortypenny nail.’
Trading also brought him into regular contact with Tahitians of every class, and helped him establish a broad base of good friendships, while Cook and the other officers remained more aloof. His journal shows him constantly enlarging his Tahitian social circle, referring to people by their names, many of them in terms of trust and affection. When this trust was broken or shaken, Banks was often mortified. He frequently blamed himself, rather than the Tahitians, for misunderstandings or false accusations of theft.
He learned the local name for the island, which he transliterated into English: ‘We have now got the Indian name of the Island, Otahite, so therefore for the future I shall call it.’ His spelling was simply based on the pronunciation ‘O Tahiti’. He also found that the Tahitians had in turn transliterated their visitors’ English names, but after their own fashion. ‘As for our own names the Indians find so much difficulty in pronouncing them that we are forced to indulge them in calling us what they please.’ The results were rather odd, and Banks suspected that they were partially amusing nicknames. Captain Cook was ‘Toote’; Dr Solander was ‘Torano’; the chief mate Mr Molineux was ‘Boba’ (Banks guessed from his Christian name, ‘Robert’); and Banks himself was ‘Tapáne’, which appeared to mean a drum. Whereas the English had difficulty in recognising more than a handful of Tahitians by name, Banks observed that the Tahitians were much quicker, and soon had names for ‘almost every man in the ship’.
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Banks’s new role expanded to that of civilian diplomat and social secretary. Not being an official part of Cook’s naval command gave him a certain flexibility between ship and shore. He helped to arrange many of the informal dinners at Fort Venus, as well as the official visits to the ship. 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 young Linnaean collector, with his detached interest in cataloguing, dissection and taxonomy, was being transformed by his Tahitian experience. The Enlightenment botanist, the aristocratic collector and classifier, was steadily being drawn in to share another ethnic culture and its customs. His Endeavour Journal would become fuller for Tahiti than for any other part of the Pacific. Eventually it would expand into a long report, couched in anthropological terms, ‘On the Manner and Customs of the South Sea Islands’. It would be the most detailed monograph he ever wrote.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

5
The occasion of the Transit of Venus, on 3 June 1769, provided a good opportunity for Banks’s new approach. In late May, Cook had set up three astronomical observation points to insure against the possible interference of localised cloud cover. Banks accompanied the furthest group of observers to the outlying island of Moorea. While recording the transit was one of the main objectives of the entire expedition, it was one which the Tahitians could not be expected to understand. Yet Banks’s journal entry for 3 June 1769 shows the consideration with which he treated the islanders during this crucial piece of scientific research.
Banks had set up the instruments at a camp above the shoreline by 8 a.m., and had also provided ‘a large quantity of provisions’ for trade and diplomatic gifts. Leaving the telescopes, he waited down by the beach. Two large canoes appeared, carrying the king of the island, Tarróa, and his sister Nuna. Banks was standing in the shade of a tree, and immediately went down to them: ‘I went out and met them and brought them very formally into a circle I had made, into which I had before sufferd none of the natives to come. Standing is not the fashion among these people. I must provide them a seat, which I did by unwrapping a turban of Indian cloth which I wore instead of a hat, and spreading it upon the ground. Upon which we all sat down and the king’s present was brought Consisting of a hog, a dog and a quantity of Bread fruit Cocoa nuts &c. I immediately sent a canoe to the Observatory to fetch my present, an adze a shirt and some beads with which his majesty seemed well satisfied.’
This was a customary exchange of gifts. But Banks was determined to explain to the king what his men were doing. ‘After the first Internal contact [of Venus with the sun’s disc] was over I went to my Companions at the Observatory carrying with me Tarroa, Nuna and some of their chief attendants. To them we shewed the planet upon the sun and made them understand that we came on purpose to see it. After this they went back and myself with them.’
Yet the nonchalant end of this journal entry shows that Banks was also perfectly prepared to take advantage of his privileged situation: ‘At sunset I came off having purchased another hog from the King. Soon after my arrival at the tent 3 handsome Girls came off in a canoe to see us. They had been at the tent in the morning with Tarroa. They chatted with us very freely and with very little persuasion agreed to send away their carriage and sleep in [the] tent. A proof of confidence which I have not before met with upon so short an acquaintance.’
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The next day Banks added mischievously: ‘We prepared ourselves to depart, in spite of the intreaties of our fair companions who persuaded us much to stay.’ But who was seducing whom? Who was exploiting whom? Many of Banks’s most striking observations on Tahiti record behaviour which seems difficult to evaluate or interpret. Once in late April, one of his closest friends among the Tahitian women, Terapo, appeared at the gate of Fort Venus in great distress. Banks carefully recorded what followed: ‘Terapo was observed to be among the women on the outside of the gate, I went out to her and brought her in, tears stood in her eyes which the moment she enterd the tent began to flow plentifully. I began to enquire the cause; she instead of answering me took from under her garment a sharks tooth and struck it into her head with great force 6 or 7 times. a profusion of Blood followed these strokes and alarmed me not a little. For two or 3 minutes she bled freely more than a pint in quantity, during that time she talked loud in a most melancholy tone. I was not a little moved at so singular a spectacle and holding her in my arms did not cease to enquire what might be the cause of so strange an action.’
Terapo consistently refused to explain, though Banks’s gesture of taking her in his arms suggests the possibility of some kind of emotional upset between them. There were several other Tahitians in the tent at the time-yet ‘all talked and laughed as if nothing melancholy was going forward’. This only deepened the mystery. Terapo’s recovery was no less abrupt and inexplicable: ‘What surpriz’d me most of all was that as soon as the bleeding ceas’d she looked up smiling and immediately began to collect peices of cloth which during her bleeding she had thrown down to catch the blood. These she carried away out of the tents and threw into the sea, carefully dispersing them abroad as if desirous that no one should be reminded of her action by the sight of them. She then went into the river and after washing her whole body returnd to the tents as lively and chearfull as any one in them.’
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Banks later discovered that this dramatic way of expressing grief was universal among the Tahitian women, and he saw many who had permanent ‘grief scars’ on their heads. He learned something about such things from queen Oborea’s little family circle. This group-consisting of the queen, her twenty-year-old lover Obadee, her servant Otheothea (Banks’s lover) and several close male friends-seems to have adopted Banks, and looked after his welfare. They frequently all came to sleep in his tent, when feasting and love-making seems to have taken place easily and indiscriminately. Sometimes this could lead to comic-opera complications, as Banks would smilingly hint in his journal.
21 May. Sunday, Divine service performed, at which was present Oborea, Otheothea, Obadee, &c. all behav’d very decently. After dinner Obadee, who had been for some time absent, returnd to the fort. Oborea desired he might not be let in, his countenance was however so melancholy that we could not but admit him. He looked most piteously at Oborea, she most disdainfully at him. She seems to us to act in the character of a Ninon d’Enclos who, satiated with her lover, resolves to change him at all events. The more so as I am offered, if I please, to supply his place! But I am at present otherwise engag’d; indeed was I free as air, her Majesties person is not the most desireable.
Other mishaps ensued towards the end of the month. Banks, Cook and Solander had decided on an expedition to explore the western end of the bay, and to bargain for some wild pigs rumoured to be held by the local chieftain, Dootah. Banks was followed solicitously up the coast by queen Oborea and her entourage in their large and comfortable outrigger canoes. When the expedition was benighted in chief Dootah’s village (no accommodation being offered), Banks agreed to separate from the others and sleep in the queen’s well-appointed canoe, which had a cabin constructed between the floats.
As he explained in his journal, he and the queen had naturally removed all their clothes. ‘We went to bed early as is the custom here: I stripped myself for the greater convenience of sleeping as the night was hot. Oborea insisted that my cloths should be put into her custody, otherwise she said they would certainly be stolen. I readily submitted and laid down to sleep with all imaginable tranquility.’
The next morning Banks awoke to find almost all his kit missing-his handsome nankeen jacket with its fine brass buttons, his breeches, his waistcoat, his much-prized pistols and even his powder-horn. All had been-most unfortunately, murmured the queen-stolen in the night. After unavailing searches and appeals, Banks was faced by the prospect of a shame-faced retreat to Fort Venus with neither the promised pigs, nor his precious pistols, or even most of his clothes. Queen Oborea seems to have enacted a form of revenge. She supplied Banks with Tahitian shawls and blankets to replace his European clothes, and bade him farewell. For once, Banks was distinctly unamused: ‘I made a motley apearance, my dress being half English and half Indian. Dootahah soon after made his apearance; I pressed him to recover my Jacket but neither he nor Oborea would take the least step towards it so that I am almost inclind to believe that they acted principals in the theft.’
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Any resentful feelings were swept aside the following afternoon. Rounding the tip of the bay, they looked out to sea and saw something wholly unexpected and ‘truly surprising’. This was the astonishing and never-to-be-forgotten sight, far out on the unprotected edge of the lagoon, of a group of dark Tahitian heads bobbing amidst the enormous dark-blue Pacific waves. At first Banks thought they had been flung out of their canoes and were drowning. Then he realised that the Tahitians were surfing.
No European had ever witnessed-or at least recorded-this strange, extreme and quintessentially South Seas sport before. It left Banks amazed by the courage and dexterity of the Tahitian surfers, and the beauty and nonchalant grace with which they mastered the huge and terrifying Pacific rollers: ‘It was in a place where the shore was not guarded by a reef as is usualy the case, consequently a high surf fell upon the shore. A more dreadfull one I have not often seen: no European boat could have landed in it and I think no Europaean who had by any means got into [it] could possibly have saved his life, as the shore was coverd with pebbles and large stones. In the midst of these breakers 10 or 12 Indians were swimming.’
Here the power of wild nature was not tamed, but was harnessed by human beings; and they evidently revelled in it. The Tahitians had developed what were clearly surfboards, constructed out of the smooth, curved ends of old canoes. They were scornful of all danger, and exultant in their physical skills. ‘Whenever a surf broke near them [they] dived under it with infinite ease, rising up on the other side; but their chief amusement was carried on by the stern of an old canoe. With this before them they swam out as far as the outermost breach, then one or two would get into it and opposing the blunt end to the breaking wave were hurried in with incredible swiftness. Sometimes they were carried almost ashore, but generally the wave broke over them before they were half way. In which case the[y] dived and quickly rose on the other side with the canoe in their hands, which was towed out again and the same method repeated.’
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. It was a complete Paradise sport: ‘We stood admiring this very wonderfull scene for full half an hour, in which time no one of the actors attempted to come ashore but all seemed most highly entertained with their strange diversion.’
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Some Tahitian ceremonies were carefully organised, and suitable for all the Endeavour’s crew, such as the afternoon of naked wrestling organised by queen Oborea. Others were less official. One morning a number of young women arrived by canoe, and were offered to Banks in a curiously provoking ceremony
12 May. While I sat trading in the boat at the door of the fort a double Canoe came with several women and one man under the awning. The Indians round me made signs that I should go out and meet them…Tupia who stood by me acted as my deputy in receiving them…Another man then came forward having in his arms a large bundle of cloth. This he opend out and spread it piece by piece on the ground between the women and me. It consisted of nine pieces. Three were first laid. The foremost of the women, who seemed to be the principal, then stepped upon them and quickly unveiling all her charms gave me a most convenient opportunity of admiring them by turning herself gradualy round.
Further pieces of cloth were then laid out in front of Banks, and the woman stepped closer and repeated her slow, smiling, naked gyrations. No awkwardness seems to have been felt on either side. ‘She then once more displayed her naked beauties and immediately marchd up to me, a man following her and doubling up the cloth as he came forwards which she immediately made me understand was intended as a present for me. I took her by the hand and led her to the tents acompanied by another woman her friend. To both of them I made presents but could not prevail upon them to stay more than an hour.’
This is clearly a seduction scene, and the unnamed Tahitian man is bartering the woman. Yet there is no gloating in Banks’s entry; nor is it clear whether he took advantage of this frank proposal. Cook also witnessed this scene, and remarked that the young woman acted ‘with as much Innocency as one could possibly conceive’.
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By mid-June Banks was increasingly prepared to abandon European inhibitions, including his clothes. He noted frequently, ‘I lay in the woods last night as I very often did,’ by which one can understand he was probably with Otheothea. On 10 June his journal records how he stripped off, had his body covered with charcoal and white wood ash, and danced ceremonially with a witch doctor (Heiva). He was joined by two naked women and a boy, and together they danced through the length of the village, past the gate of Fort Venus, and along the shore.
It must have been an extraordinary sight, the expedition’s chief botanist whirling past the marine guards in the sunlight. But this Tahitian ceremony was not at all what it might have appeared to uninstructed European eyes. It was not an erotic rite, but a dance of ritual mourning. Banks and the young women were taking the part of ancestral ghosts (Ninevehs). ‘Tubourai was the Heiva, the three others and myself were the Nineveh. He put on his dress, most Fantastical tho not unbecoming…I was next prepard by stripping off my European cloths and putting me on a small strip of cloth round my waist, the only garment I was allowed to have, but I had no pretensions to be ashamed of my nakedness for neither of the women were a bit more coverd than myself. They then began to smut me and themselves with charcoal and water, the Indian boy was compleatly black, the women and myself as low as our shoulders. We then set out. Tubourai began by praying twice, once near the Corps again near his own house…To the fort then we went to the surprize of our freinds and affright of the Indians who were there, for they every where fly before the Heiva like sheep before a wolf.’ The dancing continued along the shore, and went on for the rest of the afternoon, ‘After which we repaird home, the Heiva undressed and we went into the river and scrubbed one another till it was dark before the blacking would come off.’
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After eight weeks it became clear that many other officers were not integrating so well into the Tahitian way of life. One of them committed an elementary error by foolishly violating a religious taboo: ‘Mr Monkhouse our surgeon met to day with an insult from an Indian, the first that has been met with by any of us. He was pulling a flower from a tree which grew on a burying ground and consequently was I suppose sacred, when an Indian came behind him and struck him; he seiz’d hold of him and attempted to beat him, but was prevented by two more who coming up seized hold of his hair and rescued their companion after which they all ran away.’
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Even Captain Cook managed to create an unnecessary crisis when it was discovered that a metal fire-rake had been stolen from the fort. Determined to set an example, he impounded a score of native canoes. When the rake was swiftly returned, Cook then demanded that all other implements stolen from the camp in the last month should also be restored before he would return the canoes. It was quickly clear to Banks that Cook had here overplayed his hand with the Tahitians. The situation grew more complicated when it was learned that the canoes actually belonged to another group of islanders, who were bringing much-needed food to their relatives. They had no previous connection with the British, and were obviously not responsible for any of the thefts.
The aggrieved Tahitians appealed directly to Banks, rather than to Cook, over this blatant injustice. ‘Great application was made to me in my return that some of these might be released.’ For the first time Banks appeared openly critical of Cook in his journal: ‘I confess had I taken a step so violent I would have seized either the persons of the people who had stolen from us, most of whoom we either knew or shrewdly suspected, or their goods at least instead of those of people who are intirely unconcernd in the affair and have not probably interest enough with their superiors (to whoom all valuable things are carried) to procure the restoration demanded.’
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For several days all trading ceased, and the fish in the sequestered canoes began to rot, filling the fort with an ominous smell. Then one of the duty officers compounded their difficulties by committing another needless offence. Taking a party of sailors out to collect ballast stone for the Endeavour, he promptly began ‘pulling down’ a Tahitian burying ground. Once again the Tahitian appeal was made directly to Banks: ‘To this the Indians objected much and [a] messenger came to the tents saying that they would not suffer it. I went with the 2nd Lieutenant to the place.’ Banks, in his diplomatic role, eventually managed to soothe both parties, had the burying ground restored, and found a nearby riverbed where the sailors ‘gatherd stones very Easily without a possibility of offending anybody’.
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The issue of the impounded canoes remained, however, and suggested hostile attitudes on both sides: ‘The fish in the Canoes stink most immoderately so as in some winds to render our situation in the tents rather disagreable…The market has been totaly stopped ever since the boats were seized, nothing being offerd to sale but a few apples; our freinds however are liberal in presents so that we make a shift to live without expending our bread.’
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Queen Oborea and Banks’s flame Otheothea reappeared at the fort, though initially Banks thought it wiser for them to sleep outside in their canoes, and they were ‘rather out of humour’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The crisis was only gradually defused, as Cook allowed the canoes to be taken back three or four at a time, in return for small peace offerings. One unexpected development was that Oborea’s ex-husband, known as Oamo, put in an appearance to plead for the release of the boats. To everyone’s surprise, Oamo behaved very politely towards his ex-wife, and he made the most favourable impression on Banks. He showed himself to be a ‘very sensible man by the shrewd questions he asks about England its manners and customs &c.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But the general issue of theft and restitution was never really resolved, and relations with the Tahitians were less relaxed in the last month of the expedition’s stay. Chief Dootah completely withdrew from the Europeans, claiming he had been frightened by Banks shooting for wild duck.
Food remained a source of mutual interest, and one remarkable culinary event featured a dog, which the priest Tupia killed, dressed and roasted, while Banks carefully took down the recipe. Most of the sailors were repelled, but Banks declared the results to be delicious. ‘A most excellent dish he made for us who were not much prejudiced against any species of food. I cannot however promise that an European dog would eat as well, as these scarce in their lives touch animal food, Cocoa nut kernel, Bread fruit, yams &c, being what their masters can best afford to give them and what indeed from custom I suppose they preferr to any kind of food.’
Banks was also more at odds than previously with his naval companions, and there was some kind of quarrel with the insensitive surgeon Monkhouse. Banks tactfully omitted this from his journal, but young Sydney Parkinson recorded a confrontation between the two, and thought it arose over Monkhouse propositioning Otheothea. Several of Oborea’s Tahitian girls had arrived at Banks’s tent ‘very earnest in getting themselves husbands’. They behaved ‘very agreeable until bedtime, and determined to lie in Mr Banks’s tent, which they accordingly did, till the Surgeon having some words with one of them…he insisted she should not sleep there, and thrust her out’. Otheothea was then heard crying for some time in the tent. Parkinson noted dramatically: ‘Mr Monkhouse and Mr Banks came to an eclaircisement some time after; had very high words and I expected they would have decided it by a duel, which, however, they prudently avoided.’ Oborea and her retinue then left in their canoes, and would not return to the camp. ‘But Mr Banks went and staid with them all night.’
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It was probably no coincidence that Cook now decided that he would take his botanist off on a separate expedition. This was planned as a circumnavigation of the entire island in the Endeavour’s small sailing boat. Its official naval objective was to chart all possible harbours, and discover any signs of previous European landings-notably French or (as it was supposed) Spanish. For Banks, however, it was a glorious scientific field expedition, and a tantalising extension of his new anthropological investigations.
Starting at Matavi Bay in the north of the island, the circumnavigation took six days. They set out with a small crew and a handful of marines at 3 a.m. on 26 June, heading eastwards. There was considerable uncertainty about their reception once they passed beyond the territory of Matavi Bay, where Oborea and Dootah had influence. One of their guides said that ‘people not subject to Dootah’ would kill them. Accordingly they adopted a cautious mode of advance. Banks and Cook travelled mostly on foot along the shoreline, while the pinnace, its marines armed with loaded muskets, was rowed just offshore, keeping pace and overseeing their progress. A number of native canoes followed them.
‘Banks as usual explored, botanized, conversed,’ noted Cook with a smile.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed he was soon plunging inland and out of sight, claiming to be in search of specimens, waving a large butterfly net as his preferred weapon of defence. Banks thought nothing of foraging by himself ashore, once disappearing at dusk to hunt for provisions. He shot a duck and two curlews, then pressed on deeper inland. ‘I went into the woods, it was quite dark so that neither people nor victuals could I find except one house where I was furnishd with fire, a breadfruit and a half, and a few ahees [nuts].’ That night he slept under the awning of a native canoe.
Some discoveries were reassuring. In one village they found an English goose and a turkey cock which had been left behind by the Dolphin’s crew two years previously. ‘Both of them immensely fat and as tame as possible, following the Indians every where who seemed immensely fond of them.’ Other sights were less so. In a longhouse in this neighbourhood Banks spotted a rather ominous wall decoration. Proudly mounted on a semi-circular board at the end of the hut were a collection of human bones. Banks carefully inspected them-they were all under-jaw bones-no less than fifteen in all: ‘They appeard quite fresh, not one at all damaged even by the loss of a Tooth.’ These were evidently war trophies, and even perhaps signs of cannibalism. Banks enquired boldly, but could get no reply. ‘I asked many questions about them but the people would not attend at all to me and either did not or would not understand either words or signs upon that subject.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Later he learned they had been ‘carried away as trophies and are used by the Indians here in exactly the same manner as the North Americans do scalps’.
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Some receptions were welcoming, but deceptive. ‘Many Canoes came off to meet us and in them some very handsome women who by their behaviour seemed to be sent out to entice us to come ashore, which we most readily did.’ They were received in a very friendly manner by Wiverou, who was chief of the district. A splendid feast was prepared, accommodation offered, and Banks confidently paid court to the women, ‘hoping to get a snug lodging by that means, as I had often done’. This is a revealing admission, and as it turned out it was wholly unjustified. As the evening drew on, and the women found Banks more importuning, ‘they dropped off one by one’. He ruefully remarked that at last he found himself in the position of being ‘jilted 5 or 6 times, and obliged to seek out for a lodging myself’. He slept alone in a hut, naked as was now his custom, except for a piece of Tahitian cloth thrown over his waist. For once he implies that he felt himself to be the outcast, and this rejection evidently gave him pause for thought.
Indeed, for all the apparent hospitality, their situation always remained surprisingly uncertain away from Fort Venus and the guns of the Endeavour. It could easily become alarming. Banks noted a tense moment on the third morning: ‘About 5 O’Clock our sentry awaked us with the alarming intelligence of the boat being missing. He had he said seen her about 1/2 an hour before at her grapling which was about 50 yards from the shore, but that on hearing the noise of Oars he looked out again and could see nothing of her. We started up and made all possible haste to the waterside. The morn was fine and starlight but no boat in sight. Our situation was now sufficiently disagreable: the Indians had probably attacked her first and finding the people asleep easily carried her, in which case they would not fail to attack us very soon, who were 4 in number armed with one musquet and cartouch box and two pocket pistols without a spare ball or charge of powder for them.’
For fifteen minutes the little party stood alone on the Tahitian beach, suddenly very conscious that they were white Europeans, isolated and ill-armed, on the remote beach of an island that did not belong to them. They watched the sun come up, and waited to be massacred. Then, to their immense relief, the pinnace reappeared around the point of the bay. She had simply slipped her mooring and drifted out to sea while her crew slept. They told themselves that the murderous party of attacking Tahitians had been a figment of their European fears.
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Other experiences were unsettling in a different way. On their last day they discovered 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. This, the ‘masterpiece’ of Tahitian architecture on the island, 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. ‘The whole was neatly coverd with feathers, white to represent skin and black to represent hair and tattow. On the head were three protuberances which we should have calld horns but the Indians calld them tata ete, little men. The image was calld by them Maúwe; they said it was the only one of the kind in Otahite and readily attempted to explain its use. But their language was totaly unintelligible and seemed to referr to some customs to which we are perfect strangers.’
By the time of their return to Fort Venus on 1 July, 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, a model of clarity and accuracy. Banks had hugely increased his supply of botanical specimens, and his knowledge of the fruit and animal resources of the island. But the human mystery of Tahiti had deepened. Its history, customs, religious practices, sexual rites all challenged European understanding, and demanded a new science of explanation.
One of the most puzzling and disturbing of all the ceremonies that Banks witnessed was the tattooing of a young girl’s buttocks. Tattooing was universal in Tahiti, and its function among young male warriors was self-evident. Complex patterns were worked across the legs, the upper torso, on the fingers and ankles, and around the loins: proof of a young man’s courage, and also of his place in the social hierarchy. The skin was pierced with a block of sharpened wooden pins, and impregnated with a purple-black vegetable dye mixed with coconut oil. The operation was long and exquisitely painful, usually performed in stages over several months, and was itself a form of male initiation rite.
Banks could understand all this very well. What he could not understand was why women were forced to undergo it also, moreover at a cruelly young age. Was it a form of sexual initiation? Or purely decorative? Or a form of tribal identity marking? Tahitian women decorated themselves with flowers, and wore beautiful mother-of-pearl earrings, of which Banks made an entire collection. But they used very little other decorations or jewellery.
5 July 1769. This morn I saw the operation of Tattowing the buttocks performed upon a girl of about 12 years old. It proved as I have always suspected a most painfull one. It was done with a large instrument about 2 inches long containing about 30 teeth, every stroke of this hundreds of which were made in a minute drew blood. The patient bore this for about 1/4 of an hour with most stoical resolution; by that time however the pain began to operate too stron[g]ly to be peacably endured. She began to complain and soon burst out into loud lamentations and would fain have persuaded the operator to cease. She was however held down by two women who sometimes scolded, sometimes beat, and at others coaxed her.
Banks became more and more restless as this operation proceeded. ‘I was setting in the adjacent house with Tomio for an hour, all which time it lasted and was not finishd when I went away, tho very near. This was one side only of her buttocks for the other had been done some time before. The arches upon the loins upon which they value themselves much were not yet done, the doing of which they told caused more pain than what I had seen.’
Finally he could stand it no more, and went back alone to Fort Venus. He was clearly both disturbed and fascinated by the whole procedure, though he gives little away about his deeper feelings-whether he was repulsed or shocked, or even sexually excited. He later wrote: ‘For this Custom they give no reason, but that they were taught it by their forefathers…So essential is it esteemed to Beauty, and so disgraceful is the want of it esteemed, that every one submits to it.’
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On 3 July Banks made one last expedition into the interior, this time accompanied only by the surgeon Monkhouse. His choice of companion seems to have been deliberate. They pursued a river line up into the mountains, pressing on as far as they could go, painfully clambering up the riverbed, sweating and stumbling, searching for plants and minerals. On the way Banks concluded rightly that Tahiti must be volcanic in origin, ‘a volcano which now no longer burns’; which also explained the fact that the Tahitian god was known as ‘the Father of Earthquakes’.
Twelve miles inland, further than any previous expedition had ever penetrated, they were brought to an abrupt halt by an enormous and beautiful waterfall, surrounded by ‘truly dreadful’ cliffs more than a hundred feet high. Beneath it lay ‘a pool so deep that the Indians said we could not go beyond it’. Here, in this enchanted but faintly menacing place, the secret heart of the Tahitian island, it seems the two men bathed and talked together, until European rivalries were happily forgotten.
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6
After a stay of three months, the British expedition prepared to leave in the second week of July 1769. Banks spent a whole day sowing South American fruit seeds for the Tahitians to harvest after they were gone: lemons, limes, watermelons, oranges. While he loaded his final specimens of Tahitian plants and animals aboard, he considered the possibility of taking a human representative of Paradise back to England. The matter had been raised with Tupia, the wise priest, who proposed that he himself should make the perilous journey together with his young son: ‘This morn Tupia came on board, he had renewed his resolves of going with us to England, a circumstance which gives me much satisfaction. He is certainly a most proper man, well born, chief Tahowa or priest of this Island, consequently skilld in the mysteries of their religion. But what makes him more than any thing else desireable is his experience in the navigation of these people and knowledge of the Islands in these seas. He has told us the names of above 70, the most of which he has himself been at.’
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Although Tupia was evidently enthusiastic to make the journey, Captain Cook would not underwrite the decision. He did not feel that the Tahitian could be signed on as an official member of the expedition, and he thought that once he was in England the Admiralty and the Crown would ‘in all human probability’ refuse to support him financially. Banks had no such hesitations, and resolved to be responsible for both Tupia’s welfare and his upkeep, saying he was taking on Tupia as his friend and his guest. Cook agreed, and would find Tupia’s help as the expedition’s South Seas navigator and Polynesian translator invaluable.
Banks added a comment that seems extraordinarily revealing. He suddenly thinks of outdoing his fashionable country-house friends back in Yorkshire with their exotic pets. ‘I do not know why I may not keep [Tupia] as a curiosity, as well as some of my neighbours do lions and tygers, at a larger expence than he will probably ever put me to.’ The idea that his friend and adviser could have been considered, even for a moment, as a ‘curiosity’, or a wild animal specimen, comes as a shock. It 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. However one explains it, the remark hangs uneasily in the air, never quite dissipated, never quite forgotten: the snake in the garden.
Nonetheless, Banks closed this entry on a more typically generous note: ‘The amusement I shall have in [Tupia’s] future conversation, and the benefit he will be of to this ship, as well as what he may be if another should be sent into these seas, will I think fully repay me.’
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There was a last-minute drama when, as Fort Venus was being dismantled, two of the marines slipped away into the woods, having said they had beautiful Tahitian wives, were content to resign His Majesty’s service, and intended to stay. Cook sent out a tracking party, but also took native hostages, which caused a good deal of ill-feeling. Once again it was Banks who defused a potentially ugly situation, by agreeing to spend the last night onshore with his Tahitian friends, until the marines should return. ‘At day break a large number of people gatherd about the fort many of them with weapons; we were intirely without defences so I made the best I could of it by going out among them. They wer[e] very civil and shewd much fear as they have done of me upon all occasions, probably because I never shewd the least of them, but have upon all our quarrels gone immediately into the thickest of them. They told me that our people would soon return.’
The marines did return, to everyone’s huge relief, at eight o’clock that morning, and Banks watched carefully through his telescope as they were hauled aboard the Endeavour while the hostages were released in exchange. Once he saw they were all ‘safe and sound’ he discharged his own Tahitian ‘prisoners’ from his tent, ‘making each such a present as we though[t] would please them with which some were well content’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Though he does not mention it, this may also have been his last chance to spend a night with Otheothea.
The Endeavour finally hoisted anchor early on the morning of 13 July 1769. ‘After a stay of 3 months we left our beloved Islanders with much regret,’ reported Banks, with careful understatement.
(#litres_trial_promo) The whole of Matavi Bay was full of Tahitian canoes. Oborea and Otheothea came aboard briefly to say tearful farewells. Banks and Tupia then climbed the rigging and stood together in the crow’s nest, waving. Sydney Parkinson wrote: ‘On our leaving the shore the people in the canoes set up their woeful cry-Awai! Awai!-and the young women wept very much. Some of the canoes came up to the side of the ship, while she was under sail, and brought us many cocoas.’
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7
Banks had gained a complicated impression of Paradise. As the Endeavour sailed westwards towards New Zealand throughout August 1769, with brief stops at other Polynesian islands (seventeen in all), he sat down in his sweltering cabin to put his reflections in some kind of order. The result was his long anthropological essay ‘On the Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islands’, perhaps the most original paper he ever wrote.
Tahiti was indeed a kind of Paradise: astonishingly beautiful, its people open and generous, and its way of life languid and voluptuous. But there were many darker elements: strong, even oppressive social hierarchies; endemic thieving; a strange religion haunted by ghosts and superstitions; infanticide; and warlike propensities just below the surface. Nonetheless, Banks’s essay is full of his glowing memories, which would later stand him in good stead on the bleakest moments of the journey home: ‘No country can boast such delightfull walks as this, the whole plains where the people live are coverd with groves of Breadfruit and cocoa nut trees without underwood; these are intersected in all directions by the paths which go from one house to the other, so the whole countrey is a shade than which nothing can be more gratefull in a climate where the sun has so powerfull an influence.’
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The essay is packed with technical information: Tahitian methods of cooking, boat-building, house-construction, tool-making, fishing, dancing, drum-making, navigation, weather-predicting, ceremonial dramas, tattooing (again). Banks also writes tenderly of shared meals, enchanting dresses and languid afternoons. His remarks on the innocence of Tahitian ornaments are characteristic: ‘Ornaments they have very few, they are very fond of earings but wear them only in one ear. When we came they had them of their own, made of Shell, stone, berries, red pease, and some small pearls which they wore 3 tied together; but our beads very quickly supplied their place; they also are very fond of flowers, especialy of the Cape Jasmine of which they have great plenty planted near their houses; these they stick into the holes of their ears, and into their hair, if they have enough of them which is but seldom. The men wear feathers often the tails of tropick birds stuck upright in their hair.’
There is a long passage on the beautiful cleanliness of the Tahitian body, both male and female. All Tahitians wash themselves at least three times a day in the rivers, making their skin smooth and glowing. Their teeth are dazzling white, and they remove all body hair. Banks even grew accustomed to the strange, unforgettable smell of their hair oil: ‘This is made of Cocoa nut oil in which some sweet woods or flowers are infusd; the oil is most commonly very rancid and consequently the wearers of it smell most disagreably, at first we found it so but very little use reconcild me at least very compleatly to it. 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 so frequent in Europe.’
The Tahitians’ simplicity and innocence (the question of theft aside) came out in innumerable ways, as for example in their attitude to alcohol: ‘Drink they have none but water and cocoa nut Juice, nor do they seem to have any method of Intoxication among them. Some there were who drank pretty freely of our liquors and in a few instances became very drunk but seemed far from pleased with their intoxication, the individuals afterwards shunning a repitition of it instead of greedily desiring it as most Indians are said to do.’
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The idea of sexual innocence proved more complicated for a European to accept: ‘All privacy is banishd even from those actions which the decency of Europaeans keep most secret: this no doubt is the reason why both sexes express the most indecent ideas in conversation without the least emotion; in this their language is very copious and they delight in such conversation beyond any other. Chastity indeed is but little valued especialy among the midling people; if a wife is found guilty of a breach of it her only punishment is a beating from her husband. Notwithstanding this some of the Eares or chiefs are I beleive perfectly virtuous.’
What later came to be regarded as the most scandalous of all Tahitian customs, the young women’s seductive courtship dance, or ‘timorodee’, Banks describes with calm detachment and a certain amused appreciation: ‘Besides this they dance, especially the young girls whenever they can collect 8 or 10 together, singing most indecent words using most indecent actions and setting their mouths askew in a most extrordinary manner, in the practise of which they are brought up from their earlyest childhood. In doing this they keep time to a surprizing nicety, I might almost say as true as any dancers I have seen in Europe, tho their time is certainly much more simple. This excercise is however left off as soon as they arrive at Years of maturity. For as soon as ever they have formed a connection with a man they are expected to leave of Dancing Timorodee-as it is called.’
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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 yet ready to support children. Banks could scarcely believe this, until he questioned several couples who freely admitted to destroying two or three children, showing not the slightest apparent guilt or regret. This was a different kind of innocence, one far harder to accept. Banks pursued the question, and found that the custom originated in the formation of communal groups in which sexual favours were freely exchanged between different partners: ‘They are calld Arreoy and have meetings among themselves where the men amuse themselves with wrestling &c. and the women with dancing the indecent dances before mentiond, in the course of which they give full liberty to their desires.’
He also found that the Arreoy, and the custom of infanticide, owed their existence ‘chiefly to the men’. ‘A Woman howsoever fond she may be of the name of Arreoy, and the liberty attending it before she conceives, generaly desires much to forfeit that title for the preservation of her child.’ But in this decision he thought that the women had not the smallest influence. ‘If she cannot find a man who will own it, she must of course destroy it; and if she can, with him alone it lies whether or not it shall be preserv’d.’ In that case both the man and the woman forfeited their place in the Arreoy, and the sexual freedoms associated with it. Moreover, the woman became known by the term ‘Whannownow’, or bearer of children. This was, as Banks indignantly exclaimed, ‘a title as disgracefull among these people, as it ought to be honourable in every good and well governd society’.
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8
The epic voyage continued for another two years. They circumnavigated the two islands of New Zealand, mapped the eastern coastline of Australia (including Botany Bay), and narrowly survived a disastrous shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef.
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Twelve months after they left Tahiti, as they headed northwards for the Torres Strait and Indonesia, Banks looked back on all the indigenous people he had seen, in one of his rare philosophical passages. In it he comes as close to the idea of ‘noble savages’ as he ever would: ‘Thus live these-I had almost said happy-people, content with little nay almost nothing. Far enough removed from the anxieties attending upon riches, or even the possession of what we Europeans call common necessaries: anxieties intended maybe by Providence to counterbalance the pleasure arising from the Posession of wishd for attainments, consequently increasing with increasing wealth, and in some measure keeping up the balance of happiness between the rich and the poor.’
He must have talked at length with both Cook and Solander on this subject, and Cook makes his own long entry reflecting on the artificiality of European ‘civilisation’. But while Cook clung to the necessity of European forms and discipline, Banks was rather inclined to dwell on the superfluity of European needs. These were perhaps the reflections of a man who had always been used to wealth and comforts. ‘From them appear how small are the real wants of human nature, which we Europeans have increased to an excess which would certainly appear incredible to these people could they be told it. Nor shall we cease to increase them as long as Luxuries can be invented and riches found for the purchase of them; and how soon these Luxuries degenerate into necessaries may be sufficiently evinced by the universal use of strong liquors, Tobacco, spices, Tea &c. &c.’
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On 3 September 1770 Banks was making another reflective entry, this time on the state of the ship’s company after more than two years away from England. General health was outstandingly good, discipline remained effective, and the terrors of the Great Barrier Reef had shown how magnificently the crew could still pull together in a crisis. Yet there was a growing sense of exhaustion and sickness for hearth and home. ‘The greatest part of them were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia; indeed I can find hardly any body in the ship clear of its effects but the Captn Dr Solander and myself, indeed we three have pretty constant employment for our minds which I beleive to be the best if not the only remedy for it.’
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It was now, when three-quarters of their journey was safely done, and they had reached their first semi-Europeanised port, that real catastrophe struck. They put into Batavia on the Malay peninsula (now Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia), where the whole crew were progressively overcome by a lethal combination of malarial fever 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. At one point Cook was only able to muster fourteen seamen on deck. Banks’s personal team was reduced from eight to four. The expedition’s astronomer Green died; the scientific secretary Spöring died; Tupia and his little son Tayeto died; Monkhouse the surgeon died; Thompson the ship’s cook died; Satterley the ship’s carpenter died; Molineux the ship’s master died; Hicks the first lieutenant died; and Banks’s faithful artist, young Sydney Parkinson, died. Solander would have died too, but for Banks’s unstinting nursing care.
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Banks himself suffered for weeks from amoebic dysentery, sometimes ‘so weak as scarcely to be able to crawl downstairs’, and experienced ‘the pains of the Damned almost’. These deaths had a devastating effect on his memories of the expedition. Finally, within sight of England, his surviving greyhound bitch, Lady, universally loved among the crew, was heard to howl out in the night. The next morning she was found flung across a chair in the cabin, still guarding Banks’s writing table, but dead.
By the time they reached London on 13 July 1771, Banks felt little exuberance. He was shattered and disorientated. The bucolic memories of Tahiti were more than two years old, and instead he was haunted by the recent horrible deaths of so many friends and shipmates. Solander was still very weak, and not out of danger. Banks’s family were not in town to greet and congratulate him, but ‘dispersed almost to the extremities of the Kingdom’ for the summer. He wrote to his friend Thomas Pennant FRS immediately on arrival: ‘A few short lines must suffice…Mr Buchan, Mr Parkinson and Mr Sporing are all dead, as is our Astronomer, seven officers, and about a third part of the ship’s crew of diseases contracted in the East Indies-not in the South Seas, where health seems to have her chief residence. Our Collections will I hope satisfy you…I must see [my family] before I begin to arrange or meddle with anything…Grass I must have in the mean time. Salt provisions and Sea air have been to me like too much hardmeat to a horse. In a few days shall be able to write more understandably. Now I am Mad, Mad, Mad. My poor brain whirls round with innumerable sensations.’
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His safe return was greeted tenderly by his sister Sophia at Revesby in Lincolnshire. From the bottom of her heart she thanked the ‘Merciful god who has daily preserved my Dear Brother from the perils, and very great ones, of the Sea!’ Her sudden outburst of piety suggests how vividly she realised the dangers that her beloved brother had consistently played down, but barely survived. On his behalf she fondly (and unavailingly) promised that he would mend his ways and his Christian faith. She could pledge that he was well-intentioned, and was one of those who ‘according to their Faith, use their best Endeavours, far as in their power they can, to do the Will of the Supreme Being’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sophia may well have had reason to worry about Banks’s state of mind. He spent a fortnight recovering on the family estate in Lincolnshire, but spoke little about his experiences, even to Sophia. He walked, ate, shot and slept; then ate and slept again.
On his return to London he made no attempt to get in touch with Harriet Blosset, though James Lee and Harriet’s mother clearly assumed that an engagement would be announced. It was obvious now that, whatever else, his experiences had left Banks utterly unfit for a quiet, regular, married life. Some evidence for this comes indirectly from a gossiping friend of Thomas Pennant’s. Even if not entirely accurate, it seems to reflect something of Banks’s disturbed state of mind. ‘Upon his arrival in England [Banks] took no sort of notice of Miss Blosset for the first week or nearly so…On this Miss Blosset set out for London and wrote him a letter desiring an interview of explanation. To this Mr Banks answered by a letter of 2 or 3 sheets, professing love etc but that he found he was of too volatile a temper to marry.’ They did have at least one painful meeting, when Harriet is reported to have wept and ‘swooned’.
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Further gossip was being reported by the novelist Fanny Burney and Lady Mary Coke in August. The story of the waistcoats provided much amusement. ‘Mr Morris was excessively drole according to custom; and said he hoped Mr Banks, who since his return has desired Miss Blosset will excuse his marrying her, will pay her for the materials of all the worked waistcoats she made for him during the time he was sailing round the world.’
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There was some talk of broken promises and scandal. One wit suggested that Banks should be ‘immediately placed in the Stocks…for this injury’.
(#litres_trial_promo) A friend of James Lee’s, Dr Robert Thornton, later claimed that Banks had given Harriet an engagement ring before he set out, and had made ‘many solemn vows’ which he now callously reneged on. In Thornton’s view it was the alluring women of Tahiti, with their free sexual practices, who had corrupted Banks’s feelings and destroyed his morals. ‘Some people are ill-natured enough to say that, vitiated in his taste by seeing the elegant women of Otaheite, who must indeed have something very peculiar in their natures to captivate such a man, upon his return, Mr Banks came indeed to see the young lady and the plants; but she found her lover now preferred a flower, or even a butterfly, to her superior charms.’ For Harriet the three-year wait ended in ‘a most mortifying disappointment’.
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But perhaps it was more a relief. The kindly Solander, who knew and liked Harriet and her mother, and had of course witnessed Banks’s anthropological behaviour in Tahiti, gently intervened and advised both parties not to proceed.
(#litres_trial_promo) Banks privately offered Harriet’s guardian James Lee a ‘substantial’ sum of money, which was accepted as a form of dowry for her future. The amount was rumoured to be £5,000 (half the sum he had previously laid out on the expedition), which suggests that Banks was not in the least callous, but felt more than ordinary guilt; though he could well afford to be generous. Harriet Blosset soon after made a happy marriage with a virtuous and botanical clergyman, Dr Dessalis, and was ‘blessed by a numerous and lovely family’.
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Rumours about Banks’s behaviour with Tahitian girls continued to spread in London for a number of months. Whether it was really this that determined him to break off with Miss Blosset (or she with him) is not clear. Satirical poems, fictional ‘letters’ and amusing cartoons certainly began to circulate, in which Banks’s subtropical butterfly net and microscope were put to suggestive use. In one cartoon he was shown chasing a beautiful butterfly labelled ‘Miss Bl…’.
Whatever the truth of these stories, it is clear that Banks was a changed man on his return to England, and it took him several years to settle back into conventional modes of behaviour. But sudden fame may have been even more unsettling than his unresolved affair with Harriet Blosset. On his return to London, Banks found to his immense surprise that the expedition was being greeted as a national triumph. Alongside Captain Cook, he and Solander were being treated as celebrities.
On 10 August they were summoned to meet the King at Windsor. For Banks the formal interview turned into a long ramble round Windsor Great Park, the first of many. Royal interest in the botanical possibilities of Kew Gardens promised great things. Moreover a real friendship quickly formed between George III, aged thirty-three, and Banks, aged twenty-eight. Both men owned large landed estates, were fascinated by agriculture and science, and were embarked on public careers, young and full of hope.
Banks and Solander next spent a debriefing weekend with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, at his country retreat. Then they were formally congratulated and repeatedly dined by the Royal Society. In November they were awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Oxford. Linnaeus wrote in Banks’s praise: ‘I cannot sufficiently admire Mr Banks who has exposed himself to so many dangers and has bestowed more money in the services of Natural History than any other man. Surely none but an Englishman would have the spirit to do what he has done.’
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The newspapers and monthlies-the Westminster Journal, the Gentleman’s Magazine, Bingley’s Journal-printed articles on their adventures, and dinner invitations started to pour in. Though Captain Cook was praised, Banks and Solander had rapidly become the scientific lions. They had brought back over a thousand new plant specimens, over five hundred animal skins and skeletons, and innumerable native artefacts. They had brought back new worlds: Australia, New Zealand, but above all the South Pacific.
London society was agog. Lady Mary Coke wrote in her diary: ‘The most talked of at present are Messers Banks and Solander. I saw them at Court, and afterwards at Lady Hertford’s but did not hear them give any account of their voyage round the world which I am told is very amusing.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Dr Johnson gravely discussed ‘culling simples’ with Banks, and offered to write a Latin motto for the ship’s goat. He thought a ‘happier pen’ than his might even write an epic poem on the expedition. Shortly afterwards Banks was elected to Johnson’s exclusive Club.
(#litres_trial_promo) Boswell, biographer’s pen in hand, had a ‘great curiosity’ to see the ‘famous Mr Banks’. He described him as ‘a genteel young man, very black, and of an agreeable countenance, easy and communicative, without any affectation or appearance of assuming’.
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Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a dashing portrait of Banks in his study, his dark hair suitably wild and unpowdered, his fur-lined jacket flung open, his waistcoat unbuttoned, a loose pile of papers from his journal under one hand, and a large globe at his elbow. The rousing inscription was from Horace: Cras Ingens Iterabimus Aequor-Tomorrow We’ll Sail the Vasty Deep Once More.
Everyone was awaiting an official written account of the great voyage. From the time of Hakluyt such travelogues had been immensely popular, and this one was impatiently anticipated. But one of the terms of the Endeavour expedition was that all journals and diaries would be surrendered at the end of the voyage, and submitted to an official historian. The journals of Cook and Banks, the papers and botanical notes of Solander, the precious drawings of Buchan and Parkinson, were accordingly all handed over to a professional author, who was to prepare a three-volume account for the sum of £600.
The man chosen was fifty-six-year-old Dr John Hawkesworth, a literary scholar and professional journalist. He was evidently considered a safe pair of hands, having written a number of short biographies and successfully collaborated with Dr Johnson on two periodicals, the Rambler and the Adventurer. The misleading title of the latter, which had nothing to do with exploration, may have reinforced his apparent credentials. The subject was a gift, and the material was magnificent, if sometimes a little risqué. 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.
Hawkesworth’s Account of Voyages Undertaken…for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere and Performed by…Captain Cook… was published in three volumes in 1773. It was prolix, abstract, and much given to philosophical digression. Its author was easily shocked, and quick to moralise. He had no scientific or naval experience to draw on, and his views on foreign customs and native morality were prejudiced and illiberal. While digressing on the ‘Noble Savage’, Hawkesworth easily struck a lurid and provocative note. He wrote with delicious outrage of Tahitian dances and sexual practices. The girls danced the timorodee with ‘motions and gestures beyond imagination wanton…a scale of dissolute sensuality wholly unknown to every other nation…and which no imagination could possibly conceive’.
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A second account of the expedition, Journal of a Voyage on His Majesty’s Ship, the Endeavour…, also published in 1773, was based on Sydney Parkinson’s journal as edited by his brother Stanfield. There had been a quarrel with Hawkesworth over the copyright of these papers, and Banks had also struggled to retrieve Parkinson’s botanical illustrations from Stanfield Parkinson. Banks felt, not unreasonably, that he had paid for them as Parkinson’s employer on the Endeavour (he had also discreetly sent £500 to Parkinson’s bereaved parents). Parkinson’s death in Batavia embittered and prolonged all these negotiations.
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. Parkinson was particularly observant of small details of Tahitian life: how the natives climbed coconut trees using a rope tied between their ankles; how they kindled fire by rubbing bark; how they wove baskets and dyed clothes; how they played their flutes with the nose; how the girls wore gardenias behind their ears and danced while snapping mother-of-pearl castanets; and how in the timorodee the most provoking gesture they made was pouting and twisting up their lips in what Parkinson called ‘the wry mouth’. It was also characteristic of young Parkinson that he had tried to learn to swim like the Tahitians, that on Banks’s advice he collected Tahitian vocabulary, and that after some hesitation he had had his arms tattooed with a ‘lively bluish purple’ design, of which he had been inordinately proud.
Two years after his return to England, when Polynesian affairs were still the rage, Banks himself put pen to paper in a short, preliminary appreciation of the Paradise island. It took the form of a light-hearted letter entitled ‘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: ‘In the Island of Otaheite where Love is the chief Occupation, the favourite, nay almost the sole Luxury of the Inhabitants, both the bodies and souls of the women are moulded in the utmost perfection for that soft science. Idleness the father of Love reigns here in almost unmolested ease…Except in the article of Complexion, in which our European ladies certainly excell all inhabitants of the Torrid Zone, I have nowhere seen such Elegant women as those of Otaheite. Such the Grecians were from whose model the Venus of Medicis was copied, undistorted by bandages. Nature has full liberty: the growing form [develops] in whatever direction she pleases. And amply does she repay this indulgence in producing such forms as exist here [in Europe] only in marble or canvas: nay! Such as might even defy the imitation of the chissel of Phidias, or the pencil of Apelles. Nor are these forms a little aided by their Dress: not squeezed as our Women are, by a cincture scarce less tenacious than Iron.’
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This was perhaps a glimpse of Banks the Tahitian libertine, though it was only circulated privately. The way was now open for Banks to publish his own journal, over 200,000 words in manuscript, together with some of the hundreds of beautiful illustrations and line drawings he had commissioned. A folio volume of 800 plates was planned, together with extensive journal extracts. Solander agreed to help him with the cataloguing and editorial work, and various assistants were hired, including the young Edward Jenner. It was intended as the greatest scientific publication of Banks’s lifetime, his masterpiece.

9
The Pacific voyage, despite its final horrors of sickness and death, had not dampened Banks’s scientific wanderlust. ‘To explore is my Wish,’ he wrote the following spring, ‘but the Place to which I may be sent almost indifferent to me, whether the Sources of the Nile, or the South Pole are to be visited, I am equally ready to embark on the undertaking.’
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In summer 1772 Cook was commissioned by the Admiralty to undertake a second, much larger Pacific expedition, this time with several ships. Banks longed to go on this new adventure, and made extensive preparations and invested thousands of pounds in new botanical equipment. But perhaps celebrity had gone to his head. His plans were increasingly ambitious, and he had summoned an extraordinary range of scientific and artistic talents to accompany him, a sixteen-man team including the chemist and radical Joseph Priestley, the painter Johann Zoffany, and the brilliant young London physician Dr James Lind (later to be Shelley’s extracurricular science teacher at Eton).
Cook was quite prepared to acquiesce to all Banks’s scientific requirements, and had the great cabin in his new ship, the Resolution, redesigned to meet them, with higher ceilings, folding work tables and fitted cabinets. His own tiny captain’s cabin was moved to the rear of the Resolution’s quarterdeck. But the Admiralty regarded Banks’s demands as unacceptably imperious, and, without warning, withdrew its authorisation. Humiliatingly, all Banks’s equipment was offloaded and dumped on the quayside at Sheerness. On 20 June he received a sharp but stately letter of rebuke from his powerful friend Lord Sandwich: ‘Your public spirit in undertaking so dangerous a voyage, your inattention to any expense,…and your extensive knowledge as a naturalist, make it lamented that you are no longer one of the crew of the Resolution. But it may not be improper to set you right in one particular which you possibly may have misunderstood, and that is that you suppose the ships to have been fitted out for your use, which I own I by no means apprehend to be the case.’
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The Admiralty had, in effect, rejected the notion of underwriting another purely scientific voyage, for what Sandwich called ‘improvements in natural knowledge’. From now on Cook’s voyages were to take on more practical and empire-building objectives (though they would include testing the rival chronometers of John Harrison and John Arnold).
Lord Sandwich made it clear that Banks would have to pursue his science on his own: ‘Upon the whole I hope that for the advantage of the curious part of Mankind, your zeal for distant voyages will not yet cease, I heartily wish you success in all your undertakings, but I would advise you in order to ensure success to fit out a ship yourself; that, and only that, can give you the absolute command of the whole Expedition.’
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So Banks commissioned his own brig, the Sir Lawrence, went to the Hebrides and inspected Fingal’s Cave, and then sailed on to Iceland, where he made many friends, admired the geysers and volcanoes, collected lava specimens, but made few original discoveries. Back in London he continued to work with Solander on his Endeavour Journal, and set out his extraordinary collection of specimens at a temporary apartment in New Burlington Street. These began to attract learned visitors. The Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, William Sheffield, wrote a long, astonished description of Banks’s scientific treasures to Gilbert White in Hampshire.
Contrary to expectation, these were far more than just botanical specimens. They formed in effect a complete museum of Pacific culture, combining natural history with ethnology and human artefacts in a quite new way. They were housed in three enormous, overflowing rooms, each with its own theme. The first, the ‘Armoury’, belonged symbolically to the human male, dedicated to weapons, utensils and sailing equipment from all over the South Seas. The second was more female in theme, a huge domestic collection of clothes, headdresses, cloaks, woven cloths, ornaments and jewellery, together with 1,300 new species of plant ‘never seen or heard of before in Europe’. The third room was dedicated simply to Nature in all her diversity. It contained ‘an almost numberless collection of animals; quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibia, reptiles, insects and vermes, preserved in spirits, most of them new and nondescript [unclassified]…Add to these the choicest collection of drawings in Natural History that perhaps enriched any cabinet, public or private: 987 plants drawn and coloured by Parkinson; and 1300 or 1400 more drawn with each of them a flower, a leaf, and a portion of stalk, coloured by the same hand; besides a number of other drawings of animals, birds, fish etc…’
The Oxford Keeper was struck by the beauty and diversity of the whole amazing collection, a glimpse into an entirely new and wonderful world. Banks had found a new role as its guardian and its promoter. ‘Indeed most of these tropical islands, if we can credit our friend’s description of them, are terrestrial paradises.’
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Banks’s early hero Carl Linnaeus had turned collecting and displaying into something approaching a European art form. At Uppsala he planted a clock garden or ‘botanical sundial’, marking each hour by clumps of plants that opened only at one particular time of day (according to the strength of the sun). The time could thus be ‘read’ by the rotating patches of open petals, and even by the release of flower perfumes (such as tobacco plants in the early evening). However, Linnaeus’s genius for taxonomy and display disguised the fact that his natural history was essentially static.
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Banks was now welcomed into the scientific societies in London: the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Society of Dilettanti. He was summoned more frequently to advise the King at Kew, where from 1773 he was gratified to find himself acting as unofficial director. After the débâcle over Harriet Blosset, he began living with a young woman called Sarah Wells, and set her up in an apartment in Chapel Street, on the other side of St James’s Park. Here 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, and certainly there was no prospect of conventional betrothal or marriage. Solander refers simply to ‘Mrs Wells’s’ charm, good nature, and delicious supplies of ‘Game & Fish’.
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Indeed, the Town and Country Magazine for September 1773 claimed that ‘Mr B the Circumnavigator’ had an illegitimate child, but perhaps this was more confused botanical satire, as the mother was named as ‘Miss B—N living in Orchard Street’. Nonetheless, one of Banks’s close friends, the zoologist Johann Fabricius, wrote to him in November sending compliments to Sarah Wells and adding: ‘What had she brought you?…A boy or a girl?’
(#litres_trial_promo) If there was a child, Banks did not allow it to affect his free social arrangements. Sarah became known and much liked by many visiting men of science, the Swedish naturalist Johann Alströmer referring to her intelligent conversation and fondly recalling a memorable ‘Soupé at his Maitresse, Mistress Wells’s’, with Banks and Solander on riotous good form.
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Tahiti pursued Banks in other ways. In summer 1774 one of Cook’s fleet commanders, Captain Furneaux of HMS Adventure, returned with a first visitor to England from the South Seas. He was entered in the ship’s muster books as ‘Tetuby Homey’, from Huahine in the Society Islands, ‘22 years, Able Seaman’. This news immediately reminded Banks of all his hopes for Tupia and his son, which had been so tragically destroyed in Batavia in 1770. Banks and Solander hurried down to Portsmouth to greet ‘Homey’ in July.
There, confined to the captain’s cabin, they found a tall and strikingly handsome Tahitian man, who was soon to become known in England as ‘Mai’ or ‘Omai’. He announced that he hoped to make his fortune, and fully intended to return to Tahiti as a rich and experienced traveller, having survived the expected savagery of the English.
(#litres_trial_promo) Omai turned out to be quick-witted, charming and astute. His exotic good looks, with large, soulful eyes, were much admired in English society, especially among the more racy of the aristocratic ladies.
Banks treated Omai partly as an honoured guest, and partly as an exotic specimen. The ambiguity of the attitudes displayed in his Tahitian journal was now put to the test. Banks fitted Omai up with European clothes, a brown velvet jacket, white waistcoat and grey silk breeches. He took him to dine with the Royal Society, with the Society of Philosophers (ten times), and carefully introduced him at a number of society soirées. Omai’s bow, executed with the aplomb of a dancer, became celebrated. He quickly won all hearts, and was eventually presented by Banks to King George III at Kew. The introduction became legendary, when Omai executed a superb version of his bow, and then sprang forward to grasp the royal hand, and grinning broadly, cried out, ‘How do King Tosh!’
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From then on he was lionised almost continually for a year. Thanks to Banks he met a host of celebrities, among them Lord Sandwich, Dr Johnson, Fanny Burney and the poet Anna Seward, who wrote a poem about him. He learned to ride, shoot, conduct flirtations, and play excellent chess-Dr Johnson never stopped teasing his friend, the learned antiquarian Giuseppe Baretti, that Omai had once checkmated him. Omai also made excellent jokes about current English fashions. Fanny Burney records his delighted and unrestrained ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ on seeing the Duchess of Devonshire’s high-piled hairstyle.
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).

10
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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In November 1780 he oversaw the historic move of the Royal Society’s offices from its obscure lodgings in Crane Court to its grand new premises in the recently completed Somerset House on The Strand, in a suitably commanding position overlooking the Thames. It was now recognised as a palace of science, to and from which travellers would come and go to the ends of the earth.
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In 1781 Banks was knighted for his energetic scientific work as Director of the royal gardens at Kew. Over the next decade he transformed the rambling and disorganised estate along the Thames into a scientific repository and botanical haven that far outstretched anything achieved by Linnaeus. He established more than 50,000 trees and shrubs at Kew, and introduced a vast number of new and exotic species that are now regarded as native: among them magnolias, fuchsias, monkey-puzzle trees, and the evergreen sequoia.
(#litres_trial_promo) He had notable successes with rare and difficult species such as the Venus fly-trap. The poet Coleridge among others refers to him as a reliable source of new exotic and experimental drugs such as Indian hemp, ‘Bang’ and cannabis.
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Yet the world of the South Pacific was drifting steadily away from Banks. His great companion and fellow voyager, the amiable, easy-going and ever-faithful Solander, was struck down by a heart attack, and died in the guest room at Soho Square in June 1782. Banks was inconsolable, and felt this loss more than any other he had experienced: it seemed to him the loss also of his own youth. He wrote tight-lipped to a mutual friend, John Lloyd: ‘To write about the loss of poor Solander would be to renew both our feelings for little purpose; suffice it to say then that few men, however Exalted their pursuits, were ever more feelingly missed either in the paths of Science or of Friendship.’
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A little later he wrote more confidentially to Johann Alströmer, who had once shared their carefree dinners with Sarah Wells, and who was now elected President of the Swedish Academy of Sciences. ‘His loss is irreplaceable. Even if I were to meet such a learned and noble man as he was, my old heart could no longer receive the impression which twenty years ago it took as effortlessly as wax, one which will not dissolve until my heart does…I can never think of it without feeling such acute pain as makes a man shudder.’
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There were now fewer and fewer survivors from the original voyage to Paradise; Banks felt like the ‘last of the Otaheites’. Perhaps also it was Solander’s death which fatally delayed any further work on Banks’s great Endeavour travel book. In 1785 he still wrote hopefully, seeing it as a kind of memorial to his friend: ‘Solander’s name will appear next to mine on the title page because everything has been brought together through our common industry. There is hardly a single clause written in it, while he lived, in which he did not have a part…it can be completed in two months if only the engraver can be brought to put the finishing touches to it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But nothing appeared.
Banks suffered his first serious and disabling attack of gout in the summer of 1787, when he was still only forty-four. He received a sympathetic letter from the King, but neither realised how grave the affliction would become. By his fifties he was almost literally tied to his presidential chair, as he had feared and prophesied. Incapacitated by agonising swellings in his legs, the once tireless and athletic young explorer had to be pushed about his London house in a wheelchair.
His body may have been chairbound, but his spirit was increasingly airborne. In fact Banks’s personal enthusiasm as the universal scientific patron largely shaped and directed the adventurous character of Romantic science, which now flowered and flourished like one of his most exotic specimens. 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.
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He now looked back proudly at his own voyage as something historic and exemplary, to be emulated by the next generation: ‘I may flatter myself that being the first man of scientific education who undertook a voyage of discovery, and that voyage of discovery being the first that turned out satisfactorily in this enlightened age, I was in some measure the first who gave that turn to such voyages.’
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The great French naturalist Georges Cuvier agreed, later describing the Endeavour voyage as forming ‘an epoch in the history of science. Natural history contracted an alliance with astronomy and exploration, and began to extend its researches over an ever-widening sphere…Everything seemed to realise the romantic wonders of the Odyssey…Banks displayed his astonishing energy: fatigue did not depress him, nor danger deter him…and not simply by seeing, but by actively observing, he showed his true scientific character…Banks was always in the advance.’
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Banks wrote provokingly to a young man hesitating to embark on a perilous scientific expedition to the feverish shores of Java: ‘I have no doubt [your family] wish to force you to adopt Sardinapalus’s advice to his citizens to “Eat, drink & propagate”…Let me hear from you how you feel inclined to prefer Ease and indulgence to Hardship and activity. I was about 23 when I began my Perigrinations; you are somewhat older, but you may be assured that if I had listened to a multitude of voices that were raised up to dissuade me from my Enterprise, I should have now been a Quiet country gentleman.’
Banks’s house in the south-west corner of Soho Square soon became known as the operations centre of scientific research in Britain. It was widely recognised as such throughout Europe-especially in France, Germany and Scandinavia. His correspondence reached round the world, from Paris to New York to Moscow to Sydney. He had the ear of George III (until the King went mad). His library and herbarium were open to all; his daily ten o’clock planning breakfasts at Soho Square were famous; his house parties at his new country estate at Spring Grove in Surrey, purchased especially for the purpose, were often like international conferences.
He received visitors from all over the world, and was the patron of numerous private projects. He advised on the settlement of Australia, was made a Privy Councillor in 1797, and served on the Board of Longitude. After some early disagreements, he became the close friend of the Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Later he was elected President of the Africa Association (which eventually became the Royal Geographical Society), and one of the founding Vice-Presidents of the Royal Institution. He began to exercise a dominant influence over the public development of British science and exploration, encouraging royal patronage, finding funds for research projects and expeditions, and skilfully boosting their national prestige. In effect Banks became Britain’s first Minister for Science.
Yet Joseph Banks never finally published his long-dreamed-of Endeavour Voyage, or any full account of his time in Paradise. Despite the death of his great friend Solander there is no real explanation for this failure, though perhaps it was a deliberate refusal. His journal exists in several manuscript drafts-one copied (and somewhat bowdlerised) by his sister Sophia; and there is a huge series of astonishing engravings (now archived in the Natural History Museum, London). Versions of the journal have been published by scholars, notably by J.C. Beaglehole, in facsimile by the Banks Society, and one recently put online by the University of New South Wales, Australia. But 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.
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Instead, Banks seemed fated to relive his story through the extraordinary lives of his protégés. This is the genial, enabling role he plays in the fantastic series of explorations, expeditions and mind journeys that follow. His great Endeavour voyage had launched an Age of Wonder.

(#ulink_a34af0cc-c4ef-5a2f-951a-40cd14a9a37a) De Bougainville’s account of his ship anchoring at Tahiti for the first time in April 1768 became one of the most celebrated passages in all French romantic travel-writing. ‘I have to admit that it was nigh impossible to keep 400 young Frenchmen at work, sailors who had not seen a woman for six months, in view of what followed. In spite of all our precautions, a young Tahitian girl slipped aboard and placed herself on the quarterdeck immediately above one of the big hatchways, which was fully open to allow air in to the sailors sweating at the capstan below. The young girl casually let slip the only piece of cloth which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all the crew exactly as naked Venus appeared to the Phrygian shepherd. Truly, she had the celestial form of the goddess of Love. More and more sailors and soldiers crowded to the foot of the hatchway, and no capstan was ever wound with such alacrity as on this occasion. Only naval discipline succeeded in keeping these bewitched young fellows from rioting; and indeed we officers had some little difficulty in restraining ourselves.’ Bougainville, Voyage autour du Monde (1771, Chapter 8, ‘Mouillage à Tahiti’).

(#ulink_50c0a6e4-6d0e-5604-a2e6-58e9e3d27b09) A very large ethical and philosophical issue about the nature of justice, property and ownership in society evidently lurked beneath these fleeting reflections of Banks and Cook. Over the next thirty years it would be addressed in various ways by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, William Godwin and Thomas Paine. Beyond that lay the whole question of imperialism and colonialism, that great, tangled Victorian inheritance, looming like a dark stormcloud on the distant horizon. For the time being the bluff innocence of this first expedition is well caught by Banks’s naval biographer, Patrick O’Brian: ‘In any case the thefts were not all on one side: [Captain] Wallis had taken possession of the entire island [of Tahiti] and its dependencies, which brings to mind the remark about the relative guilt of the man who steals a goose from off a common and the other who steals the common from under the goose.’ Patrick O’Brian, Joseph Banks: A Life (1987), p.95.

(#ulink_3b692d20-9139-5d32-af5b-c656ee146968) It was soon accepted that the Europeans in general were responsible. A satirical poem dedicated to Banks in 1777 had a bitterly sarcastic footnote referring to the transmission of ‘the Neapolitan fever’ to Tahiti, ‘where from the promiscuous intercourse of the Natives, it will probably very soon annihilate them all, and in the most dreadful manner, for the honour of Christian humanity’: ‘An Historic Epistle from Omai to the Queen of Tahiti’ (1777). In addition there is nature’s revenge on marauding European crews, as described in Coleridge’s ballad The Ancient Mariner. It is often forgotten that this poem describes the death of an entire ship’s complement of 200 men (bar the Mariner) after an encounter with a terrifying and diseased woman, ‘Life-in-Death’:
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
(The Ancient Mariner, lines 190-4)
The full catastrophe of venereal disease, which devastated the Pacific populations over the next two generations, has been described by Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (1966).

(#ulink_2c71a10e-843c-5c1e-987f-9056072e67ba) The brief, tentative landings that took place on the coast of ‘New Holland’ (Australia) during May 1770, though they yielded Banks and Solander many prizes in flora and fauna, did not at the time strike Cook with anything like the significance that they would later acquire with the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in January 1788. Cook’s long entry for 6 May 1770 gives details of the ‘capacious, safe and commodious’ anchorage at ‘Stingray Harbour’ (firmly renamed ‘Botany Bay’ by Banks), the varied woods and the ‘very beautiful birds such as Cockatoos, Lorryquetes, Parrots etc’, but notes that the Aboriginal inhabitants were both reclusive and hostile, ‘and we were never able to form any connection with them’. By 29 May the Endeavour was already tangled in the maze of perilous shoals leading to the Great Barrier Reef.

(#ulink_30d267e2-fe6a-5d97-a75c-bdd346877bd2) All this is quite unlike the wonderful simplicity and directness of Banks’s original Endeavour Journal, and reminds one how delicate the balance-both moral and stylistic-already was between observation and exploitation in these early pioneering days. Banks never wrote about Tahiti again in this mode, though none of his friends (except possibly Solander) would have disapproved of this gentlemanly jeu d’esprit. It has to be added that this is nothing compared to the epistolary lubricities of Banks’s friend Sir William Hamilton. Other influential essays on the South Sea Paradise were published by Bougainville, Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau at this time. Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (written in 1772 but not published until 1777) proclaimed Tahiti as a model for the reform of sexual relations in Europe: relaxing the conventions of marriage, promulgating free love between the young, and emphasising the importance of mutual physical pleasure between partners.

(#ulink_46386db5-c3ae-56e6-814f-aec13e05215a) Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) emphatically rejected evolution. His ‘systematics’ revealed no connecting law of growth or change, as would the transformational notion explored by several later botanists until Gregor Mendel (1822-84), patiently studying generation after generation of garden peas, gave rigour to the science of genetics. Coleridge pointed to this difference between an organising taxonomy and a dynamic scientific principle or law in essays in The Friend (1819). The psychology of collecting, ordering and naming specimens could also be seen as a form of mental colonising and empire-building. ‘Taxonomy, after all, is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval surveys were flooding London with specimens to be classified, inserting them in their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy, had undeniable political overtones. Take a bird or a lizard or a flower from Patagonia or the South Seas, perhaps one that had had a local name for centuries, rechristen it with a Latin binomial, and presto! It had become a tiny British colony.’ Anne Fadiman, ‘Collecting Nature’, in At Large and at Small (2007), p.19.

(#ulink_54742073-8def-510a-9aa6-25067e1568e5) It has been conservatively calculated that Banks’s correspondence ran to over 50,000 items, though these are still widely scattered in archives in Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand. See the Joseph Banks Archive Project on the internet. There have been various recent selected editions of his correspondence. These include The Selected Letters of Joseph Banks (2000) and the superb new edition The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, in six volumes (2007), both edited by Neil Chambers.

(#ulink_d55cdef2-c173-5343-9f85-d62fbd24b224) Literally a Paradise Lost, in the sense that venereal disease, alcohol and Christianity had combined by the early nineteenth century to destroy the traditional social structures of Tahiti and to transform its ‘pagan’ innocence forever. The London Missionary Society, founded in 1810, instructed its Tahitian missionaries to ‘cultivate the tenderest Compassion for the wretched condition of the Heathen, while you see them led captive to Satan at his Will. Do not resent their abominations as affronts to yourselves, but mourn over them as offensive to God.’ Charles Darwin visited Tahiti on his way back from the Galapagos islands in November 1835, and later called it ‘Otaheite, that fallen Paradise!’ Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact (1966).

2 Herschel on the Moon (#ulink_a337e897-29b6-50ce-8ff5-3b9fe1c17ba2)
1
Shortly after his election as President of the Royal Society in 1778, Joseph Banks began to hear rumours of an unusually gifted amateur astronomer working away on his own in the West Country. These rumours first reached him through the Society’s official Secretary, Sir William Watson, whose brilliant and unconventional son, a young physician based in Somerset, was a moving spirit behind the newly founded Bath Philosophical Society. Watson (junior) began sending accounts to his father of a strange maverick who owned enormously powerful telescopes (supposedly built by himself), and was making extravagant claims about the moon.
The initial reports that reached Banks were strange and somewhat sketchy. The man was called Wilhelm Hershell or William Herschel, possibly a German Jew from Dresden or Hanover.
(#litres_trial_promo) One winter night in 1779 young Watson had found this Herschel in Bath, standing alone in a cobbled backstreet, viewing the moon through a large telescope. Though tall and well-dressed, and wearing his hair powdered, he was clearly an eccentric. He spoke with a strong German accent, and had no manservant accompanying him. Watson asked if he might take a look through the instrument, which he noticed was a reflector telescope, not the usual refractor used by amateurs. It was large-seven feet long-and mounted on an ingenious folding wooden frame. The whole thing was evidently home-made. To his surprise he found its resolution was better than any other telescope he had ever used. He had never seen the moon so clearly.
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They fell into slightly halting conversation. Watson was immediately taken by Herschel’s humorous and modest manner, and soon realised that it disguised an acute unconventional intelligence. Herschel’s knowledge of astronomy, though obviously self-taught, was impressive. Though he had no university education, and said he had very little mathematics, he had mastered John Flamsteed’s great atlas of the constellations, read the textbooks of Robert Smith and James Ferguson, and knew a great deal about French astronomy. Above all he knew about the construction of telescopes, and the making of specula-mirrors. Though in his early forties, he talked of the stars with a quick, boyish enthusiasm, that betrayed intense and almost unnerving passion. Watson was so struck that he asked if he might call round to see him the very next morning.
The house at 19 Rivers Street, in the lower, unfashionable section of Bath, was modest, and clearly Herschel was not a gentleman of leisure. The lower rooms were cluttered with astronomical equipment, but the front parlour was dominated by a harpsichord and piled high with musical scores.
(#litres_trial_promo) It emerged that Herschel was a professional musician, held the post of organist at the Bath Octagon Chapel, and made ends meet by giving music lessons. He also composed, and was fascinated by the theory of musical harmony. His domestic situation was odd. He was poor, and unmarried, but Watson noticed that he spoke tenderly of a sister, who was not only his housekeeper but also his ‘astronomical assistant’.
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Watson invited his new acquaintance to join the Bath Philosophical Society. Herschel responded with alacrity. Though hesitant to speak in public, he started submitting papers through Watson. Many of them were strange ventures into speculative cosmology and the philosophy of science. They included such subjects as ‘What becomes of Light?’, ‘On the Electrical Fluid’ and ‘On the Existence of Space’.
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Proud of his new discovery, Watson sent what he considered the best of these early papers to his father, Sir William, at the Royal Society in London. Herschel was modestly worried that his English would not be up to the mark, and Watson tactfully corrected each paper. It was not their plain literary style, however, which caused controversy, but their content. The very first of them, ‘Observations on the Mountains of the Moon’, was so unconventional that it caused an unaccustomed stir when it was published in the Society’s august journal Philosophical Transactions in spring 1780. In it Herschel claimed that with his home-made telescopes he had observed ‘forests’ on the lunar surface, and that the moon was ‘in all probability’ inhabited.
Nevil Maskelyne, the Astronomer Royal and leading cosmological light of the Royal Society, was more than a little outraged by these apparently absurd claims. He had himself established that the moon had no life-sustaining atmosphere, based on the sharpness with which it occults starlight at its edge.
(#litres_trial_promo) But he was intrigued by the minute detail of Herschel’s observational sketches of the moon’s surface, and the apparently fantastic power of his reflector telescope. He wrote a challenging letter to Watson in Bath, questioning the seriousness of Herschel’s work, and his views on the moon. It was now that Joseph Banks, always on the lookout for new and unusual scientific talent, began to pay attention.
Watson forwarded what he tactfully called ‘Dr Maskelyne’s extremely obliging letter’ to Herschel. Clearly anxious that Herschel might take offence at the implied criticism, he urged a diplomatic response in a covering note of 5 June 1780: ‘I think you would do right (pardon my giving you advice) either to add the desired improvements, or to write over again the Paper, and send it to Dr Maskelyne, who, as he is Astronomer Royal, will be pleased, I believe, with the compliment paid him, and he will present it anew to the Society.’
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To his relief, Herschel wrote back to the Astronomer Royal with apparent modesty on 12 June: ‘I beg leave to observe Sir, that my saying that there is an absolute certainty of the Moon’s being inhabited, may perhaps be ascribed to a certain Enthusiasm which an observer, but young in the Science of Astronomy, can hardly divest himself of when he sees such Wonders before him. And if you promise not to call me a Lunatic I will transcribe a passage from some observations begun 18 months ago, which will show my real sentiments on the subject.’
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The views that Herschel now expressed must have taken Maskelyne aback. Far from retracting his opinions, he emphasised his belief that ‘from analogy’ with the earth, and its likely conditions of heat, light and soil, the moon was ‘beyond doubt’ inhabited by life ‘of some kind or other’. Even more provocatively, he thought that the terrestrial view of matters gave undue importance to the earth. ‘When we call the Earth by way of distinction a planet and the Moon a satellite, we should consider whether we do not, in a certain sense, mistake the matter. Perhaps-and not unlikely-the Moon is the planet and the Earth the satellite! Are we not a larger moon to the Moon, than she is to us?…What a glorious view of the heavens from the Moon! How beautifully diversified with [her] hills and valleys!…Do not all the elements seem at war here, when we compare the earth with the Moon?’
That Herschel was writing somewhat mischievously to the Astronomer Royal becomes clear towards the end of his letter. Poetry gently creeps up on astronomy: ‘The Earth acts the part of a Carriage, a heavenly waggon to carry about the more delicate Moon, to whom it is destined to give a glorious light in the absence of the Sun. Whereas we, as it were, travel on foot and have but a small lamp to give us light in our dark nights, and that too often extinguished by clouds.’ The teasing wit in Herschel’s final sally was unmistakeable: ‘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!’
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Maskelyne could not overlook this, and promptly visited Herschel in Bath, accompanied by Banks’s new Secretary and confidant at the Royal Society, Dr Charles Blagden. The visit seems to have been somewhat stormy. They cross-questioned Herschel in a challenging manner, but reported back to Banks that they were strangely impressed, especially by Herschel’s beautiful home-made telescopes, of which there were several. There was also the unusual matter of the sister, a small, shy, tongue-tied young woman who seemed as mad about astronomy as her brother. Her name was Caroline. There was however no reason to believe that the Herschels would achieve anything particularly original in astronomy. They were provincials, émigrés, and poor self-taught enthusiasts.
Unknown to Maskelyne, the tongue-tied Caroline Herschel had made her own brief note of this visitation from the great men of the metropolis. The ‘long conversation’ which Dr Maskelyne held with her brother William got nowhere, and to her ‘sounded more like quarrelling’. Immediately Dr Maskelyne left the house her brother burst out laughing and exclaimed: ‘That is a devil of a fellow!’
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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. He had achieved-or possibly achieved-something that had not been done since the days of Pythagoras and the Ancient Greek astronomers. Herschel had discovered what was perhaps a new planet. If so, he had changed not only the solar system, but revolutionised the way men of science thought about its stability and creation.

2
William Herschel was born in Hanover on 15 November 1738, and his younger sister Caroline twelve years later, on 16 March 1750. Their passion for observational astronomy came absolutely to rule both their lives, although in very different ways. At its height, in the 1780s, brother and sister spent night after night, month after month, summer and especially winter, alone but together in the open air, under a changing canopy of stars and planets. Their minutely recorded telescope observations, published in over a hundred papers by the Royal Society, 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 and his sister were deeply attached from childhood, and most of what is known about William’s life is drawn from Caroline’s affectionate but troubled journal or day book, which she later turned into a memoir. She once wrote: ‘If I should leave off making memorandums of such events as affect, or are interesting to me, I should feel like-what I am, namely, a person that has nothing more to do in this world.’
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William was well into his thirties when astronomy began to take over his existence. The Herschel family concern over several generations had been music, not stargazing. In mid-eighteenth-century Germany-then a series of city states-the profession of music-playing, singing, composing, and teaching-was as socially important as those of the law, the army or the Church. Each city court and most military regiments had their own orchestras, and those of Hanover had some of the most renowned in Europe. Their fame spread especially after the Elector of Hanover became George I of England in 1715, and composers such as Handel achieved Europe-wide status.
William and Caroline’s father, Isaac, was a military bandsman with the Hanover Foot Guards. His own father had been a landscape gardener near Magdeburg in Saxony who had an amateur interest in the oboe, but who died when Isaac was only eleven. Isaac, virtually an orphan, and without proper education, also began life as a gardener on various aristocratic Prussian estates. But at twenty-one, in his own words, he ‘lost all interest in horticulture’, found he had a natural ear for music, and ‘worked day and night to become an oboe player’. Despite advice from his elder brother to stick to gardening, he could ‘no longer resist the desire to make music and to travel’, and drifted first to Potsdam, then to Brunswick (’too Prussian for me’), and finally to Hanover, where the atmosphere was more liberal.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Elector of Hanover was now George II of England, and more easy-going English manners were acceptable. In August 1831 Isaac joined the Hanover military band, a happy career choice which allowed him considerable freedom, until he was caught up in the Anglo-German campaigns against the French which swept mid-eighteenth-century Europe.
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At twenty-five Isaac fell in love with a local girl, Anna Moritzen, who came from a village just outside Hanover. She was a beautiful creature, but completely illiterate. They might not have married except that Anna got pregnant, and Isaac proved himself a man of honour. Anna later said prettily that Isaac dropped into her life ‘as if from a cloud’.
(#litres_trial_promo) They steadily produced one child every two years for the next twenty years-but though ten children were born only six survived, a cause of much grief. Anna adored her first-born, Jacob, above all else, and indulged him extravagantly; she also loved her first daughter, Sophie, the beauty of the family. With the remaining children she was more severe, especially with her youngest and least promising daughter, Caroline.
Anna always seemed to be struggling to control the large, unruly family during Isaac’s frequent absences with his regiment. She tried to inculcate traditional German virtues: discipline, craftsmanship, thrift and family loyalty. She had no patience with ‘book-learning’, especially as far as her daughters were concerned. However, she accepted Isaac’s ambition ‘to make all his sons complete musicians’, which she saw as a path to fame and money. One of William’s earliest memories was of being given a tiny violin which his father had made for him, and being taught to play almost before he could hold it to his shoulder.
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Jacob was quickly established as ‘the genius’ of the family: a superb solo musician from childhood, handsome but vain and volatile, having the true ‘artistic temperament’. William was quieter and steadier, more determined in his lessons, thoughtful and genial, a great reader. Caroline mostly remembered her mother’s severity, and how her eldest brother and sister, Jacob and Sophie, were by contrast petted and indulged.
Possibly Isaac also found his wife Anna a little ‘too Prussian’. There was something dreamy, almost unworldly, about Isaac Herschel. Alongside his music-making, it is evident that he had a certain metaphysical approach to the world. He had little formal education, but for that very reason his interests were wide and passionately pursued: they included instrument-making, reading philosophy and practising amateur astronomy. It was a combination very characteristic of the culture of Enlightenment Germany, at a time when its greatest philosopher, the young Immanuel Kant, was also a craftsman and lens-grinder. Isaac was a natural teacher, patient and good-humoured; while Anna was quick-tempered, opinionated and scornful of what she regarded as bookishness.
Caroline remembered her father taking her out into the street to see the winter stars on a clear, frosty night, ‘to make me acquainted with the most beautiful constellations, after we had been gazing at a comet which was then visible’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps this stayed in her mind, because finding comets would later become her particular passion. She also recalled being shown an eclipse of the sun, safely viewing it reflected in a bucket of water.
(#litres_trial_promo) She added admiringly that her father loved helping William with his studies, and was particularly delighted with his ‘various contrivances’-by which she meant his scientific models. (Her phrasing, like her accent, remained pleasingly Germanic to the end of her life.) Among these she particularly remembered a shining, neatly turned four-inch brass globe, ‘upon which the equator and ecliptic were engraved by my brother’, an object of childish wonder and admiration to her. This was an early sign of William’s extraordinary manual skills, which she came to worship.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her own secret desire was to become a concert singer, but she dared tell no one about this except William.

3
Perhaps the moments of paternal care were remembered because they were rare. Isaac was often away on campaign, and Anna ran the noisy, chaotic household as the growing family moved from apartment to apartment in Hanover, depending on their financial circumstances. There was great sibling rivalry. The bond between William and Caroline was strengthened by their vain and bullying brother Jacob, who as his mother’s darling had become spoilt and domineering. There was also the unhappy elder sister Sophie, whose beauty led to an early marriage with a ‘cruel and extravagant’ husband which turned out to be a disaster.
(#litres_trial_promo) Caroline-who was small and impish-claimed she was frequently whipped for disobedience both by her mother and by Jacob, starved for food, and treated as a scullion. Similarly, she said William had been endlessly teased by Jacob for his outstanding work at the garrison school in Latin, Greek, French and mathematics. He also mocked his model-making abilities. Jacob took nothing seriously but ‘the science of music’, in which he already considered himself (rightly) a virtuoso.
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At fourteen William joined the Hanover regimental band, alongside Jacob and his father. He soon learned to turn his hand to an astonishing array of instruments-the oboe, the violin, the harpsichord, the guitar and, a little later, the organ. He was also starting to compose, and had an early fascination with musical notation and the theory of harmony. Both he and Jacob appeared as young solo performers at the court of the Elector of Hanover, and their names were not forgotten.
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Caroline also remembered long philosophical arguments at home in the evenings, when the brothers returned after concerts. She would lie awake in her bedroom, trying not to fall asleep and secretly delighting in William’s quiet, calm voice steadily contradicting Jacob’s furious outbursts. According to her the names of ‘Leibniz and Newton’ were shouted from the parlour ‘with such warmth that my Mother’s interference became necessary’.
(#litres_trial_promo) When their father was at home these conversations on philosophical subjects became even more rowdy, and would frequently last till dawn. The combination of Leibniz and Newton suggests that William and Jacob were arguing about the rival virtues of calculus (a mathematical system invented by Leibniz) and fluxions (a similar system invented-but jealously guarded-by Newton). Both systems produced the new mathematics of curves and gradients, essential to the astronomical calculation of planetary orbits and the elongated ellipses of comets. It was an unusual household.
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In November 1755 the five-year-old Caroline witnessed a strange portent of disruption in the after-shock of the Lisbon earthquake, which amazingly travelled as far as Germany. As she remembered it, the whole barracks shook. ‘I saw both my parents standing aghast and speechless…my brothers came running in…all [the family] being panic-struck by the earth quake.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This earthquake, which killed over 30,000 people in Lisbon and shook cities throughout Europe, seemed to many to call into question the idea of God (or Nature) as a benevolent Providence, and to be a sign that a new kind of scientific knowledge was required. Among many speculative works, it inspired Voltaire’s Candide. Caroline always retained a superstitious horror of earthquakes, and said she felt one years later when she stood by her father’s deathbed.
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In the spring of 1756, when William was seventeen and Caroline was six, the Hanover Foot Guards were posted to England, to serve under their ally the Hanoverian King George II. It was the outbreak of a long, desultory and financially draining conflict with the French that would become the Seven Years War, and would radically affect the fortunes of the Herschel family. Jacob tried to obtain a home posting with the court orchestra, but failed, and all the men of the family were conscripted. Caroline remembered the grim, silent bustle in the house. ‘My dear father was thin and pale, and my brother William almost equally so, for he was of a delicate constitution and just then growing very fast. Of my brother Jacob I only remember his [making] difficulties at everything that was done for him.’ The rest of the family, the three younger children including the baby Dietrich, were abruptly left on their own as the men departed.
Caroline’s sense of this human drama is well caught in her Memoir. ‘The troops hallooed and roared in the streets, the drums beat louder…and in a moment they were all gone. I found myself now with my Mother alone in a room all in confusion, in one corner of which my little brother Dietrich lay in his cradle; my tears flowed like my Mother’s but neither of us could speak.’ Then Caroline made a touching gesture towards the mother she feared. She ran and found one of her father’s large cambric handkerchiefs, unfolded it, and carefully placed one corner in her weeping mother’s hand, while holding onto the opposite corner herself. They were united, at least, in grief. ‘This little action actually grew a momentary smile into her face.’
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The Hanover Regiment were stationed at Maidstone, in Kent. Jacob spent his pay on fashionable English clothes, William on English books, and Isaac on an allowance for Anna and the children. William fell in love with the country, began to learn the language, and made a small circle of English friends. For the first time there are hints that he was secretly beginning to dream of an entirely different, freer kind of life in the land of Newton, which had been adopted by his fellow German Handel. When the Hanover Guards were posted back to Germany the following spring to fight the invading French armies, Jacob packed a beautifully tailored English suit, and William a copy of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
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Caroline remembered their return, one freezing winter evening in December 1756.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her mother Anna was preparing a welcome-home dinner, and the six-year-old Caroline was sent to collect her father and brothers from the parade ground. But she missed them in the dark and confusion, and the frightened little girl had to make her own way home. ‘I continued my search till I was spent with cold and fatigue, and on coming home I found them all at table, nobody greeting me but my brother.’ As she remembered it, no one had even noticed her absence except William. She never forgot his reaction. ‘My dear brother William threw down his knife and fork, and ran to welcome and crouched down to me, which made me forget all my grievances.’
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Jacob now obtained a timely discharge, but William and his father took part in the disastrous battle of Hastenbeck, which was fought against the French invaders twenty-five miles outside the city of Hanover, on 26 July 1757. The surrounding countryside was overrun by a French army of 60,000 troops under Marshal d’Estrées. The allied general, the Duke of Cumberland, beat a strategic retreat westwards towards Flanders. Hanover was occupied, and the Herschels’ building had sixteen French infantrymen billeted on it.
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After a hasty family conference it was decided to smuggle William-still only eighteen-out of Germany altogether. Caroline recalled a fleeting, romantic glimpse of her brother’s surreptitious departure as she stood anxiously by the street door, told not to call out or give him away: ‘he glided like a shadow along, wrapped in a great coat, followed by my mother with a parcel containing his accoutrements’.
(#litres_trial_promo) William slipped past the last sentinel at Herrenhausen, and made his way to Hamburg, where he took ship again for England. At the last moment he was joined by Jacob, and together the two brothers arrived, penniless refugees, in London. They supported themselves by copying musical scores, giving oboe lessons, and playing as freelance musicians in local orchestras. They gave a successful concert in Tunbridge Wells. In the evenings William read voraciously: English novels, books on mathematics and musical harmony, Robert Smith’s Harmonics (1749) and James Ferguson’s recently published and immensely popular Astronomy Explained (1756).
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By the autumn of 1759 Jacob was finding the life too hard, and slipped back to Hanover with his and William’s combined savings, eventually finding employment as a court musician.
(#litres_trial_promo) Now, for the first time in his life, William Herschel, aged twenty-one, was alone-but free, talented, and in the country of his choice. And with a secret gift, his genius for astronomy, hidden even from himself-but awaiting the opportunity to unfold. For the next five years he virtually disappeared from the family history.
Caroline was devastated when William went abroad. In retrospect, she realised that it was he alone who had cared for her, and in his long absence he became a sort of legendary figure. At home her misery deepened. Hanover remained occupied, and food supplies were short. She continued going to the garrison school, but was not allowed to learn arithmetic or languages, and was increasingly treated as a maidservant by the family. She remembered sewing immensely long woollen stockings, scrubbing laundry, and writing her mother’s letters to her father on campaign. In fact her unusual literary ability was a rare source of pride, as she later recalled. ‘My pen was taken frequently in requisition for writing not only my Mother’s letters to my Father, but to many a poor soldier’s Wife in our Neighbourhood to her Husband in the Camp; for it ought to be remembered that in the beginning of the last century very few women left country schools with having been taught to write.’
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Her father had been made a prisoner of war, and for some months her brother Jacob became effective head of the family. He ‘woefully disarranged’ the household, demanded larger rooms, and bullied his little sister. ‘Poor I got many a whipping for being too awkward at supplying the place of footman or waiter.’
(#litres_trial_promo) When her father finally returned from the wars in summer 1760, aged fifty-three, he was a broken man, his health permanently damaged by many months of imprisonment, asthmatic and with a heart condition.
(#litres_trial_promo) He gave some private music lessons, smoked his pipe, and was largely ruled by his wife and his eldest son. He did however manage to regularise William’s situation as a soldier absent without leave. On 29 March 1762 General A.F. von Sporcken signed a formal document of discharge.
(#litres_trial_promo) But there was no sign of their son coming home.
Caroline’s own health was bad. At the age of five she had caught smallpox, and now at eleven she caught typhus. While she was recovering her mother left her to crawl up and down stairs ‘on my hands and feet like an infant’ for several months.
(#litres_trial_promo) The worst result of this illness and neglect was that Caroline’s growth was permanently stunted. In a family of tall, lean children, she never grew much beyond five feet.
(#litres_trial_promo) Moreover, her face had been permanently scarred by the smallpox. The lively, enchanting pixie that William had once known had become a silent, resentful gnome. But she also became increasingly determined and self-sufficient. She said that from the time of her recovery, ‘I do not remember ever having spent a whole day in bed.’
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Isaac increasingly left the care of his surviving children largely in Jacob’s hands: Alexander aged seventeen, Caroline aged twelve, and the youngest, Dietrich, a sweet but sickly child, aged seven. Her father would indulge Caroline (‘and please himself’) with a short lesson on the violin, but he told her mournfully that as she was now ‘neither handsome nor rich’ she could never expect to marry, and should resign herself to helping her aged parents.
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Her brother Jacob refused to allow her to train as a milliner, although she was encouraged to learn just enough to be able to deal with the household clothes and linen. Her father had once hoped to give her ‘something like a polished education’, but her mother insisted that, given the family situation, it should be practical and ‘rough’; she would not even allow her to learn French, in case she developed ambitions to be a governess.
(#litres_trial_promo) Similarly, little Dietrich was denied a dancing master. Anna also observed that it was ‘her certain belief’ that had William read less, he would never have stayed away in England.
(#litres_trial_promo) When Jacob insisted that an extra servant girl be hired, she was given Caroline’s room and bed to share. For Caroline, ‘her destiny now seemed unalterable’. She was to be the family housekeeper, a spinster and permanent maidservant.
(#litres_trial_promo) She later decided to destroy all the journals referring to her private feelings during these years of misery. She did not want to write in the fashionable Romantic mode of the personal confession. ‘After reading over many pages,’ she wrote to Dietrich, ‘I thought it better to destroy them, and merely write down what I remember to have passed in our family at home, and abroad.’
In fact much remains of her inner life: as much perhaps as in the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. This dramatic rejection of the record of her childhood unhappiness was really a prelude to continuing revelations of frustrations in adulthood. ‘By what is to follow,’ she explained, ‘[Dietrich] may also see how vainly his poor Sister has been struggling through her whole life…wasting her time in the performance of such drudgeries and laborious works as her good Father never intended to see her grow up for.’ This was the ultimate cause, she came to think, of the ‘mortifications and disappointments which have attended me throughout a long life’. But all this was in retrospect, nearly sixty years later.
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In the summer of 1764, apparently without warning, to Caroline’s astonished delight her brother William-‘let me say my dearest brother’-reappeared in Hanover.
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4
What had happened to him in the interval? From his intermittent letters to Jacob, and things he subsequently told Caroline, it is possible to reconstruct the outline of his adventures, though with many gaps. Against all expectation, he had not remained in London, or gone back to his friends in Kent, but had boldly struck into the remote north of England. Surprisingly he used his military contacts to obtain the post of civilian music master to the Durham militia, which was stationed under the Earl of Darlington at Richmond in Yorkshire.
(#litres_trial_promo) This was as much a social engagement as a military one, and Herschel was soon completely independent, working as a freelance musician and music teacher in Leeds, Newcastle, Doncaster and Pontefract, and as an organist in Halifax. Little is known about these posts, except that he was constantly on the move, frequently lonely, and sometimes weeping with homesickness.
Every so often Jacob received letters from William with varied English postmarks, and written-with remarkable versatility-in German, French or English as the mood and subject took him. These letters were also covered in mechanical diagrams, and frequently shifted without a break from words to musical notation. They give a sense of Herschel’s mind switching with extraordinary agility between different modes of expression and zones of thought-literary, mechanical, musical, philosophical.
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From Yorkshire on 11 March 1761 he wrote in a fit of melancholy for which he chose slightly faltering English: ‘I must tell you a certain anxiety attends a vagrant life. I do daily meet with vexations and trouble and live only by hope. Many a restless night have I had; many a sigh and-I will not be ashamed to say it-many a tear.’ But a fortnight later he was writing from Sunderland in sprightly French about two pretty girls he had just met-one of them ‘la plus belle du monde, la Beauté elle-meme personnifée’-whose accomplishments included excessive blushing, flirting and playing the guitar. Sadly they only met once, though Herschel later confessed that they corresponded for over a year-another indication of his loneliness, perhaps.
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He chose German for his philosophical reflections. All of these were thoughtful, but many of them gloomy: the stoic doctrines of Epictetus, the optimism of Leibniz (’not the least credible nor feasible’), the origins of evil, the nature of sin, the ethical (rather than the intellectual) necessity for Christian religion in European society. ‘In all ages there have been philosophers who have had thoughts above their religion, and have been true Deists’-but it was ‘impossible’ in the present state of education for ‘a whole nation to be true Deists’. William himself described God memorably, in German, as ‘the unknowable, must-exist Being’.
(#litres_trial_promo) With this formula he was able to set aside, for the time being at least, the problem of a personal Creator.
He had thought often about the ‘immortality of the soul’, but said (to Jacob at least) that he preferred not to draw any conclusions. His unchar-acteristically pious explanation seems to disguise a scientific reservation that there was no ‘intelligible’ data on the matter: ‘My feeble understanding is not capable of pushing so far into the secrets of the Almighty; and as all those propositions have something unintelligible about them, I think it better to remain content with my ignorance till it pleases the Creator of all things to call me to Himself and to draw away the thick curtain which now hangs before our eyes.’ In fact ‘pushing far into secrets’ was always Herschel’s natural instinct and delight.
(#litres_trial_promo) Perhaps music provided a way of pondering these questions, and at this time he composed an oratorio based on Milton’s Paradise Lost, though the manuscript score has not survived.
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Another way would be astronomy. For the glowing exception to these dark truths about human life was always the life of Nature, already an endless source of clarity and consolation for Herschel. ‘If one observes the whole Natural World as one, one finds everything in the most Beautiful Order; it is my favourite maxim: Tout est dans l’ordre!’
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Riding between musical engagements, from one remote provincial northern town to another, often crossing over the moors alone at night, he found himself studying the panoply of stars overhead as he had done as a boy. He became well acquainted with the moon, and would later write that at this time he had intended ‘to fix upon the moon for my habitation’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He also later told several tales about these lonely rides, one being how on one occasion he was reading so intently that when his horse stumbled and threw him, he somersaulted over its head and landed upright still holding his book in his hand, a perfect demonstration of the Newtonian law of ‘circular motion’.
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Herschel now began to explore further the work of James Ferguson (1710-76), a man after his own heart who had started life as an illiterate Highland farm-labourer, and had become one of the most distinguished practical astronomers and demonstrators. His Astronomy Explained (1756) ran to numerous popular editions, and he later vividly described in his Autobiography (1773) how he fell in love with astronomy. He would take a blanket out into the fields after work, and lie on his back measuring star distances and patterns with beads on a string held up over his head. He then transferred these, by the light of a stub of candle on a stone, to his first paper star-maps, spread out beside him on the grass. He said he imagined the ecliptic (the sun’s curving path through the heavens) like a high road running through the stars. Gradually he taught himself astronomy and built his own telescopes. He later invented various devices for projecting constellations during his lectures, and his ‘Eclipseon’ for showing the various movements of the solar system.
Living in lonely bachelor lodgings, Herschel spent more and more time reading about stellar theory. He followed Robert Smith’s Harmonics (1749) with his Compleat System of Opticks (1738), which contained illustrated sections on astronomical observations.
(#litres_trial_promo) He 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? Many of these problems would emerge in his earliest scientific papers, and would continue to fascinate him for the rest of his life.
He was approaching thirty, and to all appearances he was alone and adrift in a foreign land. But he was not disorganised or depressed. Much of his father’s military discipline, and his own professionalism, now stood him in good stead. He worked immensely hard, with an energy and determination that never left him. His musical appointments were increasingly important, regular and better paid. At Halifax he was conducting an orchestra, playing the organ, giving singing lessons, and composing his own music. He was also learning Italian.
After a period of physical weakness in his late teens (which Caroline had anxiously remarked on), William had grown into a tall, commanding figure, with a high, intellectual forehead, and very striking dark eyes. Outwardly at least, he was cheerful and sociable. It is evident that he made friends wherever he went. At one concert he was joined by the Duke of York, brother of the new King George III, who accompanied him (rather badly) on the violoncello. On another occasion he was invited to conduct one of his own symphonies at St Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh. At the reception afterwards, he chanced to meet the philosopher David Hume, and was promptly invited out to dinner.
(#litres_trial_promo) There was something about Herschel’s mixture of intensity and innocence that simply charmed people. And talented German exiles were, of course, popular.
Herschel was brought back to Hanover by a combination of circumstances. His work at Halifax had led to the first really serious opportunity of his career: the possibility of being appointed the organist of the new Octagon Chapel at Bath, when its building was completed. Bath was fast becoming the most fashionable city in England-nearly ready for Beau Brummell-and all kinds of other musical work would obviously be available there. Herschel immediately thought of his brothers, Jacob and Alexander. He had heard too that his father Isaac was ill, and not likely to live much longer. There may also have been worries about the younger children under Jacob’s care-Caroline and little Dietrich.
(#litres_trial_promo) At all events, the prodigal son suddenly reappeared in Hanover in the summer of 1764. He arrived saying he had just observed an eclipse of the sun as he rode over the Luneburger Heath.
Caroline was then fourteen, and her appearance following her illness must have shocked him. But there was little that he could do for her immediately, and after an absence of nearly seven years his visit to Hanover lasted a mere fortnight. It was a sober reunion. Isaac, obviously failing, could not persuade him to remain, and instead William spoke of future plans for his brothers as musicians in England. Nothing was said of Caroline at this point. William must have known it was the last time he would see his father alive.
Caroline remembered William’s departure after his flying visit with grief and frustration. It was the day of her first communion, and William had particularly admired her appearance in a new black silk dress. But she was sent to church by Jacob, and not allowed to see William off. She never forgot that moment. ‘The church was crowded and the door open. The Hamburg Postwagen passed at eleven, bearing away my dear brother…It was within a dozen yards from the open door; the postillion giving a smettering blast on his horn. Its effect on my shattered nerves, I will not attempt to describe, nor what I felt for days and weeks after.’ She walked home alone, ‘in feverish wretchedness’, wearing her new dress and painfully aware that she was carrying the bouquet of artificial flowers that her elder sister Sophia had worn on her ill-fated wedding day.
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Their father died of a stroke in 1767, but William did not return for the funeral. He would not come back to Hanover for another eight years.
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5
William was offered the organ post in August 1766, and officially moved to Bath in December of that year. Before the chapel was opened he found a lucrative position in the famous Pump Room Band, run by the impresario James Linley. The Pump Room and Theatre was then the very height of fashionable entertainment. Linley’s daughter, the singer ‘Angel’ Linley, later became a star at Drury Lane, and married the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Early on, Herschel had a quarrel with Linley over orchestral arrangements in the Pump Room, which got into the newspapers and caused a brief but diverting scandal in Bath society. The disagreements were minor-the appointment of singers, the provision of music stands-but there was some suggestion that Linley was exploiting Herschel as a German outsider. What was remarkable was the sudden revelation of Herschel’s fiery temper and determination when roused. Far from conceding to Linley, he took out a series of advertisements against his concerts in the Bath Chronicle. He referred openly to Linley’s ‘low Cunning and dark Envy’, and set up a competing programme with a rival diva, the Italian singer Signora Farinelli. This proved a great success.
After one season of musical warfare Linley made peace with Herschel, and their combined concerts resumed at the Pump Room, to general satisfaction. After Linley left for London, Herschel became sole director. Moreover Linley became a great admirer of Herschel, and sent his son Ozias to him to learn the violin. It was perhaps no coincidence that when Ozias went on to Oxford, he studied mathematics and astronomy.
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William rented a modest house ten minutes’ walk from the Pump Room, in the upper part of Bath, at Rivers Street. He continued composing for the oboe, taught guitar, harpsichord and violin, conducted oratorios and gave singing lessons. In June 1767 he was joined by Jacob for a visit, and took up his appointment as organist and choirmaster at the Octagon Chapel, which was opened on 4 October.
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It was during this hectic period that his other secret passion exerted itself. In February 1766 the twenty-seven-year-old William Herschel started his first Astronomical Observation Journal. He recorded an eclipse of the moon, and the hazy appearance of Venus.
(#litres_trial_promo) Hard as he worked as a musician, he was now steadily training himself as an astronomer. He devoured books on astronomical calculation, Flamsteed’s star tables and Thomas Wright’s cosmological speculations. He attended James Ferguson’s astronomy lectures at the Pump Room in 1767, and at last met this early astronomical hero of his.
(#litres_trial_promo) He spent hours star-gazing in the little Rivers Street garden at night. Even when teaching his music pupils in the evening, it was said that he sometimes broke off and took them outside to look at the moon. He began to build up a small arsenal of second-hand refractor telescopes, and carefully examined their construction. He was considering what his father Isaac used to call ‘one of his contrivances’.
The refractor is the classic type of straight-through telescope originally developed by Galileo, and refined by Kepler and the great seventeenth-century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. It has magnifying lenses at each end of the tube, one fixed and the other adjustable (the eyepiece), advancing or retreating to focus the image. In extendible or retractable form, it was often used by soldiers or sailors on active service, until the arrival of the binoculars. It was just such a refractor telescope that Nelson would-or would not-put to his blind eye at the battle of Copenhagen in 1798. The snapping closed of the retractable mechanism became a gesture of decision and command.
Herschel found that most refractor telescopes were satisfactory for simple low-magnification viewing of the moon or the planets. But astronomical versions were absurdly cumbersome (some up to twenty-five foot long), and almost useless for high-magnification observation of the stars. The curve or bulge in the magnifying lens acted like a prism, and broke up the white stellar light into distorting rainbow-coloured fringes at the edges. (This became known as ‘chromatic aberration’. A shortsighted person can see these rainbow aberrations of starlight with the naked eye, because his pupil is also distorted at the edges.) Newton, observing this in his famous prism experiments at Cambridge, had invented an entirely different type of telescope, the reflector. But his, which he donated to the Royal Society, was only six inches long, with a magnifying power of forty.
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Confined to refractors, most eighteenth-century British astronomers had paid little attention to stellar astronomy, except where it served for navigation purposes. (The John Dolland achromatic telescope, which corrected some prismatic distortion, was only invented in 1758, and did not come into general use-as improved by his son Peter Dolland-until the turn of the century.
(#litres_trial_promo)) The newly appointed Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, based at the Greenwich Observatory, was largely concerned at this time with observing lunar eclipses, planetary transits and passing comets. His special interests lay in establishing tables for use at sea as a mariner’s almanac, and in the calculation of longitude. He noted that since his seventeenth-century predecessor at Greenwich, John Flamsteed, had thoroughly mapped the heavens, he himself kept only thirty-one stars under regular observation.
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Since his long nights of riding over the moors, Herschel’s interests had roamed far beyond the safe family of the solar system, with its restricted circuit of sun, moon and six known planets. He had the courage, the wonder and the imagination of a refugee. His whole instinct was to explore, to push out, to go beyond the boundaries. Gradually he began to think about the possibilities of Newtonian reflector telescopes. Newtonians were based on a different principle from the traditional refractors. They produced increased ‘light-gathering’, rather than simple magnification. As their name implies, the primary component of a reflector telescope is a large mirror, or speculum, highly polished and subtly curved inwards (concave) so as to gather and concentrate starlight at a much greater intensity than the lens of the naked eye. This concentrated light is then viewed through a simple adjustable eyepiece inserted into the side of the tube, the whole set-up producing wonderfully bright images and little chromatic aberration.
Instead of conventional magnification, Herschel began to think in terms of something he called ‘space-penetrating power’. This was a concept he had partly developed from Robert Smith’s Opticks.
(#litres_trial_promo) Conventional eighteenth-century astronomers still studied the night sky as if it were a flat surface, or rather the interior surface of a decorated dome, inlaid with constellations. Flamsteed’s beautiful Celestial Atlas, first published as a large decorative folio in 1729, presented the sky like this. Its second edition of 1776 still remained the standard European book of reference for stellar identification.
Each constellation was given a double-page spread, showing the mythological figures that gave them their names drawn in flat engraved outlines, as well as the known stars belonging to the group. The brighter stars were identified by their home constellation and a Greek letter of the alphabet. So Alpha Orionis, also known by its Arabic name Betelgeuse, was the bright star on the shoulder of Orion the Hunter; and Zeta Tauri (which would later catch Herschel’s attention) was a third-magnitude star in Taurus the Bull.
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But Herschel began to conceive of deep space. He began to imagine a telescope which might plunge deep down into the sky and explore it like a great unplumbed ocean of stars. This was something a reflector telescope might be able to do supremely well, if its concave mirror were sufficiently large. But because even small astronomical mirrors were expensive, and large ones had not yet been developed (even by London lens-makers like Dolland), Herschel realised that he would have to make them himself. Moreover, to achieve the exquisitely fine reflective surface he required, they would have to be cast in metal, not glass.
Meanwhile the other Herschel brothers began to shuttle between Bath and Hanover. Jacob came over for a brief visit in summer 1767, following Isaac’s death, but after giving virtuoso performances in the Pump Room he preferred to return to his high life in Hanover. Young Dietrich, now aged fifteen, came the following summer, and was given a fine holiday. Finally Alexander came and settled in 1770.
(#litres_trial_promo) William moved to a larger house at 7 New King Street, and Alexander was given the attic rooms, while William took over the first floor and had the reception rooms redecorated and furnished with a new harpsichord for his singing and music lessons.
All the time he was evidently worrying about Caroline, and finally in the spring of 1772, after long discussion with Alexander, he wrote to Hanover to ask if Caroline (then aged twenty-one, and having reached her majority) would like to join them at Bath. Knowing the opposition his proposal would face from their mother and Jacob, William put his suggestion in the most plain and practical terms, as Caroline recalled. She should make a trial as to whether ‘by his instructions I might not become a useful singer for his winter concerts and oratorios’. She could also become her brothers’ housekeeper. If after two years this ‘did not answer our expectations’, William would send her back. Significantly, he mentioned not a word of astronomy.
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Caroline longed to accept. But her mother fiercely objected, and so of course did Jacob. ‘I had set my heart upon this change in my situation, [but] Jacob began to turn the whole scheme to ridicule…[although] he never heard the sound of my voice except in speaking.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Caroline found her own way of stubbornly preparing for her escape. She practised singing the solo parts of oratorios ‘with a gag between my teeth’, so she could not be heard at home; and she secretly knitted enough cotton stockings for Dietrich to last him ‘two years at least’.
Finally Herschel himself went over to Hanover, and won his mother over by pointedly promising to settle an annuity on her to pay for a maid to replace Caroline. He never succeeded in getting his elder brother’s agreement, however. Jacob was away attending the Queen of Denmark at a court festival, and blustering letters arrived ‘expressing nothing but regret and impatience’ at the whole plan. William simply ignored them, and Caroline left ‘without receiving the consent of my eldest brother’. They departed on 16 August 1772, and from this moment William became the real head of the family.
Caroline still spoke practically no English. Her elfin face, badly marked by the childhood smallpox scars, made her painfully shy. At less than five feet she was of such diminutive stature that at times she seemed like a pixie out of some German folk tale. She had an almost childlike enthusiasm, energy and sense of mischief. The one known portrait of her at this age, a charming miniature silhouette, confirms this impression. Her profile is fine, pert, almost boyish, but with full, slightly pouting lips, and a neat, very determined little chin. Her hair bubbles round her head in a mass of curls, and falls down her back, where it is secured with a ribbon. She has a sprite-like quality about her.
Caroline adored the journey to England, keeping a wide-eyed diary of the trip, like an excited teenager. In Holland her hat was gloriously blown off into a canal. At night William made her sit outside on the top of the carriage so he could show her the constellations. On the crossing to Norfolk, one of their ship’s masts was carried away in a storm. Anchoring off the beach at Great Yarmouth (future home of Dickens’s Lil’ Emily), they were transferred with their bags to an open boat, rowed through the swell, and unceremoniously ‘thrown like balls’ onto the shore by two strapping English sailors.
Outside Norwich, the horses ran away with their carriage and they went ‘flying into a dry ditch’. In London they walked round the streets, seeing St Paul’s and the Bank, admiring the lights and examining the shops. But William would only pause outside those selling optical instruments-‘I do not think we stopped at any other.’ By the time they arrived by the overnight coach in Bath, Caroline reckoned she had only slept in a bed twice in eleven days. That was what it was going to be like living with her brother. ‘I was almost annihilated,’ she wrote triumphantly. William covered the whole journey in one sentence in his journal. ‘Set off on my return to England in company with my sister.’
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6
William now hustled Caroline into her new life. Summoning her to a seven o’clock breakfast, he began immediately to give her lessons in English and arithmetic, and showed her ‘booking and keeping household accounts of cash received and laid out’. He said he would give her three singing lessons a day, while she practised the harpsichord, dealt with the household linen and prepared the menus. She was given rooms in the attic with Alexander, but was commanded to act as hostess in the salon.
William treated her affectionately but sternly, insisting that she go out to shop on her own in the market at Bath, even though she still only spoke a few words of English, which she had, as she put it, ‘on our journey learned like a Parrot’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She found herself ‘alone among fishwomen, butchers, basket-men etc’, and also had to contend with the ‘hot-headed old Welsh woman’ who cooked. She felt she was encountering a ‘natural antipathy’ which the lower class of the English had against foreigners.
(#litres_trial_promo) But she could also be fierce herself: William’s neighbour, the motherly Mrs Bullman, she quickly dismissed as ‘very little better than an Idiot’, a term much favoured by Caroline.
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At first she struggled against Heimweh (homesickness) but she showed herself unexpectedly dauntless, and gradually settled into the taxing new routine. Breakfast was shortly after 6 a.m. (’much too early for me, who would rather have remained up all night’), followed by household accounts, shopping, laundry, three-hourly singing lessons, instruction in English and arithmetic, music copying, formal practice on the harpsichord kept in the front room, and reading out loud from English novels.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘By way of relaxation’, she and William talked of nothing but astronomy. She never forgot ‘the bright constellations with which I had made acquaintance during the fine night we spent on the Postwagen travelling through Holland’. But she also remembered that William had promised to train her up as a professional concert singer, who would one day be independent.
It took time for the full emotional rapport to renew itself between the tall, handsome thirty-four-year-old bachelor brother, driven and ambitious, and the shy, tiny, awkward twenty-two-year-old sister, who had never before travelled outside her native Hanover, but who was bursting with unfulfilled dreams and longings. To begin with their relationship seemed formal, almost like that between father and daughter. In many ways William was quite withdrawn-enthusiastic and talkative in the mornings, but remote in the evenings after any guests had departed. ‘I seldom saw my Brother in the evening…He used to retire to bed with a basin of milk or glass of water, and Smith’s Harmonics and Optics, Ferguson’s Astronomy etc, and so went to sleep buried under his favourite authors; and his first thoughts on rising were how to obtain instruments for viewing those objects himself of which he had been reading.’ At breakfast, Caroline was usually subjected to ‘ample stuff for an astronomical Lecture’.
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William loved Caroline tenderly, but he also bullied her, in what he saw as a kindly pedagogical way. He could be an unsparing disciplinarian. She in turn adored him, but also feared him and grew impatient with him. He was always fierce in his domestic demands, and constantly required her to better herself: her English, her mathematics, her music and her astronomy. But gradually she learned to tease him and criticise him, while he came more and more to depend on her. In his daily notes and instructions he began to address her by the affectionate diminutive ‘Lina’, with its moonlike echo. Sometimes he even wrote it teasingly in French-‘Lina adieu’-or transliterated into Greek letters, ‘as you understand Greek’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Caroline always referred to him simply as ‘my dearest Brother’, or else ‘my beloved Brother’. For Caroline, William was initially the great liberator who had taken her out of the German house of bondage. But later their roles would subtly change. As William would observe to Nevil Maskelyne, it was not always self-evident which was the planet and which was the moon.
With the household running more smoothly, Herschel could now begin regular astronomical observations in their garden at night. Once Caroline had arrived, he found more time to explore the construction of telescopes. First he hired a two-and-a-half-foot-long Gregorian reflector telescope, which was too small; then in autumn 1772 he tried to construct an eighteen-foot refractor on the Huygens model. But its tube, which Caroline was instructed to make out of papier-mâché, was so long that it kept bending, like an elephant’s trunk. They substituted one made out of tin, but it was still not satisfactory. Then he wrote to London for materials to construct a five-foot reflector, but was told that no one made glass mirrors large enough (at least five inches in diameter) to fit it. It was then that Herschel took the crucial decision to try to cast, grind and polish his own metal mirrors or specula. To start with, he acquired some metal grinding and polishing tools from John Michel, a Quaker astronomer who had retired to Bath nursing some strange, unacceptable ideas-such as the existence of ‘black holes’ in space from which light itself could not escape.
The accelerating pace of Herschel’s experiments is caught in a memorandum of his purchases made over five months in 1773.
May 10th. Bought a book of Astronomy, and one of Astronomical tables.
May 24th. Bought an object glass of 10 foot focal length.
June 1st. Bought many eyeglasses, and tin tubes; made a pair of steps.
June 7th. Glasses paid for, and the use of a small reflector paid for.
June 14th. The hire of a 2 foot reflecting telescope for 3 months paid for.
Sept. 15th. Hired a 2 foot reflector.
Sept. 22nd. Bought tools for making a reflector. Had a metal [mirror] cast.
Oct. 2nd. Bought a 20 foot object glass, and 9 eyeglasses. Emerson’s Optics. Attended private [music] scholars as usual.
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In June 1773 Herschel decided to attempt to make his own large reflector telescope, using metal mirrors as big as six inches in diameter.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a complicated and above all laborious task, requiring the casting, grinding and polishing of ‘speculum metal’, made of an alloy of white tin and brass. Three-inch mirrors were quite common, but a six-inch-diameter mirror with a precise concave surface required a technical feat that had never been achieved before. It called for a series of ingenious ‘contrivances’, which took Herschel back to his boyhood days, and all his old enthusiasm and ingenuity bubbled back.
The casting first required the construction of a small iron furnace and special moulds. These, Herschel found after many experiments, could best be made from a dried non-porous natural loam, formed from pounded horse-dung.
(#ulink_2e81b9f2-1837-5bda-a0ee-e64f8767fceb) Once cast, the speculum metal had to be hand-ground with a solution of ‘coarse emory and water’ to achieve the required concave curve, and finally polished, ‘with putty or oxide of tin or pitch’, for hours on end to achieve an absolutely smooth reflective surface. It was an exhausting, and occasionally dangerous, physical process, needing endless trial and error. The furnace was liable to explode, and Herschel found that the polishing had to be done without pausing-sometimes for many hours on end.
(#litres_trial_promo) If the polishing paused for even a few seconds in the final stages, the metal would harden and mist over, and the mirror would be useless.
All the work had to be carried out at 7 New King Street, turning the elegantly furnished house (intended of course for music-making and teaching) into a pungent, chaotic workshop. Initially Caroline was appalled at this transformation: ‘To my sorrow I saw almost every room turned into a workshop. A Cabinet-maker making a Tube and stands of all descriptions in a handsome furnished drawing room! Alex putting up a huge turning machine…in a bedroom for turning patterns, grinding glasses & turning eye-pieces etc. At the same time Music durst not lay entirely dormant during the summer, and my Brother had frequent rehearsals at home.’
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Caroline was gradually becoming William’s closest assistant. She was up at all hours, turning her hand to every practical need, housekeeping, shopping in the market, dealing with visiting music scholars, taking Pump Room choirs for singing practice, ‘lending a hand’ in the workshop, even reading aloud from inspiring fiction (in her bad accent) while William sweated over the mirror-polishing.
(#litres_trial_promo) Their choice of books seems intended to relieve the monotony of the work: Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy-all tales of fantastic adventures or eccentric heroes. Caroline does not seem to have been permitted the most fantastic and eccentric of them all, William’s favourite, Paradise Lost.
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Sometimes she even provisioned William while he worked, literally putting drinks and bits of food into his mouth. On at least one momentous occasion, this extraordinary provisioning process lasted for sixteen hours without a break. It was as if Caroline was a mother bird feeding a demented nestling. Something of William’s obsessional dedication, and Caroline’s ambivalent feelings about it, come out in the way she described this in her journal: ‘My time was so much taken up with copying Music and practising, besides attendance on my Brother when polishing, that by way of keeping him alife I was even obliged to feed him by putting the Vitals by bits into his mouth-this was once the case when at the finishing of a 7 foot mirror he had not left his hands from it for 16 hours together…And generally I was obliged to read to him when at some work which required no thinking, and sometimes lending a hand, I became in time as useful a member of the workshop as a boy might be to his master in the first year of his apprenticeship.’
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Much later, Victorian illustrators would make this into a comfortable domestic scene, a harmonious couple in an elegant drawing room, with convenient refreshments on a nearby table. In fact these epic polishing sessions took place downstairs, at the workbench of the unheated, stone-flagged basement in New King Street. Here William and Caroline were surrounded by tools and chemicals, and the distinct, pungent smell of the horse-dung moulds. It was dirty, monotonous and exhausting work, for which they wore rough clothes, and ignored ordinary household routines and niceties.
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Caroline’s account is light-hearted and self-denigrating, in her usual manner, and yet faintly resentful. Her sense of herself as William’s ‘boy’ apprentice suggests a measure of physical subordination and discipline. It also hints at an undignified negation of her sex. Here William was her ‘master’, not her kindly brother or patient teacher. Moreover, she saw herself as his ‘first year’ boy, at a time when apprenticeships normally lasted seven years. Though willingly undertaken, the work must have been frustrating and even perhaps humiliating for her. (What, for example, did she do if William needed to urinate during his epic polishing sessions?) Once again her account of the brother-sister relationship is problematic.
Meanwhile Herschel revealed extraordinary mechanical ability, combining the manual dexterity of a musician with almost ruthless determination and stamina. On one occasion he insisted on sharpening his instruments on the landlord’s grindstone in the yard after midnight, and came back fainting, with one of his fingernails ripped off. On another, the casting exploded in the basement workshop, and a stream of white-hot metal shot across the stone floor, cracking it from end to end and nearly laming them both.
By 1774 Herschel had successfully assembled his first five-foot reflector telescope, with a home-made metal speculum mirror of six-inch diameter (about the size of a side-plate). His Observation Journal records proudly: ‘December. At night I made astronomical Observations with telescope of my own construction.’
(#litres_trial_promo) As if to distinguish it from the standard tubular refractors, he had a beautiful octagonal case of gleaming mahogany panels made for it by their cabinet-maker. With its bright brass eyepiece and small sighting scope, it looked like a fine piece of Georgian furniture, not unworthy of Chippendale himself.
It was immediately apparent that Herschel had created an instrument of unparalleled light-gathering power and clarity. He saw, for example, what very few astronomers even suspected: that the Pole Star-which had been the key to navigation, and the poet’s traditional emblem of steadiness and singularity, for centuries-was not in fact one star at all, but two stars. This observation was not officially confirmed until Herschel received a letter from Joseph Banks, as President of the Royal Society, nearly ten years later, in March 1782.
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The first objects Herschel studied from his garden were his old travelling companion, the moon, and then two of the most prominent of the mysterious nebulae, or ‘star-clouds’, about which almost nothing was yet known. The first nebula was the one in the skirts of Andromeda, just visible with the naked eye as a faint primrose gaseous whorl beyond Cassiopeia; the other was in Orion, the mysterious blue star cluster, two stars down on the Hunter’s sword blade. These colour-tints were immensely enhanced by Herschel’s reflector, and he was soon producing wonderfully evocative colour descriptions of stars and planets. The nine-teenth-century observer T.H. Webb would complain that Herschel was rather too ‘partial to red tints’, though whether this was a purely subjective problem, a physiological one, or down to his speculum metal being a better reflector at the long-wavelength end of the spectrum, is still open to debate. The modern Hubble images are even more cavalier about colouring deep-space objects.
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From the start, Herschel’s observations have a note of authority, and he is ready to challenge current astronomical thinking. His Observation Journal for 4 March 1774 reads: ‘Saw the lucid spot on Orion’s Sword, thro’ a 5 ½ foot reflector; its shape was not as Dr Smith has delineated in his Optics; tho’ something resembling it…From this we may infer that there are undoubtedly changes among the fixt stars, and perhaps from a careful observation of this spot something might be concluded concerning the Nature of it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Even at this early stage Herschel has the notion of a changing universe, and that nebulae might hold some clue to this mystery. Each winter between 1774 and 1780 he made detailed drawings of Andromeda and the Orion nebula to see if any alterations could be identified.
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The nebulae represented a new field of sidereal or stellar astronomy. Only thirty nebulae were known in the 1740s, at the time of Herschel’s birth. By the time Herschel began to study them in the mid-1770s, Charles Messier in Paris had catalogued just under a hundred. Within a decade, by the mid-1780s, Herschel would have increased this tenfold, to over a thousand nebulae.
(#litres_trial_promo) No one really knew their composition, origins or distance. In general they were thought to be a few loose clouds of gas, hanging static in the Milky Way, some loose flotsam of God’s creation, and of little cosmological significance. Herschel suspected that they were star clusters at immense distances, whose composition might hold a clue to an entirely new kind of universe.
Sometimes, to observe the northern sky, he took his telescope out into the street at the front of the house, and dictated notes to Caroline. That autumn they attended together a return series of Ferguson’s astronomy lectures, given at the Pump Room by popular demand. Herschel’s journal records that he was still giving eight one-hour music lessons a day, and Caroline was continuing several hours’ singing practice.
(#litres_trial_promo) But the music scholars were sometimes surprised by Herschel ‘dropping his violin’ in the middle of the last evening lesson, and jumping up to peer at some particular group of stars from the window. One startled student recalled: ‘His lodgings [at Rivers Street] resembled an astronomer’s much more than a musician’s, being heaped up with globes, maps, telescopes, reflectors etc, under which his piano was hid, and the violoncello, like a discarded favourite, skulked away in a corner.’ Herschel himself said that some of his pupils ‘made me give astronomical instead of music lessons’.
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Back in Hanover, Anna and Jacob were still expressing doubts about Caroline living in England. Again, Herschel did not mention astronomy, but revealed that he had established a small millinery business on the ground floor at 5 Rivers Street, to supplement the household income, which Caroline was running successfully as well as pursuing her singing.
(#litres_trial_promo) He then slipped over to reassure them in the summer of 1777, and for the first time wrote a series of confidential letters to Caroline in English. ‘Mama is extremely well and as I have represented things gives her consent to you staying in England as long as you and I please. I wish very much to see my own home again [Bath], and conclude at present, remaining your affectionate Brother, Wm. Herschel…I hope to be in Bath about 14-16 of Sept.’
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Caroline was continuing her singing training, and beginning to perform regularly in Herschel’s concerts at the Pump Room. But she ‘could not help feeling some uneasiness’, as she put it, about her future prospects, as more and more of William’s time was ‘filled up with Optical and Mechanical works’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Once they went together to fulfil a singing engagement in Oxford, but Caroline remembered it largely for the perilous journey home, ‘for the jaunt was made in a single horse Chaise, and my Brother was not famous for being a good driver’.
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Then William gave her ten guineas-a very considerable sum-to spend on whatever evening dress she liked, for her musical performances. She was overjoyed when the proprietor of the Bath Theatre, Mr Palmer, solemnly pronounced her to be ‘an Ornament to the Stage’, a compliment she never forgot.
(#litres_trial_promo) On 15 April 1778 she was advertised, for the first time, as the principal solo singer in a programme of selections from Handel’s Messiah at the Bath New Rooms. As this was Herschel’s own end-of-season ‘Benefit Concert’, it was clearly he who promoted her. Her performance was such a success that she was offered her first solo professional engagement by a company at the Birmingham Festival for the following spring. Here at last was her chance of an independent career, at the age of twenty-eight. But after consultation with William, she turned it down, announcing that she was ‘resolved only to sing in public where her brother was conducting’. Consciously or not, she had made a decision about her future with William.
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It may be no coincidence that the following year, 1779, Herschel began a much more serious and regular pattern of observations. He recorded: ‘January. I gave up so much of my time to astronomical preparations that I reduced the number of my [music] scholars so as not to attend more than 3 or 4 a day.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He had decided on his first major astronomical project: to establish a new catalogue of so-called ‘double stars’.
John Flamsteed had observed over a hundred double stars, but had established no special record of them, and there were obviously many more to be found. The value of double stars was that they might provide a method of gauging the earth’s distance from the rest of the Milky Way, by the measuring of parallax.
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Although distances within the immediate solar system-to the moon and notably to the sun (using the Transit of Venus observations)-had been approximately measured, there was no general idea how far away the stars were, or what the size of the Milky Way might be. Kant, for example, assumed that Sirius (the Dog Star), because of its brightness, was probably the centre of the entire Milky Way galaxy, and possibly of the whole universe.
(#litres_trial_promo) In fact it is one of our nearest stars, just over 8.7 light years away.
Most current ideas about the cosmos were small-scale. It was widely believed that the earth was a few thousand years old at most (Biblical calculations gave 6,000 years), and that the universe might stretch out a few million miles ‘above’ the earth. The ‘fixed stars’ revolved in an unchanging pattern, and their brightness or magnitude was probably a function of their size, rather than their distance. So a faint star was probably comparatively small, rather than comparatively far away-a perfectly reasonable assumption. (One of Herschel’s most simple and radical ideas was to assume exactly the opposite.) The physical closeness of the stars and planets also explained their astrological ‘influences’. The universe was small, closely connected, largely unchanging (except for comets), and almost intimate.
Nevertheless, the eighteenth century had been rich in speculative theories about the possibility of a ‘Big Universe’. These included Thomas Wright’s Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750) and Kant’s Universal Natural History of the Heavens (1755), which first proposed-though without observational evidence-that there might be ‘island universes’ outside the Milky Way, that some distant stellar systems might be altering, and that the whole cosmos might be in some sense ‘infinite’, though it was not clear what exactly ‘infinite’ might mean, as hitherto it was a quality possessed only by God and mathematics. Herschel himself had added to these theoretical accounts with an early paper, eventually published by the Bath Philosophical Society, ‘On the Utility of Speculative Enquiries’.
All these speculative essays assumed the high probability that extraterrestrial life existed, either within the immediate solar system, or further out among the stars. James Ferguson, for example, stated in the opening of his Astronomy Explained (1756) that the entire universe was evidently populated, if not positively crowded, with living forms: ‘Thousands upon thousands of Suns…attended by ten thousand times ten thousand Worlds…peopled with myriads of intelligent beings, formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was further assumed that such life forms, though not necessarily human in appearance, would have developed civilisations and sciences superior to our own. The question of whether they were ‘fallen’ in a religious sense, and required Redemption according to Christian doctrine, remained a moot point among astronomers, few of whom would have considered themselves as ‘atheists’ in any modern sense. ‘An undevout astronomer is mad,’ as the poet Edward Young reflected in Night Thoughts (1742-45).
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However, the growing sense of the sheer scale of the universe, and the possibility that it had evolved over unimaginable time, and was in a process of continuous creation, did slowly give pause for thought. For a poet like Erasmus Darwin, in The Botanic Garden (1791), it put the Creator at an increasing shadowy distance from his Creation.
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This interest in extraterrestrial life was one of the reasons that Herschel remained so fascinated by the surface of the moon, with its mysterious mountains and craters, and dramatically shifting patterns and colours of shadow. When it was invitingly at the crescent (the best time to study surface detail), but too low to be observed from his tiny back yard, he would take his seven-foot telescope out into the cobbled street in front of the house. So it was, in December 1779, while Herschel was ‘engaged in a series of observations on the lunar mountains’, that a passing carriage stopped, a young gentleman sprang out, and he had his first historic meeting with Dr William Watson, junior. This was Herschel’s first really important scientific contact in England, one not made until he was forty-one. Watson was only thirty-three.

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Herschel later recalled the moment with appropriate gravity: ‘The moon being in front of my house, late in the evening I brought my seven-foot reflector into the street…Whilst I was looking into the telescope, a gentleman coming by the place where I was stationed, stopped to look at the instrument. When I took my eye off the telescope, he very politely asked if he might be permitted to look in…and expressed great satisfaction at the view. Next morning, the gentleman, who proved to be Dr Watson, junior (now Sir William), called at my house to thank me for my civility in showing him the moon.’
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Caroline remembered it rather less formally. Herschel and Watson were so immediately taken with each other that very night that they burst into the house and began ‘a conversation which lasted until near morning; and from that time on [Dr] Watson never missed to be waiting on our house against the hours he knew my Brother to be disengaged’.
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Watson warmly befriended Herschel, and encouraged his work even to the extent of helping with pounding horse-dung moulds and casting speculum mirrors. He quickly became what Caroline called ‘almost an intimate of the family’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He had Herschel elected to the Bath Philosophical Society as ‘optical instrument maker and mathematician’ (no mention of musician), and over the next two years encouraged him to submit no fewer than thirty-one papers at its meetings. These included ‘On the Utility of Speculative Enquiries’, ‘On the Existence of Space’, and further unconventional observations on the moon. They are evidence of the extraordinary intellectual ferment that had seized upon Herschel.
His notion of the cosmos was already far from conventional, and several of these papers were what would now be called ‘thought experiments’. In his ‘Space’ paper, delivered on 12 May 1780, he astonished his audience with his radical thoughts on time and distance: ‘Huygens said that it was possible some of the fixt Stars might be so far off from us that their light tho’ it travelled ever since the Creation at the inconceivable rate of 12 million of miles per minute, was not yet arrived to us. The thought is noble and worthy of a Philosopher. But [should] we call this immense distance a mere imagination? Can it be an abstract Idea? Is there no such thing as space?’
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In the case of his moon speculations, he raises the question whether a scientific idea has to be ‘correct’ to be significant. One of Herschel’s most ingenious ideas was that moon craters were artificially constructed circular cities (or ‘Circuses’), built especially to harness solar power for the lunar inhabitants: ‘There is a reason to be assigned for circular Buildings on the Moon, which is that as the Atmosphere there is much rarer than ours and of consequence not so capable of refracting and (by means of clouds shining therein) reflecting the light of the Sun, it is natural enough to suppose that a Circus will remedy this deficiency. For in that shape of Building one half will have the direct, and the other half the reflected, light of the Sun. Perhaps, then on the Moon every town is one very large Circus?’
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So, besides the two main projects, to record all new double stars and all new nebulae, Herschel was also embarked on a third and partly secret programme in 1779: to discover life on the moon. For some time he did not risk sending this section of the lunar paper to Maskelyne at the Royal Society, but both Watson and Caroline were aware of it. This was one of the reasons he needed to construct better telescopes.
The moon project had begun with a long entry made in his Observation Journal for 28 May 1776. He saw ‘what I immediately took to be woods or large quantities of growing substances in the Moon’. With a certain angle of solar light, some of the lunar shadows looked like ‘black soil’ spread down a mountainside. Other puzzling stippled shadows, especially in the Mare Humorum, Herschel believed were enormous ‘forests’, made up of huge, spreading leafy canopies, or at least ‘large growing substances’. Because of low lunar gravity, this gigantic ‘vegetable Creation’ was evidently ‘of a much larger size on the Moon than it is here’.
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Similarly, he tended to believe that there were so many of the smaller moon craters that they must be artificial constructions: ‘By reflecting a little on this subject I am almost convinced that those numberless small Circuses we see on the Moon are the works of Lunarians and may be called their Towns.’ Nonetheless, true science required not speculation but accurate observation and telescopic proof. ‘But this is no easy undertaking to make out, and will require the observation of many a careful Astronomer and the most capital Instruments that can be had. However this is what I will begin.’
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The light-gathering power of Herschel’s seven-foot reflector allowed him to see many objects that no previous astronomers had accurately observed, or at least recorded. With Caroline taking notes at his dictation, they began to compose a new catalogue of double stars, and to develop a system of recording the exact time and position of any unusual stellar phenomena not previously catalogued by Flamsteed. By this means Herschel began to build up an extraordinary, instinctive familiarity with the patterning of the night sky, which gradually enabled him to ‘sight-read’ it as a musician reads a score. He would later himself use such musical analogies to explain the technique and art of observation.
In early 1781 it was decided to close down the millinery business at 5 Rivers Street. William and Caroline moved back to the substantial three-storey terraced house at 19 New King Street, where the telescope equipment was immediately set up in the fine little back garden: ‘beyond its walls all [was] open as far as the river Avon’. Here, as Caroline noted modestly, ‘many interesting discoveries were made’. At first she however had to remain at Rivers Street to oversee the selling off of the linen stock, and she missed the first few nights of observation in March. She subsequently recorded, with unusual care, that she did not return to New King Street until 21 March-as it turned out a historic absence.
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During these nights around the spring equinox Herschel was observing alone, and as well as continuing with their catalogue of double stars, he gave himself up to making drawings of Mars and Saturn. Possibly he was ranging more freely than usual, or possibly he was testing his ability to ‘sight read’ the sky. At all events, on Tuesday, 13 March 1781, slightly before midnight, Herschel spotted a new and unidentified disc-like object moving through the constellation of Gemini. This discovery would change his entire career, and become one of the legends of Romantic science.
It also raises an intriguing question: how soon did Herschel know-or suspect-what he had discovered? It seems from his Observation Journal at the time, that what he thought he had found was a new comet. The following laconic account appears in his ‘First Observation Book’ for 12 and 13 March 1781
March 12 5.45 in the morning. Mars seems to be all over bright but the air is so frosty & undulating that it is possible there may be spots without my being able to distinguish them. 5.53 I am pretty sure there is no spot on Mars. The shadow of Saturn lays at the left upon the ring.
Tuesday March 13 Pollux is followed by 3 small stars at about 2’ and 3’ [minutes of arc] distance. Mars as usual. In the quartile near Zeta Tauri the lowest of two is a curious either nebulous star or perhaps a Comet. A small star follows the Comet at 2/3rds of the field’s distance.
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There are no further remarks for these nights, and certainly no expression of excitement or anticipation. On the following night, Wednesday, 14 March, it was either cloudy, or Herschel did not bother to observe, for there is no entry. He may have been prevented by an official engagement to play the harpsichord at the Bath Theatre, or to rehearse oratorios with Caroline.
(#litres_trial_promo) On 15 March there are short observations on Mars and Saturn, accompanied by some drawings of them made between 5 and 6 a.m., but nothing further about the ‘curious nebulous star or comet’. On Friday, 16 March there is again no entry. But Herschel may have been reflecting on his sightings, and talking to Caroline over the weekend, for finally, on the night of Saturday, 17 March there is the first clear sign that he was definitely in pursuit of the mysterious new object.
Saturday March 17 11pm. I looked for the Comet or Nebulous Star and found that it is a Comet, for it has changed its place. I took a superficial measure 1 rev, 6 parts and found also that the small star ran along the other [cross] wire…Position exactly measured 91′96…
Once Caroline had returned to New King Street on the twenty-first, there are regular entries in late March following the ‘comet’, and attempts to measure its diameter with William’s newly designed micrometer. For example, on 28 March the Observation Book reads: ‘7.25 pm. The diameter of the Comet is certainly increased, therefore it is approaching.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The increase in apparent size was a further indication of ‘proper motion’ and a solar orbit; and further proof that it could not possibly be a fixed star. But if it was a comet, there should be a slightly blurred, fiery outline and a distinct tail or ‘coma’. Here Herschel’s beautifully clear reflector images, even more than his high-magnification eyepieces, came into their own. In early April, some three weeks after his first sighting, Herschel made what seemed to be a definitive observation.
Friday April 6 I viewed the Comet with 460 [magnifications] pretty well defined, no appearance of any beard or tail. With 278 [magnifications] perfectly sharp and well defined.
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Though Herschel was scrupulously careful not to say so in his Observation Book, the sharp, round definition and the lack of any tail could only mean one thing: a new ‘wanderer’, or planet. What in fact he had observed was the seventh planet in the solar system, beyond Jupiter and Saturn, and the first new planet to be discovered for over a thousand years (since Ptolemy). He would name it patriotically after the Hanoverian king, ‘Georgium Sidus’ (‘George’s Star’), but it eventually became known to European astronomers as Uranus. ‘Urania’ was the goddess of astronomy, and the new planet was seen to mark a rebirth in her science.
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Yet there was no Eureka moment: quite the opposite. For the next few weeks there was a great deal of uncertainty about what sort of astronomical body Herschel had found. Nowhere does the word ‘planet’ appear in his Observation Journal for that spring of 1781, and there was no popular reporting of the news in the magazines. The following year, when the sensation was widely known, it would be very different, as Caroline remarked: ‘Since the discovery of the Georgium Sidus, I believe few men of learning or consequence left Bath before they had seen and conversed with its discoverer.’ But for the time being there were just endless measurements with the micrometer, ‘and a fire to be kept in, and a dish of Coffee during the long nights of watching’. She added wryly: ‘I undertook with pleasure what others might have thought a hardship.’
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On 22 March Herschel tentatively communicated his preliminary observations of ‘a Comet’ to William Watson, who passed them on to Nevil Maskelyne and Joseph Banks at the Royal Society.
(#litres_trial_promo) Maskelyne immediately contacted other European astronomers, notably Charles Messier in Paris, asking for their opinion.
(#litres_trial_promo) A week later Herschel followed this up with a direct report to the Royal Society, which was logged in the Society’s ‘Copy Journal Book’ for 2 April. Now he expressed barely muted excitement: ‘Saw the Diameter of the Comet extremely well defined and distinct; with several different powers thro’ my 20 foot Newtonian reflector. It was a glorious sight, as the Comet was placed among a great number of small fixt stars that seemed to attend it.’
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Remembering Herschel’s ‘lunacies’ of the previous year, Maskelyne was initially sceptical. He found great difficulty in even locating the new object with his own telescopes at Greenwich, a difficulty increased by Herschel’s inability to provide the conventional mathematical coordinates. At this stage Herschel located all his stars on hand-drawn star maps-what he called ‘an eye-draught’-an amateur technique that again visually recalls his familiarity with musical scores.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not until 4 April that Maskelyne wrote cautiously to Watson (still not to Herschel directly) that he had finally found the new ‘star’, and observed that it had just discernible ‘motion’. However, he prudently, and not unreasonably, hedged his bets: ‘This [the motion] convinces me it is a comet or a planet, but very different from any comet I ever read any description of or saw. This seems a Comet of a new species, very like a fixt star; but perhaps there may be more of them.’ This safely covered all the options. He added a pointed postscript: ‘PS I think [Herschel] should give an account of his telescope, and micrometers.’
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The Astronomer Royal was in a dilemma. He had no reason to accept Herschel as a reliable astronomer, and to declare a new planet prematurely might bring himself and the Royal Society into disrepute, and even ridicule. On the other hand, to reject what might be the greatest British astronomical find of the century, especially if the predatory French astronomers accepted it first (and even named it), would be even more damaging. He was also aware that Banks regarded this as a crucial moment in his presidency, and in the fostering of good relations between the Royal Society and the Crown. King George III was particularly fascinated by stars, and particularly keen to outdo the French.
Maskelyne finally chose to act as a man of science: he went back to his own telescopes, and from 6 to 22 April made his own observations. He was, after all, acting precisely according to the motto of the Royal Society itself: Nullius in Verba-‘Nothing upon Another’s Word’. On 23 April he at last wrote directly to ‘Mr William Herschel, Musician, near the Circus, Bath’. He began prudently, but ended firmly.
Greenwich Royal Observatory, April 23, 1781
Sir, I am to acknowledge my obligation to you for the communication of your discovery of the present Comet, or planet.
I don’t know which to call it. It is as likely to be a regular planet moving in an orbit nearly circular round the sun, as a Comet moving in a very eccentric ellipsis. I have not yet seen any coma or tail to it…
This tipped the argument towards a planet, but was not a decisive opinion. Maskelyne then went into technical details about their respective telescopes-especially the need for ‘very firm stands’-and the difficulties of using micrometers to measure apparent changing diameters (and hence establish a possible planetary orbit): ‘If the light of the small planet is not still, & free from scintillations, it is impossible to prove it to have any other than a spurious diameter that may arise from the faults to which the best telescopes are subject.’ Nonetheless, he praised Herschel for making ‘very good observations’.
Finally, in his last paragraph, he committed himself. ‘On the 6th April I viewed the Comet with my 6 foot reflecting telescope and the greatest power 270, and saw it a very sensible size but not well defined. This however showed it to be a planet and not a fixt star, or of the same kind of fixt stars as to possessing native light with an insensible diameter. I am Sir, etc etc, N. Maskelyne.’
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Herschel had gained an invaluable ally. He immediately sent up a brief, masterly paper which was read at the Royal Society on 26 April. It was entitled simply ‘An Account of a Comet’, and was published in the Philosophical Transactions in June. He stated that ‘between ten and eleven in the evening’ of 13 March 1781 he had at once recognised a new object of ‘uncommon magnitude’ in Gemini, and immediately ‘suspected it to be a comet’. But from the account he then gave of its magnitude, clarity of outline and ‘proper motion’ it was clear that Herschel was now claiming that the ‘comet’ was really a new planet. Though, no doubt advised by Watson, he did not actually say so. To support this, he also claimed that the object remained perfectly round, without the least appearance of comet’s tail, when magnified 270, 460 and 932 times-the latter magnifications being far beyond what even Maskelyne’s Greenwich telescopes could achieve. All this naturally excited even more controversy than his moon paper, and some murmurs of dissent.
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Maskelyne nevertheless stoutly confirmed his opinion to Banks that their dark horse, the ‘musician of Bath’, had made a revolutionary discovery, and had ‘much merit’. Yet he could not suppress a touch of rueful irony. ‘Mr Herschel is undoubtedly the most lucky of Astronomers in looking accidentally at the fixt stars with a 7 foot reflecting telescope magnifying 227 times to discover a comet of only 3’ [seconds of arc] diameter, which if he had magnified only 100 times he could not have known from a fixt star…Perhaps accident may do more for us than design could; and this makes one wish that the number of astronomers was multiplied in order to increase our chance of new discoveries.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This suggestion that the discovery had been ‘accidental’, and that he had been ‘lucky’, was to grow increasingly disturbing to Herschel.
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Maskelyne had made public his support of Herschel just in time. On 29 April Messier wrote directly to ‘Monsieur Hertsthel at Bath’ from Paris, congratulating him-‘this discovery does you much honour’-and giving his opinion that this was very likely to be the seventh planet in the solar system. Messier had himself, he said modestly, discovered no fewer than eighteen comets in his lifetime, and this resembled none of them: it was ‘a little planet with a diameter of 4 to 5 seconds, a whitish light like that of Jupiter, and having the appearance when seen with glasses of a star of the 6th magnitude’. He signed ‘with consideration and respect’ as ‘Astronomer to the Navy of France, of the Academy of Sciences, France’.
As Maskelyne and Banks were only too aware, Messier’s congratulations would soon carry the weight of the entire French Académie des Sciences.
(#litres_trial_promo) Throughout the spring and summer months of 1781, more and more astronomers-in France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Sweden-observed the tiny moving speck, and took the view that it was indeed a planet circling in a massive ellipse beyond Saturn. These included Jacques Cassini, Henry Cavendish and Pierre Méchain. In October Anders Lexell, the celebrated Russian mathematician, wrote from his observatory far away in St Petersburg, sending a fully computed orbit and adding his congratulations. Using a series of parallax readings, he calculated that the planet was large and unbelievably remote, over sixteen times further from the sun than the earth, and twice as far out as Saturn. The size of the solar system had been doubled. Jérôme Lalande, who also computed the orbit, later said that this was the moment when the Académie des Sciences finally accepted the new planet-seven months after it had been sighted. Lalande himself suggested it should be christened ‘Herschel’.
It is suggestive that it was mathematical calculation, rather than astronomical observation, which finally convinced the scientific community that a seventh planet really did exist. One of the things Lexell’s calculation showed was that Herschel’s vivid impression that the planet was increasing in apparent diameter throughout March and April (and therefore approaching the earth) must have been the product of his growing concentration and excitement, since it was actually getting smaller and moving away. Lexell continued to work patiently for several years on his calculations, and later came up with the revised figure of 18.93 times the distance from the earth, impressively close to the modern computer-generated figure of 19.218. (In fact, as the planet’s orbit is elliptical not circular, the distance varies: at its closest it is 18.376 and at its furthest it is 20.083.)
In May, Watson proudly took Herschel up to London to meet his father Sir William, and to renew his now extremely cordial relations with Nevil Maskelyne. Together with the wealthy Deptford astronomer Alexander Aubert, they all dined with Sir Joseph Banks at the Mitre Club, the tavern much favoured by Dr Johnson. This was Herschel’s first meeting with the inner circle of British astronomers, and it was a great success. There was an air of suppressed triumph and excitement. Banks, in high spirits, seized his hand, congratulated him on ‘the great discovery’, and announced that he was to be elected to the Royal Society and awarded the Copley Gold Medal forthwith-within the next fortnight!
(#litres_trial_promo) He claimed it as a decisive British victory over French astronomy, and the eminence of Messier, Pierre Laplace and Lalande, who had hitherto dominated European astronomy.
In fact Banks’s enthusiasm had rather got the better of him. The Copley Medal and the fellowship election had to go through the Society’s plodding bureaucratic procedures, which took another six months. Maskelyne used the interval to write warmly to Herschel in August: ‘I hope you will do the astronomical world the favour to give a name to your new planet, which is entirely your own, and which we are so much obliged to you for the discovery of.’
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It was subsequently shown that ‘Georgium Sidus’ had actually been observed and recorded at least seventeen times between 1690 and 1781, and was even catalogued by Flamsteed. But it had always been dismissed as a minor ‘fixed’ star. It was only Herschel’s observational genius-and the quality of his seven-foot reflector-which identified it as a large, steadily moving body in regular orbit round the sun: a true planet. And it was Maskelyne who, by promptly supporting Herschel and bringing his observations to the attention of other leading European astronomers, confirmed the discovery and had it accepted by the scientific community at large. It later became clear that Uranus was a weird blue ice giant (not ‘little’ as Messier thought), twice the distance of Saturn, and taking 84.3 years to complete a solar orbit. It is the only planet in the solar system which is tilted ‘on its side’, so its axis of rotation, or spin, is horizontal to its solar orbit.
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In November Banks wrote a friendly and characteristically droll letter to Herschel, asking him for details of how he made the discovery that famous night, and all the difficulties ‘etc etc’ it caused him. He wanted to refer to these when presenting him to the assembled members of the Royal Society in London the following month: ‘Sir, The Council of the Royal Society have ordered their Annual Prize Medal to be presented to you in reward for your discovery of the new star. I must request that (as it is usual for me on that occasion to say something in commendation of the discovery) you will furnish me with such anecdotes of the difficulties you experienced etc etc…as you may think proper to assist me in giving due praise to your industry and ability.’
Banks, in high good humour, also enjoyed putting Herschel on his mettle. ‘Some of our astronomers here incline to the opinion that it is a Planet, and not a Comet. If you are of that opinion, it should forthwith be provided with a name, or our nimble neighbours, the French, will certainly save us the trouble of Baptizing it.’
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Herschel, again advised by Watson, asked Banks if he could name the planet after the King, ‘Georgium Sidus’, a sound and self-effacing diplomatic stroke from a fellow Hanoverian.
(#litres_trial_promo) But he was less easy about the continuing murmurs in some quarters of the Royal Society that his discovery had been in some sense ‘accidental’. This struck at his very notion of scientific method. He wrote insistently, even angrily, to Banks just before the ceremony on 19 November: ‘The new star could not have been found out even with the best telescopes had I not undertaken to examine every star in the heavens including such as are telescopic, to the amount of at least 8 or 10 thousand. I found it at the end of my second review after a number of observations…The discovery cannot be said to be owing to chance only it being almost impossible that such a star should escape my notice…The first moment I directed my telescope to the new star, I saw with a power of 227 that it differed sufficiently from other celestial bodies; and when I put on the higher powers of 460 and 932 was quite convinced it was not a fixt star.’
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This claim was to become a point of honour with Herschel, often repeated. In September 1782 he wrote to Lalande in Paris, stating emphatically that the discovery ‘was not owing to chance’. Since he was embarked on a regular review of the sky, ‘it must sooner or later fall into my way, and as it was that day the turn of the stars in that neighbourhood to be examined, I could not very well overlook it’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The following year he wrote to the German astronomer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg at Göttingen, repeating that it was ‘not by accident’, and adding: ‘when I came to Astronomy as a branch of [mathematics] I resolved to take nothing upon trust but see with my own eyes all what other men had seen before’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lichtenberg replied enthusiastically (in German): ‘Mein Gott! If I had only known, when I was for a few days in Bath in October 1775, that such a man lived there! As I am no friend of tea rooms, nor of cards or balls, I was much ennuyéd and spent my time at the top of the [cathedral] tower with a field glass…’
When he came to write an autobiographic sketch for his friend Dr Hutton in 1809, Herschel was more insistent than ever: ‘It has generally been supposed that it was a lucky accident which brought this star to my view; this is an evident mistake. In the regular manner I examined every star of the heavens, not only of that magnitude but many far inferior, it was that night its turn to be discovered. I had gradually perused the great Volume of the Author of Nature and was now come to the seventh Planet. Had business prevented me that evening, I must have found it the next, and the goodness of my telescope was such that I perceived its planetary disk as soon as I looked at it; and by application of my micrometer, I determined its motion in a few hours.’
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This claim is not entirely borne out by his original Observation Journal. His first sweep or ‘review’ of double stars, begun in 1779, had not revealed the Georgium Sidus, so discovery on the second was not inevitable. Nor was recognition instant when it came. The journal reveals no precise Eureka ‘first moment’ on 13 March, only the hardening suspicion drawn out over five days to Saturday, 17 March that the strange body had ‘proper motion’, but was neither a ‘nebulous star’ nor a ‘comet’, and so was very probably a new planet. But it was Nevil Maskelyne who was the first to say so explicitly in writing, in April.
Nevertheless, Herschel’s discovery was an astonishing feat. It became his professional signature, and a historic moment for cosmology. It is hardly surprising that over the years he continued romantically to refine the story, and compressed his discovery into a single wondrous night, the inspired work of a glorious ‘few hours’. Caroline never commented on this, although it seems clear that she was present during the critical nights of measuring between 21 March and 6 April 1781. The effect of this account was to present an engagingly romantic image of science at work: the solitary man of genius pursuing the mysterious moment of revelation.
Joseph Banks’s presentation speech, when awarding the prestigious Copley Gold Medal for the best work in any scientific field during the year 1781, in front of the assembled Fellows of the Royal Society, was unreservedly complimentary to Herschel. The discovery of the new planet was the first great success of Banks’s new presidency. In his most expansive and jovial mood, he accordingly projected a visionary future for Herschel’s astronomy: ‘Your attention to the improvement of telescopes has already amply repaid the labour which you bestowed upon them; but the treasures of heaven are well known to be inexhaustible. Who can say but your new star, which exceeds Saturn in its distance from the sun, may exceed him as much in magnificence of attendance? Who can say what new rings, new satellites, or what other nameless and numberless phenomena remain behind, waiting to reward future industry?’
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The award set the seal on Herschel’s reputation, and reignited the general fascination with astronomy. The discovery of the seventh planet began a revolution in the popular conception of cosmology. It was widely reported in the gazettes, journals and year books published in London, Paris and Berlin at the end of 1782. Yet although all orreries were instantly out of date, it took some time for Uranus to enter into the popular imagery and iconography of the solar system.
One of the best of the new wave of popular astronomy books was John Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy in Letters to his Pupil, which first appeared in 1786 (and went on to new expanded editions in 1788, 1811 and 1822). Bonnycastle gave the discovery of Uranus its own chapter: ‘Of all the discoveries in this science, none will be thought more singular than that which has lately been made by Dr Herschell…This is a Primary Planet belonging to the solar system, which till 13th of March 1781, when it was first seen by Dr Herschell, had escaped the observation of every other astronomer, both ancient and modern…’ Yet he still treated it as a puzzling novelty, its significance yet to be developed. ‘This discovery, which at first appears more curious than useful, may yet be of great service to astronomy…and may produce many new discoveries in the celestial regions, by which our knowledge of the heavenly bodies, and of the immutable laws that govern the universe, will become much more extended: which is the great object of the science…‘
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Bonnycastle’s book was a thoroughly Romantic production, which included a good deal of ‘illustrative’ cosmological poetry from Milton, Dryden and Young. It also sported an engraved frontispiece by Henry Fuseli. This showed the goddess of astronomy, Urania, in a diaphanous observation-dress, pointing seductively to her new star while instructing a youthful male pupil. The publisher was Joseph Johnson of St Paul’s Churchyard, also the publisher of William Blake, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft; and later of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Bonnycastle was a great friend of the philosopher Godwin, and besides including poetry to illustrate his astronomical explanations, he considered the imaginative impact of the new astronomy. The ‘Babylonian’ writers of Egypt had increased the Biblical estimate of the earth’s age from 6,000 to 400,000 years, but Bonnycastle pointed out that ‘the best modern astronomers’ had increased this to ‘not less than 2 million years’. He thought that viewing the stars through a telescope both liberated the imagination and produced a certain kind of wonder, mixed with disabling awe or terror: ‘Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost. Surrounded by infinite space, and swallowed up in an immensity of being, man seems but as a drop of water in the ocean, mixed and confounded with the general mass. But from this situation, perplexing as it is, he endeavours to extricate himself; and by looking abroad into Nature, employs the powers she has bestowed upon him in investigating her works.’
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Uranus slowly became a symbol of the new, pioneering discoveries of Romantic science. An unfathomably larger universe was steadily opening up, and this gradually transformed popular notions of the size and mystery of the world ‘beyond the heavens’. Indeed, the very terms ‘world’, ‘heaven’ and ‘universe’ began to change their meanings. It was the psychological breakthrough that Kant had predicted in his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens back in 1755: ‘We may cherish the hope that new planets will perhaps yet be discovered beyond Saturn.’
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Erasmus Darwin would eventually celebrate Herschel’s new astronomy in his poem The Botanic Garden (1791), notably in the spectacular opening section of Canto 1. The discovery of Uranus inspired Darwin to evoke many other possible ‘solar systems’, each with its own sun and planetary family, spontaneously exploding into being after an initial ‘big bang’. Here Darwin was using Newton’s celestial mechanics (based on Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion), but dramatising the new notion of an endless sequential creation as implied by Herschel. The creative cosmic force is ‘Love’ (as in the classical cosmology of Lucretius), while the Biblical God now seems content simply to initiate what is, in effect, a vast cosmological experiment, and then sit back as a passive observer.
When Love Divine, with brooding wings unfurl’d,
Call’d from the rude abyss the living World,
‘Let there be Light!’, proclaimed the Almighty Lord,
Astonish’d Chaos heard the potent word;
Through all his realms the kindling ether runs
And the mass starts into a million Suns.
Earths round each Sun with quick explosions burst,
And second Planets issue from the first;
Bend as they journey with projectile force,
In bright ellipses their reluctant course;
Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll,
And form, self-balanced, one revolving whole.
-Onward they move, amid their bright abode,
Space without bound, the bosom of their God!
To this shimmering and kinetic passage, which seems to anticipate in language the music of Haydn’s Creation (1796-98), Darwin added a long, admiring Note on ‘Mr Herschel’s sublime and curious account of the construction of the heavens’.
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Astronomers from all over Europe (especially France, Germany and Sweden) began to write to Herschel in Bath, asking for details about his metal specula, his high-magnification eyepieces and his observational techniques. In England there continued to be much scepticism about both his abilities and his telescopes. His replies tended to be formal, but occasionally he relaxed a little with astronomers whom he trusted, and whose skills he admired. He light-heartedly described the pains he took to set up, tune and even ‘humour’ his telescopes. He gave them a life of their own, and implied that he treated them like so many concert prima donnas (perhaps remembering La Farinelli, who had saved him at the Pump Room). To Alexander Aubert in London he wrote one of his most whimsical accounts on 9 January 1782, when enclosing his new catalogue of double stars. ‘These instruments have played me so many tricks that I have at last found them out in many of their humours, and have made them confess to me what they would have concealed, if I had not with such perseverance and patience, courted them. I have tortured them with powers, flattered them with attendance to find out the critical moments when they would act, tried them with Specula of a short and long focus, a large aperture and a narrow one. It would be hard if they had not proved kind to me at last!’
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It is striking how frequently he now compared the art of astronomical observation to learning and playing a musical instrument. To Aubert he wrote of the need to adjust each telescope individually and ‘to screw an instrument up to its utmost pitch. (As you are an Harmonist you will pardon the musical phrase.)’
Yet for some months Herschel had to continue to defend his telescopes against sceptics in the Royal Society. To the accusation that his discovery was by chance, they now added the implication that the huge powers of magnification he claimed were illusory. Particular scepticism was directed at his lens of 6,000 power, since it was calculated that a star so highly magnified would move through the viewing field of his telescope in ‘less than a second’, owing to the earth’s rotation. Therefore it would be quite impossible to observe. Herschel replied crisply that it took all of three seconds, and he could follow such a star very well.
(#litres_trial_promo) But to William Watson he complained that his critics evidently intended to send him ‘to Bedlam’, and wrote defensively on 7 January 1782: ‘I do not suppose there are many persons who could even find a star with my [magnifying] power of 6,450; much less keep it if they had found it. Seeing is in some respects an art, which must be learnt. To make a person see with such a power is nearly the same as if I were asked to make him play one of Handel’s fugues upon the organ. Many a night have I been practising to see, and it would be strange if one did not acquire a certain dexterity by such constant practice.’
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Watson quietly kept Banks informed of the controversy, while Banks gently temporised, suggesting that perhaps the magnifications were slightly miscalculated, but supporting Herschel against his detractors. He sent smiling presidential greetings: ‘My best Compliments to Mr Herschell, with best wishes for the Sake of Science that his nights may be as Sleepless as he can wish them himself.’
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Alexander Aubert now firmly took Herschel’s side. Thanking him for the catalogue of double stars, he remarked appreciatively on all the trouble Herschel had taken: ‘but trouble is nothing to you, and the least thing we can do in return is to…convince the world that though your discoveries are wonderful, they are not imaginary…Your great power of 6450 continues to astonish, your micrometer also…Go on, my dear Sir, with courage, mind not a few barking, jealous puppies; a little time will clear up the matter and if it lays in my power you shall not be sent to Bedlam alone, for I am much inclined to be one of the party.’
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Herschel’s next destination, as it turned out, was not Bedlam but Windsor. King George III, advised by the Astronomer Royal and the President of the Royal Society, had chosen to ignore these controversies. He summoned Herschel to court to congratulate him, but asked Banks and Maskelyne to make an independent trial of the now celebrated sevenfoot telescope at the Greenwich Observatory. On 8 May Herschel left for London, his precious telescope and folding stand perilously packed into a mahogany travel-box (’to be screwed together on the spot where wanted’), accompanied by a hastily assembled trunk of equipment including his large Flamsteed atlas (marked up by Caroline), his new catalogue of double stars (similarly written up by Caroline), ‘micrometers, tables, etc’, and rather makeshift court dress.
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At Greenwich, Maskelyne was stunned by the superior quality and light-gathering power of Herschel’s ‘home made’ mirrors. He immediately recognised that they were far more powerful than any of the official observatory telescopes, and probably than any other telescope in Europe. Maskelyne, reputed to be a jealous and illiberal man because of his supposed ill-treatment of the watchmaker John Harrison, behaved with great forthrightness and generosity to Herschel.
On 3 June 1782 Herschel wrote exuberantly to Caroline, casting aside his usual circumspect tone: ‘Dear Lina…The last two nights I have been star-gazing at Greenwich with Dr Maskelyne & Mr Aubert. We have compared our telescopes together and mine was found very superior to any at the Royal Observatory. Double stars they could not see with their instruments I had the pleasure to show them very plainly, and my [folding stand] mechanism so much approved of that Dr Maskelyne has already ordered a model to be taken from mine; and a stand to be made by it for his reflector. He is however now so much out of love with his instrument [a six-foot Newtonian] that he begins to doubt whether it deserves a new stand.’
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Banks (who had learned much about royal decorum since Tahiti) now knew that it was the perfect moment to introduce Herschel formally to the King at Windsor in May 1782. The meeting between the two Hanoverians (commoner and king, but both firmly speaking English) was a great success. Members of the King’s Hanoverian entourage had already heard of the Herschel brothers as talented musicians, and His Majesty was intrigued by the change in métier.
(#litres_trial_promo) King George, not yet mad, was renowned for his aphoristic remarks to his more talented subjects. To Edward Gibbon, for example, still deep in his six-volume history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he had observed archly: ‘Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Gibbon?’ It was said that the King now murmured to Banks: ‘Herschel should not sacrifice his valuable time to crotchets and quavers.’
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Herschel wrote swiftly to Caroline, with a note of growing excitement that had never previously appeared in his letters. ‘Among Opticians and Astronomers nothing is now talked of but what they call my great discoveries. Alas! This shows how far they are behind, when such trifles as I have seen and done are called great. Let me but get at it again! I will make such telescopes & see such things-that is, I will endeavour to do so.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In a later note, again using her intimate diminutive name, he added: ‘You see Lina I tell you all these things, you know vanity is not my foible therefore I need not fear your Censure.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He would not have feared his sister’s censure a decade before.
Banks was determined to find his new astronomical protégé a salary, and if possible a suitable place. This required some diplomacy, as university professorships were for mathematicians, the post of Astronomer Royal was evidently taken, and the new post of Royal Astronomer at Kew Gardens had recently been promised to another-‘a devil of a pity’. With Banks’s diplomatic nudging, the King agreed that Herschel should give up teaching music in Bath, and move to a house near Windsor, to concentrate entirely on astronomy. To achieve this, His Majesty would be pleased to create a new official post, appointing Herschel as the King’s Personal Astronomer at Windsor on a salary of £200 per annum. (This was not particularly generous, but then the Astronomer Royal received only £300.) At the age of forty-three, Herschel’s second career had burst into life.
After the very briefest consultation, Herschel, Caroline and their brother Alexander moved on 31 July 1782 to a large, sprawling house in the village of Datchet, positioned deep in the countryside between Slough and Windsor, just south of the river Thames. The house had large grass plots suitable for erecting telescopes, and several stables and outbuildings for the furnaces and the grinding and polishing equipment. An old laundry could be converted into an observation building. But the house itself had not been inhabited for several years, and was cold and damp. Caroline set about the huge task of cleaning and repairing.
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Almost immediately Herschel was commanded to bring his famous seven-foot telescope to Windsor, where it was reassembled on the terrace for everyone to view the planets. Herschel was a particular success with the three teenaged royal princesses, Charlotte, Augusta and Elizabeth. On one cloudy evening (it being an English summer) when viewing was impossible, he had the inspired idea of constructing pasteboard models of Jupiter and its four moons, and Saturn and its rings, and hanging them-illuminated by candles-from a distant garden wall on the Windsor estate. These were meticulously prepared beforehand. By ingeniously focusing down the seven-foot, he was able to show these models to the three young girls through the telescope, an early form of outdoor planetarium.
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Many other children of the new generation also grew up understanding the cosmos in a new way. Discovering the stars became a particular and special moment of self-discovery. The poet Coleridge remembered being taken out at night into the fields by his beloved father, the vicar and schoolmaster of Ottery St Mary in Devon, in the winter of 1781 to be shown the night sky. Coleridge was only eight, but he never forgot it. Perhaps the Reverend John Coleridge, a great follower of the monthly magazines (to which he sometimes contributed learned articles on Latin grammar), had recently read of Georgium Sidus. At all events, Coleridge treasured the memory of his father’s eager demonstration of the stars and planets overhead, and the possibility of other worlds: ‘I remember, that at eight years old I walked with him one evening from a farmer’s house, a mile from Ottery-& he told me the names of the stars-and how Jupiter was a thousand times larger than our world-and that the other twinkling stars were Suns that had worlds rolling round them-& when I came home, he showed me how they rolled round. I heard him with profound delight & admiration; but without the least mixture of Wonder or incredulity. For from my early reading of Faery Tales, & Genii etc etc-my mind had been habituated to the Vast.’
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Such a huge, starlit prospect, inhabited by giant planets and remote classical gods, might have puzzled or alarmed a normal eight-year-old. But the striking thing is that Coleridge, who wrote many letters about his childhood and always remembered it acutely, said he felt no surprise or disbelief at all-‘not the least mixture of Wonder or incredulity’-about this revelation of the enormous scale of the universe. He felt himself already tuned to the size and mystery of the new cosmos. His Romantic sensibility-even at the age of eight-already inhabited the infinite and the inexplicable. Cosmological imagery, and especially the symbolic movement of the stars and the moon, entered deeply into his early poetry, and in a sense it came to rule the world of the Ancient Mariner and his ship.
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.
Her beams bemocked the sultry main,
Like April hoar-frost spread,
But where the ship’s huge shadow lay,
The charmed water burnt alway
A still and awful red.
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The prose gloss that Coleridge added to this passage almost twenty years later (1817) takes on a new resonance when compared with what we now know of Herschel’s long nights of lunar observation:
In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as Lords that are certainly expected and yet there is silent joy at their arrival.
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The young John Keats remembered an organised game at his school in Enfield, in which all the boys whirled round the playground in a huge choreographed dance, trying to imitate the entire solar system, including all the known moons (to which Herschel had by then added considerably). Unlike Newton’s perfect brassy clockwork mechanism, this schoolboy universe-complete with straying comets-was a gloriously chaotic ‘human orrery’.
Keats did not recall the exact details, but one may imagine seven senior boy-planets running round the central sun, while themselves being circled by smaller sprinting moons (perhaps girls), and the whole frequently disrupted by rebel comets and meteors flying across their orbits. Keats was later awarded Bonnycastle’s Introduction to Astronomy as a senior school prize in 1811. Reading of Herschel, he enshrined the discovery of Uranus five years later in his great sonnet of 1816, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.
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8
Once they had moved to Datchet, Herschel and his brother Alexander started an exclusive business in the manufacture of high-quality reflector telescopes. The first five of them, all seven-foot reflectors, were ordered by King George as royal gifts, and although never fully paid for by the Crown office (they were priced at a hundred guineas each), they had the invaluable effect of making Herschel the royal telescope-maker, ‘By Appointment’. All telescopes, whatever their size, were individually constructed to order, took three or four weeks to make, and had an individual price, usually quoted in guineas. Herschel would supply them either in kit form or fully assembled in beautiful mahogany cases, with spare mirrors and a selection of eyepieces. Although every one was handcrafted, his immense energy achieved something like mass-production. Over the next decade he made 200 mirrors for the popular seven-foot telescope, 150 for the ten-foot, and eighty for the big twenty-five-foot, although not all of these were sold.
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Prices rose steadily. The renowned seven-foot telescope was usually sold in kit form for thirty guineas, but Herschel gradually raised even the kit price to a hundred guineas, the figure he quoted to the German astronomer Johann Bode in Berlin.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eventually a twenty-foot in kit form sold for 600 guineas. The luxury ten-foot reflector, complete with polished mahogany case, patent adjustable stand, a selection of eyepieces and a spare mirror, cost a princely 1,500 guineas.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed the more expensive models were sold mostly to German princes, and models also went to Lucien Bonaparte (Napoleon’s brother) and the Emperor of Austria.
(#litres_trial_promo) Probably the most expensive commercial telescope that Herschel ever made was commissioned by the King of Spain for £3,500, and delivered to the Madrid Observatory in 1806.
(#litres_trial_promo) Scores of Herschel’s telescopes were eventually sent all over England and Europe, and he personally delivered one on behalf of King George to the state observatory at Göttingen in 1786.
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Gradually more and more visitors began to descend on the observatory at Datchet. Caroline started to keep a neat, double-columned visitors’ book, rather as if she were recording star observations, which in a sense she was. In spring 1784 the dying Dr Johnson sent the young Susannah Thrale (Mrs Thrale’s third daughter) on a visit, advising her to cultivate an acquaintance with Herschel: ‘He can show you in the night sky what no man before has ever seen, by some wonderful improvements he has made in the telescope. What he has to show is indeed a long way off, and perhaps concerns us little, but all truth is valuable and all knowledge pleasing in its first effects, and may subsequently be useful.’
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Caroline wrote vivid accounts of their routine of all-night star observations, or ‘sweeps’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Herschel’s technique of ‘sweeping’ did not-as the term seems to imply-involve moving the telescope laterally, which was always a tricky operation with the bigger reflectors. Instead it was kept on the meridian, and moved slowly up and down, while the constellations turned through the field of observation as the stars moved steadily across the night sky. As this motion is caused by the earth itself rotating on its polar axis, so the telescope is effectively ‘sweeping’ the heavens like some immensely long broom, or the finger of a searchlight. By this method Herschel could progressively cover the entire night sky in a series of small strips, each covering about two degrees of arc.
(#litres_trial_promo) The technique was far more accurate than any other stellar observation that had ever been undertaken before in the history of astronomy. But it was also immensely slow and painstaking. A complete sweep could take several years to complete.
During this time Herschel became so familiar with every part of the sky that he could identify stellar patterns, and any new objects, with amazing speed and precision. Perhaps his musical training helped him here, as much as his painfully self-taught mathematics. As he suggested himself, he could read the night sky like a skilled musician sight-reading a musical score. Or more subtly, the brain that was trained to recognise the highly complex counterpoints and harmonies of Bach or Handel could instinctively recognise analogous stellar patternings.
Herschel became fascinated by both the physics and the psychology of the observation process itself, and later wrote some of his most fascinating papers about it. From 1782 he began to record the many physical tricks his eyes could play, and also began to study the illusions of night observation. On 13 November, while trying to identify a new double star in Orion, he dictated a careful note to Caroline:
Following 10 Orionii. I saw very distinctly double at least a dozen times pass through the whole field of view with both eyes, but was obliged to darken everything. I suspected my right eye to be tired, & know it to see objects darker. Therefore tried the left first, & saw it immediately pass thro’ the field double several times. Saw the same afterwards with the other eye…No star twinkled except Syrius, & those as low. The evening exceptionally fine for telescopes.
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The more he was challenged by professional astronomers, the more Herschel became conscious of his ‘art of seeing’, and how it needed explaining afresh. ‘The eye is one of the most extraordinary Organs,’ he repeatedly told his correspondents. Classical physiology was wrong. Visual images did not simply fall upon the optic nerve, in the same sense that they fell upon a speculum mirror. The eye constantly interpreted what it saw, especially when using the higher powers of magnification. The astronomer had to learn to see, and with practice (as with a musical instrument) he could grow more skilful: ‘I remember a time when I could not see with a power beyond 200, with the same instrument which now gives me 460 so distinct that in fine weather I can wish for nothing more so. When you want to practise seeing (for believe me Sir,-to use a musical phrase-you must not expect to see at sight or a livre ouvert) apply a power something higher than what you can see well with, and go on increasing it after you have used it for some time.’
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Caroline later assembled an index of all Herschel’s remarks on practical observation. Under ‘Trials of Different Eyes and Seeings’ she listed such topics as the distortion effect of ‘looking long at an object etc’, the need to progress from lower to higher powers of magnification, the fact that ‘different eyes judge differently of [the same] colours’, that ‘eyes tire’ without the observer noticing, and that ‘we see things always smaller at first, when difficult to be seen’.
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Under another heading, ‘Airs and Situations’, she listed the particular locations and atmospheric conditions which affected a telescope. These were not always self-evident. The atmosphere itself had ‘prismatic powers’, and distortions could be produced by ‘field breezes’, viewing ‘over the roof of a house’, or standing ‘within 6 or 8 feet of a door’. Surprisingly, because of thermal ripples rising from the ground, ‘evenings tho’ apparently fine, are not always good for viewing’. By contrast, ‘moist air was favourable’, and damp or rain, even certain kinds of fog, were ‘no hindrance to seeing’. It was possible to observe in conditions of severe frost, or even falling snow, provided the mirrors were kept clear of ice.
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Caroline gave the term ‘sweeping’ a certain domestic familiarity, so that in her letters she sometimes implies she is a sort of celestial housekeeper, brushing and dusting the stars to keep them in a good state for her brother, a sort of heavenly Hausfrau. But perhaps she also had deeper feelings about the cosmos she was now discovering. It was no longer a mere hobby to please him. Once they had moved to Datchet, in the summer of 1782 Herschel began to train her more carefully in observation techniques, so she could become a genuine ‘assistant-astronomer’. By way of encouragement he built her a special lightweight sweeper, consisting of ‘a tube with two glasses’ (i.e. a traditional refractor), and instructed her ‘to sweep for comets’.
Initially she found working on her own in the dark rather daunting. ‘I see from my Journal that I began August 22nd 1782, to write down and describe all remarkable appearance I saw in my sweeps, which were horizontal. But it was not till the last two months of the same year that I felt the least encouragement to spend the star-light nights on a grass-plot covered with dew or hoar frost, without a human being near enough to be within call.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Besides, at this early stage Caroline knew ‘too little of the real heavens to be able to point out every object so as to find it again without losing too much time by consulting the Atlas’. As all novice astronomers find, stars move disconcertingly rapidly through a telescopic field of vision, even that of a low-powered telescope, and can easily slip away in the few moments spent consulting a star chart and then readjusting one’s eyes to night vision. (Night vision can take as long as thirty minutes to establish its full sensitivity.)
Clearly things were better for Caroline when Herschel was on hand in the garden, and not away at Windsor doing royal demonstrations. ‘All these troubles were removed when I knew my brother to be at no great distance making observations with his various instruments on double stars, planets etc, and I could have his assistance immediately when I found a nebula, or cluster of stars.’ In this first year Caroline found no comets, and only succeeded in identifying fourteen of the hundred or so known nebulae. She was too often interrupted by Herschel’s imperious shout, when he wanted her to write down some new observation made with the large twenty-foot.
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Such teamwork was essential to the sweeping procedure that the Herschels developed. As William made his observations, he would call out precise descriptions of what he saw (with special attention to double stars, nebulae or comets). He would give magnitudes, colour and approximate distances and angles (using a micrometer) from other known stars within the field of view. Standing below him in the grass, and later sitting at a folding table, Caroline would meticulously note all this data down, using pen and ink and a carefully shrouded candle lantern, and consulting their ‘zone clock’ (a clock using a time scale related to the position of the stars, rather than the sun). Alexander Aubert would later give them a magnificent Shelton clock, with compensated brass pendulum, as a contribution to their work.
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With Herschel, this was not tranquil or contemplative work, as might be supposed. Caroline would ‘run to the clocks, write down a memorandum, fetch and carry instruments, or measure the ground with poles etc etc of which something of the kind every moment would occur’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sometimes she would call back questions, asking for further clarifications. Most importantly she would note the exact time of each observation, using the special zone clock, which would give a precise position as each object rotated through the meridian. By this method, at no point would William have to compromise his night vision by looking at a lit page and taking his own notes.
Herschel described their sweeping methods in a paper published in April 1786, ‘One Thousand New Nebulae’. Crucial to his technique was that he did not have to take his eye away from the lens, but could ‘shout out’ his observations while his assistant wrote them down and ‘loudly repeated’ them back to him. This had ‘the singular advantage’, as he put it, ‘that the descriptions were actually writing and repeating to me while I had the object before my eye, and could at pleasure correct them’. The distinct tone of military command was emphasised by the fact that nowhere in this paper did Herschel mention that his assistant was Caroline.
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Standing under a night sky observing the stars can be one of the most romantic and sublime of all experiences.
(#litres_trial_promo) But the Herschels’ sweeps were fantastically prolonged and demanding. In clear weather, they would often go on for six or seven hours without a break. They began at eleven at night, and often did not go to bed before dawn, in a mixed state of exhaustion and euphoria. Both slept till midday, and the house had to be kept quiet most of the morning, although Caroline often seems to have been up early, drinking coffee and writing up the night’s observations in long, minute columns of figures: a sort of double book-keeping which she often referred to as ‘minding the heavens’.
Observations and note-making required dogged precision and absolute concentration. It could be chill even in summer, and in winter the frost covered the grass around them, and the wind moaned through the trees. (Nevil Maskelyne had a special woollen one-piece observation suit made for him at Greenwich, with padded panels that made him look like a premonition of the Michelin Man.) Herschel took to rubbing his face and hands with raw onions to keep out the cold. When Banks came down to join them he sometimes brought oversize shoes so he could wear half a dozen pairs of stockings inside them. Caroline layered herself in woollen petticoats. Frequently it was so cold that films of ice formed on the telescope mirrors, the ink clotted in the well, and frozen beads blunted the tip of Caroline’s quill.
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It could also be dangerous. Caroline wrote: ‘I could give a pretty long list of accidents of which my Brother as well as myself narrowly escaped of proving fatal for observing with such large machineries, where all around is in darkness [and] is not unattended with danger; especially when personal safety is the last thing with which the mind is occupied at such times.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The winter of 1783 was especially harsh. On one night in November that year, when William was mounted high up on the crossbar of his twenty-foot reflector, the wind almost blew him off, and when he hastily clambered down the rickety structure (’the ladders had not even the braces at the bottom’), the entire wooden frame collapsed around him; workmen had to be called to release him from the wreckage of spars.
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On 31 December 1783, New Year’s Eve, over a foot of snow had fallen, and the sky was overcast. William however postponed celebrations, and insisted on the last sweep of the year. Caroline gives the impression that he was particularly impatient, and perhaps shouting at her more than usual. ‘About 10 o’clock a few stars became visible, and in the greatest hurry all was got ready for observing. My Brother at the front of the Telescope [was] directing me to make some alterations in the lateral motion.’ As she hurried round the base of the telescope, ‘having to run in the dark on ground covered foot deep in melting snow’, she slipped and tripped over a hidden wooden stake. These stakes were used to peg down the telescope frame with guy ropes, and had large iron hooks facing vertically upwards, ‘such as butchers use for hanging their joints on’.
Caroline painfully recounted what followed. ‘I fell on one of these hooks which entered my right leg about six inches above the knee. My brother’s call-make haste!-I could only answer by a pitiful cry-I am hooked!’ She was impaled, like a fish on a barb, and could not move. Herschel was still high up on the observation platform, in complete darkness, and did not immediately realise what had happened. It seems he continued to call down through the dark, ‘Make haste!’, while Caroline continued to gasp back in agony, ‘I am hooked!’
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Finally he grasped the situation, and called for help from the assistant who had been adjusting the telescope frame. ‘He and the workman were instantly with me, but they could not lift me without leaving near 2 oz. of my flesh behind. The workman’s wife was called but was afraid to do anything.’ Caroline was carried back to the house, but astonishingly no doctor was called. She bandaged the wound herself, retired to bed, and proudly recorded that she was back on telescope duties within a fortnight. It seems that the extreme cold had an antiseptic effect on the large, open wound, and prevented fatal gangrene.
No doubt it was characteristic of Caroline to treat this wound lightly, and not make any fuss. Yet there is an uneasy sense throughout her account that William did not treat her with sufficient tenderness or care: ’I was obliged to be my own surgeon by applying acquabaseda and tying a kerchief about it for some days.’ The local Windsor physician, Dr James Lind, only heard about the accident a week later, ‘and brought me ointment and lint and told me how to use it’. The deep wound did not heal easily, but there is still no mention of William’s concern at any point. Eventually Dr Lind was called back to Datchet in early February 1784. ‘At the end of six weeks I began to have some fears about my poor Limb and had Dr Lind’s opinion, who on seeing the wound found it going on well; but said, if a soldier had met with such a hurt he would have been entitled to 6 weeks nursing in a hospital.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It is curious that Dr Lind compared Caroline to someone in military service, and it is hard to overlook a certain note of reproach in his words.
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Caroline surely intended some irony when she added in the Memoir: ‘I had however the comfort to know that my Brother was no loser through this accident for the remainder of the night was cloudy and several nights afterwards afforded only a few short intervals favourable for sweeping, and until 16 January before there was any necessity for exposing myself for a whole night to the severity of the season.’
The wound had largely healed by the summer, but it would later return to give her chronic pain in old age. Her pitiful cry-‘I am hooked!’-is curiously symbolic of her relations with her brilliant, domineering brother at this period, at a time when he was obsessed by his astronomical ideas to the exclusion of all else. Including, it might seem, his sister’s well-being; although we have only her word for this.
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It is hardly surprising that Herschel was a little distracted. In 1784 and 1785 he drew together his most radical ideas about the cosmos, and published two revolutionary papers in the Royal Society’s PhilosophicalTransactions. These completely transformed the commonly held idea of our solar system being surrounded by a stable dome of ‘fixt stars’, with a broad ‘galaxy’ or ‘via lactae’ (meaning a ‘path or stream of milk’) of smaller, largely unknown stars spilt across it, roughly from east to west. This was a celestial architecture or ‘construction’, inspired fundamentally by the idea of a sacred temple, which had existed from the time of the Babylonians and the Greeks, and had not seriously been challenged by Flamsteed or even by Newton.
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‘An Investigation of the Construction of the Heavens’, published in June 1784, quietly set out to change this immemorial picture. It was based on all Herschel’s ceaseless telescope observations, relentlessly pursued with Caroline over two years, with his new twenty-foot reflector telescope. He had identified 466 new nebulae (four times the number recently confirmed by Messier), and for the first time suggested that many, if not all, of these must be huge independent star clusters or galaxies outside our own Milky Way.
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This led him on to propose a separate, three-dimensional shape to the apparent flat ‘milk stream’ of the Milky Way. His proposal was based on his new method of ‘gauging’ the number of stars in any direction as seen from the earth, and then deducing from the different densities observed the likely shape of this galactic star cluster as it would be seen looking ‘inwards’ from another galaxy. This was a daring mixture of observation and speculation. Herschel’s first galactic diagram appeared like a curious oblong box or tilting parallelogram of stars.
(#litres_trial_promo) But his later calculations produced the now-familiar discus shape of the Milky Way, with its characteristic arms spinning out into space, and the slight bulge of stars at its centre.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was never sure where the solar system was located in the galaxy, and at one point observed that its overall shape was relative, depending on the view as seen by ‘the inhabitants of the nebulae of the present catalogue…according as their situation is more or less remote from ours‘.
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In the second paper, called simply ‘On the Construction of the Heavens’ (1785), Herschel began to develop these ideas into a startling new ‘natural history’ of the universe. He opened by arguing that astronomy required a delicate balance of observation and speculation. ‘If we indulge a fanciful imagination and build worlds of our own…these will vanish like Cartesian vortices.’ On the other hand, merely ‘adding observation to observation’, without attempting to draw conclusions and explore ‘conjectural views’, would be equally self-defeating.
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His own conjecture would be radical. The heavenly ‘construction’ was not something architecturally fixed by the Creator, but appeared to be constantly changing and even evolving, more like some enormous living organism. His telescopes seemed to show that all gaseous nebulae were actually ‘resolvable’ into stars. They were not amorphous zones of gas left over from the Creation. They were enormous star clusters scattered far beyond the Milky Way, and were dispersed throughout the universe as far as his telescopes could penetrate. The nebulae themselves were active. Their function seemed to be that of constantly forming new stars out of condensing gas, in a process of continuous creation. They were replacing stars which were lost.
Herschel found a memorable phrase for this astonishing speculation: ‘These clusters may be the Laboratories of the universe, if I may so express myself, wherein the most salutary remedies for the decay of the whole are prepared.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He also pursued the possibility that some nebulae may be ‘island universes’ outside the Milky Way, thereby hugely increasing the sense of the actual size of the cosmos. Among these was the beautiful nebula in Andromeda, ‘faintly red’ at the centre. By 1785 his nebulae count had risen to well over 900. They appeared ‘equally extensive with that which we inhabit [the Milky Way]…yet all separate from each other by a very considerable distance’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He picked out at least ten ‘compound nebulae’ which he considered larger and more developed than the Milky Way, and imagined the star-cluster view of our own galaxies from theirs. ‘The inhabitants of the planets that attend the stars that compose them must likewise perceive the same phenomena. For which reason they may also be called Milky Ways by way of distinction.’
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As Kant had speculated, the cosmos might be infinite, whatever that might mean. Though Herschel’s estimates of cosmological distances were much too small by modern calculation, they were outlandishly, even terrifyingly, vast by contemporary standards. Beyond the visible parts of our own Milky Way, he estimated that a huge surrounding ‘vacancy’ of deep space existed, ‘not less than 6 or 8 thousand times the distance of Sirius’. He admitted that these were ‘very coarse estimates’. The implications seemed clear, though they were cautiously expressed in his paper: ‘This is amply sufficient to make our own nebula a detached one. It is true, that it would not be consistent confidently to affirm that we were an Island Universe unless we had actually found ourselves everywhere bounded by the ocean…A telescope with a much larger aperture than my present one [twelve inches], grasping together a greater quantity of light, and thereby enabling us to see further into space, will be the surest means of completing and establishing the argument.’
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The dramatic implications of these ideas were soon picked up by journalists and popularisers. The following year Bonnycastle assessed the situation in the first edition of his Introduction to Astronomy: ‘Mr Herschel is of opinion that the starry heaven is replete with these nebulae, and that each of them is a distinct and separate system, independent of the rest. The Milky Way he supposes to be that particular nebula in which our sun is placed; and in order to account for the appearance it exhibits, he supposes its figure to be much more extended towards the apparent zone of illumination than in any other direction…These are certainly grand ideas, and whether true or not, do honour to the mind that conceived them.’
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Also contained in Herschel’s revolutionary paper of 1785 were the seeds of a new, long-term project. He was planning the building of a monster forty-foot telescope, with a four-foot mirror. This would be the biggest and most powerful reflector in the world. With this he believed he could resolve once and for all the problem of the nebulae-whether they were other galaxies far beyond the Milky Way, or merely gas clouds within it. He would also have a better chance of establishing the true distance of the stars, through the measurement of stellar parallax. Above all he believed he would be able to understand how the stars were created, and whether the whole universe was changing or evolving according to some definite law or plan. Finally, he believed he might establish if there were observable signs of extraterrestrial life, a discovery which would have enormous impact on philosophical and even theological beliefs.
There was one other small, but revolutionary, departure in his 1785 paper. For the first time William Herschel carefully credited Caroline in print with a small ‘associate nebula’ in Andromeda. It was a previously unknown cluster ‘which my Sister discovered on August 27 1783 with a Newtonian 2 foot sweeper’. It was not in Messier’s annual catalogue La Connaissance des Temps, so this was Caroline Herschel’s first new addition to the universe.
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(#ulink_3981b671-1e2d-5279-b107-facf35ce0ca1) Caroline eventually wrote out two versions of this memoir, the first in summer 1821, when she was seventy, and the second in 1840. She also destroyed two sections of the original record which she did not want read by other family members. A composite version was edited by her great-niece, Mrs John Herschel, and published by Murray in 1769. The manuscript still exists in the private collection of John Herschel-Shorland. The individual Memoirs have been meticulously published by Michael Hoskin, as Caroline Herschel’s Autobiographies (2003). William wrote a ‘Memorandum of my Life’ when he was nearly sixty, but this was a sort of professional CV for fellow scientists, comparatively short and characteristically reserved (Herschel, Scientific Papers 1, p.xiii). For full details see the Bibliography.

(#ulink_a74526c1-73e0-591b-ba09-7248623045ed) Three of William Herschel’s works are currently available on CD. They are his Oboe Concertos in C major and E-flat major, and his Chamber Symphony in F major (Newport Classics, Rhode Island, USA, 1995). They are notable for their light musical touch and fine, sprightly melodic lines, sometimes with a certain melancholy in the slower passages. The rapid, complex orchestration around the solo oboe in the concertos is handled with great confidence, and suggests Herschel’s ability to manage patterns and counterpoint. This was a conceptual skill which he seemed to transfer (visually) to the patterning of stars and constellations. He moved from earthly music to the music of the spheres.

(#ulink_693a2271-767c-5111-8415-227da5c5af29) A typical brass eighteenth-century orrery showed the sequence of six known planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter (with moons) and Saturn (with rings) orbiting around a central sun (sometimes operated by clockwork and illuminated by candles). Flamsteed showed all constellations-such as Herschel’s early favourites Orion, Andromeda and Taurus-against mythological engravings of their signs: the Hunter, the Goddess, the Bull. His Atlas Coelestis catalogued 3,000 stars; the modern Hubble telescope has identified some nineteen million. But the presentation of the night sky as a curved dome of mythological constellations is still quite usual, as for instance in the magnificently restored curved ceiling of Grand Central Station, New York.

(#ulink_951bade2-3e65-5c1f-9b24-2c3a15110879) The use of horse-dung moulds for casting metal mirrors continued well into the twentieth century, with the 101-inch mirror of the Mount Wilson telescope in California, cast in Paris in 1920 and eventually used by Edwin Hubble to confirm Herschel’s theories about the nature and distance of galaxies in 1922. See Gale Christianson, Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (1995). Precision was never easy to obtain: the mirror of the modern orbiting Hubble Space Telescope was found to be two micrometres too flat at the edges, an error which cost $1.5 billion to correct in 1992.

(#ulink_aa1476f5-7b7b-5a0c-b6d1-1802d5853415) In describing the rebel angel’s enormous glowing shield, Milton contrives in Paradise Lost a beautiful reference to Galileo’s refractor telescope and the view he achieved of the moon.
…The broad circumference
Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
At evening from the top of Fiesole.
Or in Val d’Arno, to descry new lands,
Rivers, or mountains in her spotty globe.
(Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 288-. See also Book III, lines 589-, and Book 5, 262-)
Milton here includes Galileo’s confirmation of an imperfect, ‘spotty’ globe, as described in his famous treatise The Starry Messenger (1610). His observations of rugged lunar mountains and irregular craters proved that not all celestial objects were perfect, and so the theologians were wrong about the nature of God’s creation (as well as about the movement of the earth around the sun). More subtly, Milton puts forward the notion of the moon as the earth’s cosmic shield, battered by many warlike blows from meteors. A modern poet might assign that task to Jupiter. As a young man Milton claimed to have met Galileo in 1638, during his tour of Italy, and discussed the new cosmology. ‘There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought’-John Milton, Areopagitica (1644).

(#ulink_2bfda711-e982-5009-b311-a29a823a6b33) The Great Andromeda galaxy, now classified as M.31, is 2.8 billion light years away, part of the laconically named ‘Local Group’ of galaxies, which includes our Milky Way. The Orion nebula, M.42, hangs just below the three stars of Orion’s belt, and is a gaseous star-cluster within our own galaxy, a mere 1.6 thousand light years away, sometimes known as the Sword of Orion. The M. numbers were assigned by Herschel’s contemporary, the Parisian astronomer Charles Messier, in an annual publication known as La Connaissance des Temps. His catalogue for 1780 held sixty-eight deep-sky objects. No astronomer yet had the least idea of the enormous distances involved, so huge that they cannot be given in terms of conventional ‘length’ measurement at all, but either in terms of the distance covered by a moving pulse of light in one year (‘light years’), or else as a purely mathematical expression based on parallax and now given inelegantly as ‘parsecs’. One parsec is 3.6 light years, but this does not seem to help much. One interesting psychological side-effect of this is that the universe became less and less easy to imagine visually. Stephen Hawking has remarked, in A Brief History of Time (1988), that he always found it a positive hindrance to attempt to visualise cosmological values.

(#ulink_0eb618ee-bd0d-52db-ae80-924164ade5a0) As with road directions, a diagram is a much better way to explain parallax than a written sentence. But it is interesting to try. Parallax is basically a trigonometrical calculation applied to the heavens. Stellar parallax is a calculation which is obtained by measuring the angle of a star from the earth, and then measuring it again after six months. The earth’s movement during that interval provides a long base line in space for triangulation. So the difference in the two angles of the same star (the parallax) after six months can be used in theory to calculate its distance. In fact single stars are so far away that they did not provide sufficient parallax to be measured with the techniques available at the time. Herschel thought that double stars might provide a more obvious parallax, by triangulating their movements against each other, as observed over six months from earth. In fact no sufficient parallax was observed until the nineteenth century, when Thomas Henderson measured the distance to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, as 4.5 light years in 1832, and the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel measured the distance to 61 Cygni as 10.3 light years in 1838. As both published their results in 1838, there was a priority dispute. The first galactic distances were established by Edwin Hubble, using the celebrated ‘red-shift’ method in the 1920s. It is intriguing that towards the end of his career Hubble thought that ‘red-shift’ might be less reliable than he had originally supposed, and galactic distances are still an area of dispute, although the ‘age’ of the entire universe is currently agreed at 13.7 billion years. Andromeda, incidentally, is ‘blue-shifted’, and therefore approaching our Milky Way, with which it will eventually collide-or cohabit.

(#ulink_f2645b94-f49f-52fa-aec7-be4d42d1d303) Young, in Night Thoughts, also imagined an infinitely distant planet with extraterrestrial inhabitants, as if it were some remote Pacific island, not unlike Tahiti perhaps:
Canst thou not figure it, an Isle, almost
Too small for notice in the Vast of being;
Severed by mighty Seas of unbuilt Space
From other Realms; from ample Continents
Of higher Life, where nobler Natives dwell.
(Edward Young, Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, 1742-45, ‘Night IX, and Last’)

(#ulink_348aae74-5af3-50ee-bbb8-468e5b747bee) This question bears on the whole nature of science history and biography. Michael Hoskin has suggested in his essay ‘On Writing the History of Modern Astronomy’ (1980) that most histories of science continue to be ‘uninterrupted chronicles’, which run along ‘handing out medals to those who “got it right”’. They ignore the history of error, so central to the scientific process, and fail to illuminate science as a ‘creative human activity’ which involves the whole personality and has a broad social context-Journal for the History of Astronomy 11 (1980). To this one might add that Romanticism introduced three important themes into science biography. First, the ‘Newton syndrome’, the notion of ‘scientific genius’, in which science is largely advanced by a small number of preternaturally gifted (and usually isolated) individuals. Second, the existence of the ‘Eureka moment’, in which great discoveries are made without warning (or much preparation) in a sudden, blazing instant of revelation and synthesis. Third, the ‘Frankenstein nightmare’, in which all scientific progress is really a disguised form of destruction. See Thomas Söderqvist (ed.), The Poetics of Scientific Biography (2007).

(#ulink_1d27dac3-8f1e-5909-a9f6-6b45b49a7794) The naming of the new planet was much disputed, and was not generally agreed until the mid-nineteenth century. Johann Bode, the editor of the authoritative Berlin Astronomical Yearbook, which quickly popularised the name ‘Uranus’, urged that a single name from classical mythology, with no national overtones, was required. With impeccable Prussian logic he pointed out that in Greek mythology Saturn (Kronos) was the father of Jupiter (Zeus), and Uranus (the Greek sky god) was the father of Saturn. It is so recorded in his great Uranographia (1801), which became the most influential celestial atlas of the early nineteenth century, replacing Flamsteed’s and cataloguing some 15,000 naked-eye stars.

(#ulink_6962281e-bd6a-5460-88e7-b5002b11198c) It was also the first planet that was not easily visible and distinctive to the naked human eye (by colour, shape or position), and indeed it is quite frustrating to attempt to find with modern binoculars. Its presence was therefore curiously remote and mysterious, emphasising the largeness and strangeness of the new solar system (now doubled in size), but also breaking up the old, affectionate feeling for a much-loved planetary family. It is arguable that Uranus has still not fully entered into the popular mythology of the solar system, a difficulty not helped by the awkward pronunciation of its name in English, which worked better when given to the metal uranium in 1789. Herschel’s son John tried to remedy this by giving Uranus’s-try saying that!-two moons the feathery Shakespearean names of Titania and Oberon, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

(#ulink_4565f87e-85a3-539f-ab97-4f7a8e0eca31)The Botanic Garden was the best-selling long poem in English throughout the 1790s, after which its popularity suddenly declined, probably because its science was thought to be too materialist and ‘French’. It was the first poem which presented itself in terms of a moving, ‘photographic’ image of the world: ‘Gentle Reader…Here a Camera Obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shade dancing on a white canvas, and magnified into apparent life!-if thou art perfectly at leisure for such trivial amusement, walk in and view the WONDERS of my ENCHANTED GARDEN.’ Darwin’s ‘antique’ prose style in this Prologue was an ironic foil to the dense, plain, highly informative manner of his scientific footnotes. Together these notes added up to a remarkable survey of the current state of the physical sciences in 1790.

(#ulink_86a30dbe-83c5-57af-84a7-91b2a9531b2a) Moon and star imagery recurs in Coleridge’s poetry throughout his life. One of his earliest known poems, ‘To the Autumnal Moon’, was a sonnet written at the age of sixteen from the lead rooftop of his London school. Many of his great West Country poems, such as ‘Frost at Midnight’ (1798), may be said to be suffused with moonlight. Greta Hall, where Coleridge lived at Keswick, was an old observatory, and from its leads he frequently recorded the state of moon, stars and the night sky, as well as his own little boy Hartley’s comments on them. His famous poem ‘Dejection’ (1802) begins with the image of the ‘winter-bright’ new moon, with ‘the old Moon in her lap’, presaging a storm. When later living alone at Malta, he used a naval telescope to observe the moon and stars, and wrote many notebook entries about his inexplicable instinct to worship the moon (1805). Even such a late poem as ‘Limbo’, probably written at Highgate, dramatises himself as an old man gazing up at the moon in a garden. He is blind-‘a statue hath such eyes’-yet mysteriously he can still sense the moonlight pouring down on him like a benediction:

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