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much of what he required for his further researches. The rest came to him from the eager outside world. Reports of the prodigious appetite of a cuckoo raised by hand, and of the tonal qualities of Tahitian wind instruments; descriptions of battles between spiders and flies; introductions to promising students of botany and natural history; queries about prospective African expeditions, proper methods of raising ships from riverbeds, the correct authorship of “ God Save the King ”; reports of unicorn sightings, of the later years of the famous German Wild Boy and his fondness for gingerbread; descriptions of destruction done to wall fruit by insects, the superiority of olives to other oil-producing trees; gifts of newly published treatises, specimens of seed, of insects, of fighting flies and remains of the spiders they had conquered—all streamed into 32 Soho Square. The kangaroos, opossums and plants that would so inconvenience the Gorgon in 1792 were all destined for Joseph Banks.
His correspondence, most of it now lost, is estimated to have comprised anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 letters. His correspondents included great names such as William Pitt the Younger, Lord Nelson, Benjamin Franklin and distinguished scholars of many nations. But there were also captains who offered interesting specimens from their travels, farmers and a letter forwarded from a schoolmaster giving testimony that he had seen a mermaid.
Anywhere in the world, everywhere in the British Isles, people noted curious phenomena, came up with curious questions, observations or theories and thought, “I’ll write to Joseph Banks.” When Samuel Taylor Coleridge wanted “hashish,” he contacted Banks. Without straying far from London and his well-managed Lincolnshire estates, Banks knew everyone, and everything. Studiously apolitical, he was respected and trusted by most parties. Few British expeditions of discovery of any kind, whether to Africa or Iceland, were mounted without consultation with Sir Joseph Banks. In Banks’s correspondence is mirrored the British eighteenth century, with all its energetic, questing optimism, its dazzling sophistication and its occasional startling innocence; an age in which geographical and scientific discoveries surpassed anything previously dreamt of, and yet an age in which it was still, just barely, possible to believe in mermaids and unicorns.
Amid this flood of gloriously mixed correspondence came an insistent trickle from those with interest in the plantations of the West Indies, with the suggestion that the importation of exotic fruit-bearing trees would be useful to the islands. As early as 1772, Valentine Morris, a planter who would later be governor of St. Vincent, had approached Banks regarding the “possibility of procuring the bread tree, either in seed or plant so as to introduce that most valuable tree into our American Islands.”
The virtues of the Artocarpus incisa —the handsome, broad-leafed tropical tree that bore fruit the size of a man’s head—had been related by early explorers, who gave accounts of the fruit’s tastiness and uncanny similarity to bread. Lord Anson’s account of his circumnavigation of the world, published in 1748, told how on the Pacific island of Tinian, where his scurvy-stricken crew had fortuitously washed up, the breadfruit had been “constantly eaten by us instead of bread: and so universally preferred that no ship’s bread was expended in that whole interval.”
Such reports by Anson, Cook and others were taken very seriously by the West India Committee, which was composed of merchants and property owners with island interests. At a meeting in February 1775, a letter was read to the chairman “relative to the introduction into England of the Bread-fruit tree and Mangostan from the East Indies, in order for their being sent over and propagated in the West Indies.” A month later, a resolution was passed offering a hundred pounds
His correspondence, most of it now lost, is estimated to have comprised anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 letters. His correspondents included great names such as William Pitt the Younger, Lord Nelson, Benjamin Franklin and distinguished scholars of many nations. But there were also captains who offered interesting specimens from their travels, farmers and a letter forwarded from a schoolmaster giving testimony that he had seen a mermaid.
Anywhere in the world, everywhere in the British Isles, people noted curious phenomena, came up with curious questions, observations or theories and thought, “I’ll write to Joseph Banks.” When Samuel Taylor Coleridge wanted “hashish,” he contacted Banks. Without straying far from London and his well-managed Lincolnshire estates, Banks knew everyone, and everything. Studiously apolitical, he was respected and trusted by most parties. Few British expeditions of discovery of any kind, whether to Africa or Iceland, were mounted without consultation with Sir Joseph Banks. In Banks’s correspondence is mirrored the British eighteenth century, with all its energetic, questing optimism, its dazzling sophistication and its occasional startling innocence; an age in which geographical and scientific discoveries surpassed anything previously dreamt of, and yet an age in which it was still, just barely, possible to believe in mermaids and unicorns.
Amid this flood of gloriously mixed correspondence came an insistent trickle from those with interest in the plantations of the West Indies, with the suggestion that the importation of exotic fruit-bearing trees would be useful to the islands. As early as 1772, Valentine Morris, a planter who would later be governor of St. Vincent, had approached Banks regarding the “possibility of procuring the bread tree, either in seed or plant so as to introduce that most valuable tree into our American Islands.”
The virtues of the Artocarpus incisa —the handsome, broad-leafed tropical tree that bore fruit the size of a man’s head—had been related by early explorers, who gave accounts of the fruit’s tastiness and uncanny similarity to bread. Lord Anson’s account of his circumnavigation of the world, published in 1748, told how on the Pacific island of Tinian, where his scurvy-stricken crew had fortuitously washed up, the breadfruit had been “constantly eaten by us instead of bread: and so universally preferred that no ship’s bread was expended in that whole interval.”
Such reports by Anson, Cook and others were taken very seriously by the West India Committee, which was composed of merchants and property owners with island interests. At a meeting in February 1775, a letter was read to the chairman “relative to the introduction into England of the Bread-fruit tree and Mangostan from the East Indies, in order for their being sent over and propagated in the West Indies.” A month later, a resolution was passed offering a hundred pounds
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