Although Banks was never to benefit financially from Australia, the Pacific voyage made him a star.

BANKS’ JOURNAL OF THE voyage ran to about 200,000 words and his plant collection included 30,000 specimens representing 3000 species, of which perhaps 1400 were new to science. Parkinson produced 18 volumes of plant drawings, leaving 269 watercolours finished and 673 unfinished. He also made 268 of the 298 surviving animal drawings, although few were f inished by him. Marine animals are the most represented, no doubt because there were no plants to draw at sea, so time could be given to zoological subjects, which were never Banks’ priority. The artists only drew four mammals and 32 birds during the whole expedition.

Indeed, there were very few tangible zoological results from the voyage as far as Banks himself is concerned, but in 1775, Danish zoologist Johan Fabricius, who’d helped Banks prepare for the voyage, published about 500 insect species from the Endeavour collection as new discoveries, apparently using the drawings as well as mounted specimens, while a few of the birds were described as new in Banks’ lifetime.

On his return to England, Banks was lionised, and in 1771 he and Solander were bestowed honorary doctor of civil law degrees by the University of Oxford. Although Banks was never to benefit financially from Australia, the Pacific voyage made him a star. He became a baronet, President of the Royal Society, adviser to both king and government, and an international patron of science. Not least, he gave natural history social as well as scientif ic prestige.

The voyage and his association with Cook turned him from an inquisitive botanist into a fervent advocate of the colonial model and he used the Royal Garden at Kew as an economic instrument. He played a critical role in the globalisation of crop plants for the good of Britain by transporting species from one part of the world to another, most famously the Polynesian breadfruit to the West Indies as food for slaves. He also sent cotton seeds from India to the Caribbean, tea from China to India, and cochineal insects from South America to India. Another of his causes was to promote New South Wales for white settlement.

As early as November 1771, Banks was said to have put aside £10,000 to publish the botanical results of the Endeavour voyage in 14 volumes. He began to prepare for printing with considerable energy, commissioning artists to produce watercolours of Parkinson’s pencil drawings so they could be engraved ready for publication, along with the watercolours he had managed to complete. The next step was to employ engravers to create copperplate line engravings from the completed watercolours, and 753 plates were made.

Then the work stalled. In November 1784, Banks was still optimistic about the project, writing, “It can be completed in two months if only the engravers can come to put the f inishing touches to it.”

But by 1791 nothing further had been accomplished, although Banks was still planning on issuing the book in parts, laying the blame for the delay on his work at Kew. In reality, his income from wool and other agricultural interests was falling, thanks to a slump following the American War of Independence (1775–1783). As President of the Royal Society and after becoming a married man, his declining interest and, perhaps more importantly, his constrained resources are generally held to be the true reasons for his not completing the project in which he had invested so much.

Some engravings were eventually run off and distributed – and a set even reached Linnaeus – but unfortunately, the Florilegium was never printed in Banks’ lifetime and he ended up bequeathing the engraved plates to the British Museum.

ONLY AT THE TURN of the 20th century, 130 years after they had been executed, were some of the drawings made from materials collected on Cook’s f irst voyage published – as 319 uncoloured lithographs. In 1900–1905, the British Museum published the lithographs in a collection edited by botanist James Br itten, with the title I llustrations of Australian Plants Collected in 1770 During Captain Cook’s Voyage Round the World in H.M.S. Endeavour.

Britten had intended to include plants from New Zealand and possibly more plants from different places, too, but this project was also abandoned after the sum of £837 had apparently been spent on it over the f ive years.

Only in the 1990s, with the publication of Banks’ Florilegium, a collection of unmounted prints published by Alecto Historical Editions in collaboration with the British Museum (Natural History), were all of Parkinson’s engraved drawings published for the f irst time, albeit in a rather exclusive way. Using the original engraved plates, the prints were coloured using the authentic techniques of the 18th century, notably the à la poupée method, in which individual colours are worked into the copper plate using a twist of cloth (the poupée, or ‘doll’, AG 90).

Just 100 sets were printed – loose, without any accompanying commentaries, and costing more than £100,000 to purchase. Unsurprisingly, they were sold only to institutions and well-heeled collectors. This meant the general public was still denied access to the intellectual fruits of what was perhaps the most significant botanical exploration in history.

It was not until 2017 that the best of these drawings were widely reproduced, in full colour and complete with accompanying commentaries and general essays about the voyage and printing processes.

With the publication of Joseph Banks’ Florilegium (Thames & Hudson, 2017), the most extraordinary of Parkinson’s illustrations were at last made available to the general public for the f irst time, almost 250 years after Endeavour f irst set sail for the Pacif ic, along with commentary on the prints and a history of the printing.

By contrast with Cook’s Endeavour voyage (1768– 1771), the botanical results of his second voyage to the Pacif ic (1772–1775) were published rapidly. That these f indings appeared before those of the f irst voyage has meant that many of the plants of the South Pacific, notably New Zealand, were named from the collections made by others on the second voyage. As that expedition only touched at Norfolk Island as far as Australia is concerned, knowledge of the botany of New Zealand advanced ahead of Australia.

Despite the continued non-appearance of the long-promised publication, Banks’ desire to ensure England got the glory – and any economic gain – for his work meant that for many years, he refused to allow European scientists access to all the material he had collected. In later life, however, he relented.

Perhaps his nationalistic sentiment had been overcome by his scientif ic curiosity. It might be that Banks, who became deeply involved with matters in Iceland and many other diversions following his return from the Pacif ic, as well as only having ever seen Australia as a sideshow in the Endeavour voyage – an expedition successful in observing the transit of Venus but unsuccessful in finding the fabled “Southern Continent” for England, and equally unsuccessful in yielding anything of commercial interest for England – felt there was now nothing to be lost by such magnanimity. Perhaps he thought it best for science to allow the savants of Europe access to the collections, rather than keeping them hidden.

Whatever his reasoning, this resulted in other people using Solander’s excellent Latin descriptions from his manuscripts, and printing his unpublished plant names. It was largely in these ways that the Australian treasures seeped into the scientific milieu, although this European work has been largely neglected in the assessment of the inf luence of the Cook voyage collections.

Indeed, as the years passed, the scientif ic outcome of the Cook voyages, whatever Banks’ thinking and apparent procrastination, was remarkably paradoxical when their initially nationalistic intent is remembered.

Work on the Endeavour botanical collections by European scientists – combined with leading Spanish taxonomic botanist Antonio Cavanilles writing up and lecturing in Madrid on the results of the Spanish voyage by Alessandro Malaspina to the Pacif ic (1789–1794) – meant that Britain had by now largely lost the initiative. (The preliminary work of English botanist James Edward Smith on First Fleet plants was an exception.)

This leadership role was only f inally regained thanks to the excellent work of Scottish botanist Robert Brown on the collections from Matthew Flinders’ voyage aboard HMS Investigator at the beginning of the 19th century (1801–1803).

The success of that was to be the result of the intervention of no less than Joseph Banks himself. But that is another story!

Perhaps he thought it best for science to allow the savants of Europe access to the collections, rather than keeping them hidden.