The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768–1771 [Volume One]

[Textual Introduction]

page 127

The editor of Banks's Endeavour journal is confronted with few textual problems. The history of the original manuscript,¹ however, and of the MS copies — of which there are five — is interesting. It has also been much misunderstood. It is bound up with the history of Banks's will, or rather of the testamentary dispositions which he made thereby, not very many months before he died. He died childless, 20 June 1820. His will, dated 7 January 1820, was necessarily long and complicated.² The bulk of his property, real estate, was left to his wife for life, and thereafter to three principal legatees, who were also executors; of these the most important in our history was Sir Edward Knatchbull (1781–1849), the nephew of Lady Banks, whose sister Mary had married Sir Edward Knatchbull, Bart., of Mersham Hatch, Kent. It is not the main will that is important to us, however, but the codicils, of which there were two. The first of these, dated 21 January 1820, made provision for Robert Brown (1773–1858), the great botanist and the last of Banks's librarians, and for other persons, and secured certain financial arrangements. Brown, ‘my indefatigable and intelligent librarian’, was left an annuity of £200. The codicil went on,

I also give to the said Robert Brown the use and enjoyment during his life of my library herbarium manuscripts drawings copperplates engraved and every thing else that is contained in my collections usually kept in the back buildings of my house in … Soho Square … and after his decease then I give and bequeath the same to the Trustees for the time being of the British Museum;

¹ In the brief history of the Banks papers that follows, I owe a good deal to a typescript memorandum on the ‘History of the Papers of Sir Joseph Banks’ prepared by Miss Phyllis Mander Jones, when Mitchell Librarian; to an interesting paper by Mr Warren R. Dawson, on ‘Sir Joseph Hooker and Dawson Turner’, in the Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, II, pt. 6 (1950), pp. 218–22; and to an interchange of information and opinions with Mr Dawson, most valuable to me. The preface to Sir Joseph Hooker's edition of Banks's journal is not very useful, except as a stimulant to contradiction and further research; as Mr Dawson has shown, Hooker's own statements are exceedingly unreliable. I have made new investigations, and the interpretations and conclusions finally adopted are my own. For permission to use and quote from correspondence in the records of the Department of Manuscripts of the British Museum I am deeply indebted to the Department; and for help in exploring those records, to Mr T.J. Brown.

² P.C.C. 510 Kent.

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but if the Trustees wished and Brown consented these collections might be removed to the Museum during Brown's life-time, satisfactory access to them being allowed for him and his friends. Certain agreeable duties were laid down for Brown in return, entailing the continuance of his life of scientific scholarship. The Soho Square house itself was left to Lady Banks for life or as long as she required it, with provision for Brown's residence, and thereafter to Brown under the same conditions of duty fulfilled. Lady Banks preferred to reside in Portland Place, where she died in 1828. Brown, therefore, a bachelor, had the whole of No. 32, Soho Square to himself: a problem which he solved by letting the front portion to the Linnean Society in 1821, keeping the ‘back buildings’, fronting on Dean Street, for his own residence and working purposes.

In 1827 Brown became the first keeper of the Botanical Department of the British Museum, officially entitled Keeper of the Banksian Botanical Collections. This was possible because he and the Trustees had agreed on the application of the alternative clause of the codicil to Banks's will, whereby the library, the herbarium, the drawings, the copperplates, and certain manuscripts — those manuscripts actually in the library — went to the Museum during Brown's life-time. This was admirable. Did it ensure the safety of the Endeavour journal? No; because the Endeavour journal, like the bulk of the MSS in Banks's possession when he died, was not actually in the library, and did not come directly under the provisions of that part of the will at all. It would have been a great deal better if they had done so; but Banks, with the best intentions in the world, had taken a false step. His papers were multifarious, and he had concluded that further provision was necessary for them; but he had made a ruinously bad choice of a person to execute his wishes. Attempts to understand the history of the journal, among other MSS, in the light of the codicil of 21 January, have been baffled because it can be understood only in the light of the second codicil, of 7 March 1820. This second, and vital, codicil began by bequeathing the botanical drawings of Banks's draughtsman Francis Bauer to the king, in the hope that Bauer would be taken on to the staff at Kew as the first holder of a permanent position there, failing which his annuity under Codicil I was to be maintained. That clause is typical Banks, though for our purposes it is irrelevant. The relevant portion is as follows:

And it is my will and desire that my dear relative Sir Edward Knatchbull Baronet be requested to look over all my boxes of papers and other page 129 things deposited in my room and the passage room next to it in my house in Soho Square and that he do burn all papers in my hand writing except such as have reference to any part of my estate or to the County of Lincoln and that he do deliver all such other written or printed papers as shall be found in any of them to the persons to whom he thinks they will be most acceptable the papers respecting the Royal Society and the affairs thereof to the Royal Society those respecting the Mint or Coinage to the Mint and that all papers and letters relative to the County of Lincoln be sent to Revesby Abbey and be deposited in the evidence room there my foreign correspondence bound and unbound to be sent to the British Museum and all the other things in the said rooms to be disposed of as the said Sir Edward Knatchbull shall think best.

Now Codicil I had made over to Robert Brown everything in the ‘collections usually kept in the back buildings’ of the house. Banks's ‘room and the passage room next to it’ were, it seems certain, part of these ‘back buildings’, much more closely allied to the library and the herbarium than to the rooms on the Soho Square side where he had his famous philosophical breakfasts and evening parties. The two codicils therefore cut across each other, and one can imagine a pretty set of legal arguments if there had ever been a lawsuit; unless, as in the case of legislation, the particular — i.e. Codicil II — took precedence of the general — i.e. Codicil I. One would have thought, indeed, that a good executor, faced with the will as a whole, would have considered its general as well as particular provisions, and that having duly burnt and distributed according to the desire of Codicil II he might in due course have made over the residuum of the ‘boxes of papers and other things’ as part of the ‘collections’, if not to Brown — who could hardly have cared about them — then to the British Museum; for the Museum was an institution with which Banks, an able and highly regarded Trustee,¹ had been long and intimately associated, and as we have seen, he had already designated it as his ultimate legatee.

Sir Edward Knatchbull, so far as this second codicil was concerned, was not a good executor. He was a ruinously bad choice because he was negligent; and not negligent in any ordinary degree, but to the point of complete irresponsibility. What he burnt we do not know; perhaps we should be thankful that he did not burn much. Perhaps he burnt nothing; for large items, as well as very many inconsiderable scraps in Banks's handwriting, have by devious routes come down to us, and now lie in widely disparate repositories.

¹ His portrait by Lawrence still hangs in the Trustees’ Room, the only portrait of a Trustee which does.

page 130 He delivered to the Royal Society practically nothing, to the Mint nothing at all. He did, in 1828, hand over to the Museum the bound, but not the unbound foreign correspondence — a burst of activity it is hard to account for, unless his memory was somehow jogged by the arrangement between Brown and the Trustees in 1827, or possibly by Lady Banks's death in 1828. But the total effect was that the person to whom he thought (if he thought at all) the great bulk of the papers would be most acceptable was Sir Edward Knatchbull. If he thought at all: for though the boxes certainly went to his house, he may hardly even have looked at them. We have to make the assumption that though the provisions of the will and its codicils were public property (for their gist had appeared in the newspapers)¹ no public body concerned thought fit to make any claim, and that there was general content that the ownership of all those boxes of papers should rest with Knatchbull.

Where then was the Endeavour journal ? Let us repeat: if it had been in the library it must surely have come to the British Museum with the library in 1827. The library came under Codicil I. But, it has already been said, the Endeavour journal did not come under that codicil: the hypothesis, that is, is irresistible that it was in one of the boxes in Banks's room or ‘the passage room next to it’. As it was in Banks's handwriting, should it then have been burnt? Apparently so — absurd as the conclusion may seem; but like so much else, it survived. We know it was in Knatchbull's possession, together with a copy of it made by Sarah Sophia Banks, which is still in the possession of Knatchbull's family; because when it first comes into our view, after its use by Dr John Hawkesworth in 1771 and 1772, it is in connection with the biography of Banks that a number of his admirers were anxious to have written.

It had been hoped that Robert Brown would write Banks's life. Brown, however, was a scientific man, without the slightest interest in the writing of biographies; nor, even had he been interested, would he have been particularly fitted for the task. In 1830 Brown himself proposed to Dawson Turner, the Yarmouth banker, botanist, and collector of books and MSS, that Turner should carry it out. An able man, a practised writer, Turner had a mind that ranged widely; he already had, as a collector, transcripts of Banks's minor journals; Knatchbull agreed to make all the papers in his possession available; and in 1832 Turner consented. A great heap of correspondence, mainly letters of all kinds to Banks, was at once sent to him;

¹ e.g., in the unnamed newspaper a cutting from which is included in B.M. Add. MS 6673 (Derbyshire Collections), p. 106a.

page 131 he set to work sorting and arranging them, and set his daughters and clerks to work making copies. As sorting and arrangement was necessary, the papers must have included other material besides the letters carefully classified and numbered by Banks himself or under his direction — unless the Turner arrangement was — as it seems it may have been — exclusively chronological; or unless Knatchbull did indeed ‘look over’ the contents of the boxes, and bring confusion into them. Turner needed the journal; he got it from Knatchbull in the latter part of 1834 and had that copied also. In 1839 he informed Brown that he intended to spend a month in London to obtain the materials he still needed to complete the task. But the life of Banks was not to be written thus, and after having the papers in his hands for twelve years, spending £200 and a good deal of his leisure on them, Turner gave in; in 1844 or 1845 he returned everything to Knatchbull, originals together with twenty-three indexed and bound volumes of copies, starting with the journal. Knatchbull died in 1849, in which year the eldest son of his second marriage, still another Edward (1829–93), assumed the additional surname of Hugessen.

Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen's main distinction, except for one thing, was that Jane Austen was his great-aunt. The exception was his dealings with the Banks papers. From 1857 to 1880 he was a politician, holding minor office under both Palmerston and Gladstone; in 1880, however, he was given a peerage instead of another undersecretaryship, and changed his political views. As Lord Brabourne, a man of letters, he pursued a new career, writing a series of fairy-stories for children that had some success. Like his father, he did not, it appears, have much sense of responsibility towards historical records, although it is true that he collected books on county history. In the context of that sentence, one further observation may be made, preliminary to the rest of our story. It has been a habit of those who have mourned over the fate of Banks's collections to bestow blame unequivocally upon Brabourne; and with blame a vast amount of indignation. It is now, however, clear that, whatever disapproval is levelled at Brabourne, the blame and indignation must be more widely spread. He did not play a very happy part; but at least it may be said for him that the part he did play was rendered less unnatural by the antecedent behaviour of Sir Edward Knatchbull. When the crisis came, furthermore, there was no very laudable behaviour elsewhere.

After Knatchbull's death the commonly recognized owner of the papers was Lady Knatchbull, his widow. There were still hopes page 132 of somehow obtaining a biographer, and a series of gentlemen glanced at the material and recoiled. While the search was going on, recourse was again had to the British Museum, and our next definite point is a memorandum dated 25 June 1861 and signed by Joseph Ball, among the records of the Department of Manuscripts: ‘The papers contained in this box and in a smaller case kept herewith were this day received by me from Thomas Bell Esq^r late President of the Linnean Society who had received them from the Dowager Lady Knatchbull. It is her wish that after the papers and correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks leave my hands they should be deposited in the British Museum’.¹ According to William Carruthers, later Keeper of the Botanical Department, they were on Lady Knatchbull's death to become the property of the Trustees. Carruthers is our only authority for this, but the story is at least not improbable. The papers went from Ball to Carruthers in the Botanical Department, for in October 1873 Carruthers was instructed to place them in the Department of Manuscripts; then at the beginning of 1876 he was allowed to take away again the twenty-three volumes of the Dawson Turner transcripts for the use of yet another potential biographer, the young Daydon Jackson.² These, owing to some fortunate lapse in administration, were not returned, and are still in the library of the Botanical Department.

Lady Knatchbull died, in her ninetieth year, at the end of 1882, and it might seem that the safety of the papers would now be assured, in an agreed and permanent resting-place. This was not so, because by 1882 they were not in the Museum at all, but at Lord Brabourne's house in Queen Anne's Gate. How did Brabourne come to have them? It has been freely stated³ that he demanded the papers from the Librarian of the British Museum as his personal property, was met by expostulation, replied with insistence, and carried off everything in a ‘box’ to put it up for auction: that, to put it brutally, he was guilty of a sort of large-scale bare-faced daylight robbery. The truth is more complicated. We are impeded in our search for it by the fact that the Department of Manuscripts did not keep copies of outgoing correspondence. The Keeper's incoming letters were, however, preserved; and from these a part, at least, of the story emerges with some definiteness. They do not

¹ B.M. Dept. of MSS, Miscellaneous Letters and Papers. Joseph Ball, F.R.S. and Thomas Bell, F.R.S. were both looked on as possible biographers.

² Carruthers's statements, some of them highly inaccurate, were made to Sir Joseph Hooker, in a letter of 14 July 1893, printed in Hooker's edition of the Journal, pp. x-xi.

³ e.g., by Carruthers, ibid., p. xi. Carruthers, writing in 1893, puts the incidents ‘Some seven or eight years ago’.

page break

The first page of the Journal

page break page 133 show the Librarian — i.e. the Principal Librarian, E. A. (later Sir Edward) Bond — to have been engaged at all, though discussions by word of mouth may have been carried on; nor is there any record at all of the Trustees having been consulted. The Museum official concerned was the Keeper of the Department of Manuscripts, E. (later Sir Edward) Maunde Thompson; and Maunde Thompson, a celebrated palaeographer, was certainly less interested in memorials of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than we in our day are. Nor, it seems, could he have been acquainted with the terms of Banks's will. Sixty years after Banks's death, indeed, nobody seems to have been acquainted with the terms of his will. In May 1880 Edward (later Lord) Stanhope, another possible biographer, wished to search the papers, and Maunde Thompson must have consulted the man he regarded as their owner; for a letter from Knatchbull-Hugessen (he did not complete his peerage formalities till later on in the year) signifies his agreement: ‘I have seen Mr Stanhope to-day and shall be quite willing that the MSS of Sir Joseph Banks shall be entrusted to his custody until he has been able to make such search amongst them as he desires. Probably the result of Mr Stanhope's examination may determine the future destination of these papers, with the exact nature of which I am at present unacquainted’.¹ Stanhope gave a receipt for four parcels of papers on 22 May, which he subsequently endorsed, 2 July 1880, as ‘Transferred to Lord Brabourne, 3 Queen Anne's Gate’. He took another ‘14 Boxes of Miscellaneous Papers’ on 7 July.² These fourteen boxes he also transferred to Brabourne, adding to his note giving this information the postcript, ‘I have ventured to recommend to Lord Brabourne handing over at once to the Museum all the scientific correspondence. Some of the more private correspondence and his journals appear to be rather for his relatives’.³

There for eighteen months the matter rested,⁴ until in February 1884 Brabourne took it up again, as if it were something entirely new. ‘I have here’, he wrote to Maunde Thompson, ‘a quantity of papers and letters inherited from the late Sir Joseph Banks — he and my grandfather having married sisters. Amongst them are Sir Joseph's journal of his voyage to Newfoundland &c and many

¹ Knatchbull-Hugessen to Maunde Thompson, 21 May 1880; Dept. of MSS. Misc. Letters and Papers.

² ibid.

³ Stanhope to Maunde Thompson, 12 July [1880], ibid.

⁴ Though Brabourne had a sale of books, drawings, and MSS relating to Lincolnshire at Sotheby's as early as 15 June 1880.

page 134 letters from scientific people and other papers of interest. I had an idea of putting these up to auction but after a conversation with Mr Stanhope who has looked through them all, I have come to the conclusion that it would be right in the first instance to offer them to the British Museum, which has already many papers and other things from Sir Joseph Banks’. He invited the Keeper therefore to come and inspect the papers, and judge the advisability of purchasing them.¹ Stanhope's recommendation of 1880 had not, evidently, met with favour. The next letter, in March, argues that Maunde Thompson had seen Brabourne, and got the papers back to the Museum for examination. Brabourne regrets he cannot himself examine them (he had been ordered abroad to convalesce from bronchitis). ‘This, however, is of the less consequence, as I have not the remotest notion of the value of such things — whether they are worth £100 or £1000 or £2000. All I know is that there are some of them which would fetch money at Sotheby's or elsewhere as Mss of Sir J. Banks, and some which might be acceptable perhaps to certain colonies or to India. There are I think several volumes of the Journal….’ Perhaps indeed Brabourne's friend Mr A. H. Todd of the Temple could go through the papers with the Keeper, and either settle the matter or ‘put it in a train of speedy settlement’.² Mr Todd duly called at the Museum, and now a fresh possibility was raised. Mr Bentley the publisher was considering the desirability of publishing some of the journals, and that would affect the price to be paid.³ Mr Todd then gave his opinion. Acknowledging a letter from the Keeper, he put the value of the papers at ‘between £250 and £300, to be reduced or increased by the permission or the refusal of the purchaser to allow publication of the journals and narratives. There is a certain amount of interesting matter that might be turned to advantage in the latter documents, among the letters there are a great number of interest and value’.⁴ This was not to show an excess of enthusiasm, but indeed no great enthusiasm was being shown anywhere. At least one can say for Lord Brabourne that he knew what he wanted. He wanted £250. So far as the concrete evidence takes us, there is nothing to show that either he or Maunde Thompson was aware that they were negotiating for the purchase by the Museum of what was — it can be reasonably argued — already the Museum's property.

¹ Brabourne to Maunde Thompson, 22 February 1884, ibid.

² Brabourne to Maunde Thompson, 10 March 1884; Papers Relating to the Purchase and Acquisition of Manuscripts.

³ Brabourne to Maunde Thompson, 14 March 1884, ibid.

⁴ Todd to Maunde Thompson, 24 March 1884, ibid.

page 135 The Keeper seems to have made an offer. Our last letter is again from Todd. ‘I have heard from Lord Brabourne’, he writes on 18 April. ‘He desires me to say that as Sir Joseph, Lady and Miss Banks gave papers coins medals and curiosities of very great value and interest to the British Museum, and as the papers you have now under consideration will complete that collection, he does not consider that £250 is a large sum for him to ask as the price of such of the papers as you may require. He is anxious however not to enter into any correspondence or to bargain about the matter, and therefore if the British Museum authorities decline to give that sum, he will be much obliged to you if you could return all the books and documents to Queen Anne's Gate in order that they may be sold by auction or dispersed among Local and Colonial Museums or otherwise disposed of, as his Lordship may deem advisable. He desires me further to ask that you will kindly decide as soon as possible as to the course you will take’.¹ Lord Brabourne was a little peremptory, and it did not do to be peremptory with Maunde Thompson. The communication is endorsed, ‘Declined Papers sent back 22 Apr 84’. Thus did the British Museum, for the time being, relinquish interest in one of the greatest of its benefactors and Trustees.

The plundering process now began. It was ‘the colonies’ that were to have first turn. Before the fatal year 1884 was out Sir Saul Samuel, the agent in London for New South Wales, acting on behalf of his Government, bought from Brabourne for £375 a large and miscellaneous collection of papers relating mainly to Australia. They were, wrote Samuel later to Sir Joseph Hooker, bought ‘on the understanding, in writing, that if [Lord Brabourne] discovered any more papers relating to the same subject he would send them to me, for the colony, without further payment’.² The Endeavour journal was not included in the purchase, which did at least put a great number of important papers into responsible ownership (they are now in the Mitchell Library, bound in twenty-two volumes as the ‘Brabourne Papers’). Encouraged, Brabourne proceeded to put up a further section of the papers for auction at Sotheby's on 11 March 1886, and then a very large collection on the following 14 April. Samuel was sent a catalogue of this last sale — ‘amongst which’, he continued in his letter to Hooker, ‘were papers relating to New South Wales, which I considered were

¹ Todd to Maunde Thompson, 18 April 1884; Papers Relating to the Purchase and Acquisition of Manuscripts.

² Samuel to Sir Joseph Hooker, n.d., published by Hooker in the Athenaeum 24 April 1897, pp. 547–8.

page 136 included in my purchase. I thereupon wrote to Lord Brabourne, requesting him to cause the documents to be withdrawn from sale and handed over to me for my Government. Receiving no reply, I subsequently wrote to Messrs Sotheby, Wilkinson and Co. protesting against the sale of the papers, and claiming them as the property of the Government of New South Wales. The papers were withdrawn at the time.’ But they were not handed over. ‘What became of them I never heard, except that when I was in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1888, I visited the Public Library in that city, and saw a number of the papers which I believe had been withdrawn from the sale to which I have referred. I was informed that these papers had been presented to the Auckland Library by Sir George Grey, by whose agent they had been purchased in London’. There is here, however, evidence of poor memory on the part of his informant, or of misinformation: the Auckland or Grey MSS had not been bought by Grey's agent in London, nor had they been withdrawn from the sale; they were bought there with other papers (perhaps by the dealer John Waller, who bought largely), sold to J. D. Enys of Canterbury,¹ and sold by him to Grey, apparently in 1888. They were bought at the sale at a very low price; for the weakness in Brabourne's plan for continued profit now appeared. People had ceased to be interested in Sir Joseph Banks, his doings, and his friends. The 207 lots put up realized a derisory sum — various attempts at addition were made, £178 5s, £180 5s, £182 19s; twenty-six lots went at 2s each, fourteen at 1s. The Museum acquired a few important ones: for example, the Blagden correspondence and the letters to Sir William Hamilton; but it let go all too much.² A few collectors got bargains. Large bundles were taken by autograph dealers, to be broken up and re-sold where signatures were well-known and fashionable; where they were not, to be destroyed or lie around collecting dust in the back rooms or cellars of shops. Individual letters and bundles of letters, stray memoranda and notes, drifted about the market for years — a few are still drifting — sometimes acquired by pious botanists from dealers for whom they were simply a deadweight, and added to the papers at Kew;

¹ Canterbury province in New Zealand, where Enys was a well-known sheep-farmer. He retired in 1890 to the family seat in Cornwall, whence other Banks papers have lately come. Cf. p. 145 below.

² ‘In 1891 I presented to the British Museum, nine hundred and sixty eight letters, a portion only of a large mass of the Banks Correspondence which I purchased of John Waller the Auto: Dealer for the sum of £10. 10s. !!!’—Spencer G. Perceval to James Britten, 28 May 1899, a letter attached inside a copy of Perceval's printing of Banks's journal of his Bristol journey, in the Botanical Library, B.M. (N.H.). ‘The whole transaction was an outrage on the memory of Banks!’ Perceval remarks in another note to Britten, 30 May 1899, ibid.

page 137 sometimes, as the years went on, sold at prices that would have lifted the heart of the first Lord Brabourne, could he have been the recipient. It was not the whole that was sacrificed in 1886. By 1928, when another large amount came on the market, the returns were much more satisfactory. Thus was one of the greatest collections of records for the history of science and the social life of the intellect ever assembled, a collection fundamental for our knowledge of certain aspects of the eighteenth century, flung away and dissipated all over the earth. What was utterly destroyed in the process it is impossible to say. But the student of Banks and of Banks's time who wishes to master his subject will find the Dawson Turner transcripts at South Kensington only a beginning; his material now lies in private hands and public collections, uncoordinated and largely uncatalogued, in London and a dozen other parts of England, in Sydney, in Adelaide, in Canberra, in Auckland, in Wellington, in New Haven, in San Francisco, in Toronto — we do not know where else. It is a melancholy end to Banks's sixty years of systematic preservation and classification. Certainly it would be a great deal more melancholy if such an enormous mass of material did not in fact exist, wide-spread as it is.¹

Among the few lots at the Brabourne sale which fetched a sum reckoned in pounds and not shillings was Lot 176. This was described as ‘Banks's (Sir Joseph) Journal of a Voyage to the Sandwich Islands and New Zealand from March 1769 to July 1771, in the autograph of Banks’. Waller gave £7 2s 6d for it. The description was a fantastic one, whatever the journal was. The dates do not correspond with those of any MS of Banks we now have, or that ever, so far as we know, existed. The original journal runs from 25 August 1768 to 12 July 1771. A fragmentary ‘journal’ in Banks's handwriting (Grey MSS 51–2: see below p. 146) runs from 7 October 1769 to 10 October 1770, and from 26 October 1770 to 9 July 1771. Carruthers told Hooker that Waller did not specially remember the purchase. If Waller had bought the two bound volumes of the original he could not but remember it: they were a solid fact which would stick in a dealer's memory even if he had sold them next day. Let us assume, however, that part of the Grey MSS, the so-called ‘journal’, was correctly described so far as its beginning date was concerned (for the gap between 10 October and 26 October

¹ I do not go into detail on the dispersal of the Banks papers, apart from the Endeavour journal. The interested person may turn to Mr Warren Dawson's list of sources in his calendar of The Banks Letters, published by the British Museum (Natural History) in 1958. This calendar includes only those letters in collections in Great Britain—something over 7000. Mr Dawson estimates the total as 50,000, or even more.

page 138 1770, the early days at Batavia, is of no significance, as will be seen from the note on the MSS below). Then it would be quite possible that Waller, when going over his heap of purchases, mislaid and destroyed the early pages of a MS that may even have been imperfect before. What he sold a little later, then, would be not quite what he had bought. This, at any rate, we may adopt as a provisional hypothesis, and we may conclude that the original journal did not come up at the sale, but that the Grey MSS did, and were there sold.

What then of the original? We know that Sir Edward Knatchbull had it, that he lent it to Dawson Turner in 1834, that Dawson Turner gave it back, at latest, in 1845. It then sinks from sight till we find it in the early nineties in the hands of [Sir] J. Henniker Heaton, M.P. In a letter from Francis Edwards the bookseller, to Alfred Lee the Australian collector, 4 May 1894,¹ Edwards says, ‘I have just been told in confidence that it is the original, in Banks's handwriting, with information as to its history and former possessors’. Why there should be any necessity for confidence it is hard to guess. Brabourne had died in 1893, but there may have been someone concerned in some anterior transaction who had a sense of shame. We are left to infer that Henniker Heaton bought the journal from Brabourne privately — we do not know when — or from somebody else who had acquired it from Brabourne. The story after this point becomes plain. From Henniker Heaton it passed in 1894 to Alfred Lee, and from Lee, with the rest of his collection (including other invaluable Banks material) in 1906 to David Scott Mitchell. In the Mitchell Library it remains. Inside the front cover of the first volume is an MS note by Sir Edward Knatchbull that it was ‘lent to Mr. Brown, March 26 1833’ (the two final figures are not however very clear). A similar note in the second volume is defective through trimming of the paper. Each volume contains Alfred Lee's bookplate. Apart from such external evidence, there is no doubt about this being the original MS, composed on board the Endeavour. It is in the handwriting of Banks as a young man, and every page bears the idiosyncrasies of his written expression. The deletions and substitutions, the characteristic and consistent misspellings, the experiments with the renderings of Polynesian names, the alteration of present tenses to past, the mis-numbering of pages, the incorporation of separate lists and memoranda, not always as a part of the composition, but bound into the volumes at a convenient place — all these are obvious and overwhelming arguments, if

¹ Mitchell MS 1808.

page 139 argument is necessary, for the authenticity of this journal as Banks's original work. This it is that is here edited and printed.

The journal is contained in two leather-bound quarto volumes, of page-size 9⅛ × 7¼ in. (23.2 × 18 cm.). Apparently Banks made up the pages himself by taking larger sheets, folding them in half, and then folding them again transversely, so producing a set of four leaves. He then sometimes placed other leaves inside these, giving himself sections of from four to sixteen leaves. So at least the volumes as bound seem to imply, with watermarks often occurring on four or more consecutive leaves, or with a succession of leaves lacking any watermark at all. He then gave himself a guide to both inner and outer margins by further folding.¹ Volume I comprises the period 25 August 1768–14 August 1769, pp. 1–332, followed by the description of ‘Manners and Customs of the South Sea Islands’, pp. 333–437, with three blank leaves at the end. Banks occasionally slipped in his numbering: p.33 is repeated; 220 is numbered 120; pp.242–366 were first numbered 142–266 and then corrected, while there is no 391 or 393 at all; and so on. After writing a number of pages — how many it is impossible to say — he added ‘running-heads’, generally of geographical names, which he very rarely mentioned in his text, or some like indication of the ship's position, together with the month and the year. His ‘Manners and Customs’ pages have a general running head. Bound in between the two pp.33 is a one page list of Madeira fish and a list of Madeira plants, pp. 1–13; between pp.62 and 63 is his memorandum on electrical experiments, pp. 1–13; between pp. 131 and 132 a list of Plantae Brasilienses, 11 pp. unnumbered; between pp.176 and 177 a list of plants of Tierra del Fuego, pp. 1–6; and between pp.214 and 215 Dr Nathaniel Hulme's letter on the use of citrus juices. All these are printed in Appendix I of the present work, Vol. II, pp. 276 ff.

Volume II comprises the period 15 August 1769–12 July 1771 The pages are numbered 1–603, which latter figure should be 703, as p. 301 is followed by 202. In the second series of 200's p. 243 is followed immediately by 246 on the verso side of the same leaf; pp. 10, 568, and 574 are blanks. Banks follows the same plan of writing as in his first volume. Whether he thought in terms of volumes is uncertain: the blank leaves at the end of Volume I may perhaps argue that he did, though it is much more likely that they are accounted for by the fact that while he was writing

¹ I owe these details to Miss Phyllis Mander Jones, lately Mitchell Librarian.

page 140 his general account of the South Sea Islands he was also keeping the journal up to date with current happenings. Volume division came later when he had the journal bound, and the matter has no particular importance. For the reader the plan followed has what some may deem the disadvantage of a certain amount of repetition; for the strictly chronological entries on what happened are followed in turn by ‘Some Account of New Zealand’, ‘Some Account of New Holland’, and of Batavia, and the Cape, and of St Helena. In these accounts, as in that of the islands, Banks tends, bringing together all his impressions, to say over again a good deal of what he has said before, though he adds a good deal also. It cannot be denied, however, that the summaries he thus produces are very useful. He certainly made them part of his technique of journal-writing.

The early part of the journal, for something like 150 pages, is written in a big rather untidy hand, as if the journal-keeper is hastening on in breakneck excitement; the writing then becomes smaller, with more lines to the page, perhaps from some prudential motive of ensuring a sufficient supply of paper; then towards the end of Volume II it becomes bigger again, as if a new excitement, that of being turned homewards, had asserted itself. Excitement cannot be the cause of Banks's lack of punctuation, because it was his nature not to punctuate, as is clear not merely from this journal but from his MSS in general. If, now and again, he is visited by a conviction that he ought to punctuate, whether because of a feeling that he is advancing on some grand set piece or for some other reason, he is likely to carry the eighteenth century conventions to so absurd a point that one can hardly get on for the commas. Fortunately these schoolboyish outbursts are very rare, and one can make one's way without deliberate obstruction from the writer. Like many of his contemporaries, in cursive writing he was prone to begin a sentence, or even a paragraph, without a capital letter; but he makes up for this by overdoing capitals elsewhere — particularly E G L J K S M. On the other hand, not all these may be capitals to Banks: he appears, for example, to have known only one form of K; his S's and C's come in all sizes; he uses a Greek E in all varieties of size, as well as the ordinary written e, for adjectives, adverbs and verbs as well as for nouns; his L is sometimes clearly an intended capital, sometimes emerges merely as a sort of habitual slip of the pen equivalent to 1; capital J seems to be used at random, like C and S — but not for the reason that, like them, it frequently falls from the pen, in rapid writing, in a size larger page 141 than the rest of a word. M is very frequently dubious; Banks never makes an elaborately formal capital, as he sometimes does with N. Inconsistency is perhaps most complete with the names of countries and peoples, even in successive lines; so that we have England, england, english, India, india, North america, new Holland, Dutch or Duch, duch, Spain, spain, spanish, and so on. Even personal names are sometimes deprived of a capital. All this is liable to cause irritation to those who go by rule — e.g. printers.

Banks's manuscript text has a few peculiarities in spelling. He is not good on final th — he always writes, e.g. lengh, strengh, for length, strength. He generally, but not always, writes his past participle -ed without either an e or an apostrophe — e.g. inclind, lookd, seemd — unless the previous syllable contained a t or d — e.g. existed, provided. It is frequently impossible to tell whether he is spelling with a c or an s — e.g. immence or immense. With the possessive case he rarely uses an apostrophe before his s. With the word notwithstanding he seems to have peculiar trouble, as if its succession of letters were altogether too long and too complicated to get right, except by extreme chance. Of generally represents off. He rarely writes out and in full, preferring the ampersand, and preferring &c to etc. With underlinings of personal or scientific names he is inconsistent. Occasionally a word necessary to the sense is omitted, and he makes the small slips common to everybody in short words — ad for as, if for is; but here we move away from peculiarities. It does not seem necessary to provide further detail.

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The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks 1768–1771 [Volume One]

[Textual Introduction]