Banks’s exploits in the Pacific were a gift for gossip columnists and satirists. For years after he arrived back in England in 1771, caricatures, pamphlets and articles mocked his sexual activities during the voyage. The Purea episode featured in many of the vicious poems written in what now seem painfully contrived rhyming couplets. This is a typical example:
She sinks at once into the lover’s arms,
Nor deems it vice to prostitute her charms;
‘I’ll do,’ cries she, ‘What Queen’s have done before’;
And sinks, from principle, a common whore.
In addition to being savaged for exploiting the Tahitian ruler, Banks was criticised for refusing to honour his engagement to Miss Blosset (although her family did successfully extract a substantial financial settlement from him). He was accused of opting for science rather than sex. Harriet Blosset’s ex-paramour had, critics sniped, been seduced by ‘the elegant women of Otaheite [Tahiti] … but she found her lover now preferred a flower, or even a butterfly to her superior charms’. Satirical poets voiced similar complaints about his abandonment of Purea. In one long defamatory epistle, Oberea (Purea) tries to lure back her British botanist by converting herself into a luxuriant plant and weaving her ‘wanton foliage round thy hand’. He has, she laments, deserted her for science – ‘at least … spare one thought from Botany for me’, she begs.
Banks became known as the ‘Botanic Macaroni’ (Figure 1). The term ‘Macaroni’ was originally coined to denigrate the aristocratic youths who had acquired continental manners during their Grand Tour to Italy, but it became a more general term of abuse for deriding foppish young gentlemen who adopted ridiculous extremes of stylish clothing. The label was laden with sexual contempt. A Macaroni, sneered one journal, is ‘neither male nor female, [but] a thing of the neuter gender … It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’ Just as plants were grouped into families, and people into tribes, so too the caricaturists identified different types of Macaroni, classifying them by the streets they paraded in, or the occupations they devised to fritter away their time.
Dressed in an ultra-fashionable coat and wig, the Botanic Macaroni carries a sword, by then no longer the essential prop of an elegant gentleman but the sarcastic (and highly symbolic) attribute of a Macaroni too effeminate to know how to use one. His right leg is swathed in bandages, a unique early reference to the gout that would later make him an invalid. Ineffectually smiling and clutching his magnifying glass, Banks is a botanical libertine whose excessive desire for women has been replaced by an obsessive preoccupation with plants.
Botany may now seem a harmless scientific pursuit, but in the late 18th century it was fraught with sexual allusions. When satirists jeered at Banks for offering an exceptionally large plant to Queen Oberea they were not being particularly original, even though in his case the joke carried extra bite because Banks really was a botanist. Throughout the Enlightenment period, lewd poems graphically compared women’s bodies with geographical features such as hills, rivers and creeks, while plants provided pornographic analogies for the sexual organs of both men and women. Legacies of this erotic botanic intensity survive in words such as ‘defloration’, the vibrant flower paintings of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and the floral place settings in Judy Chicago’s feminist art installation, ‘The Dinner Party’.
To make matters worse, even the scientific language of botany was saturated with sexual references. Banks ardently supported the controversial Linnaean system of classification, which relied on counting the numbers of male and female reproductive organs inside flowers. To describe different groups of plants, Linnaeus had used extraordinary terms like ‘bridal chamber’ and ‘nuptials’. For prudish Britons, this sexualised version of nature verged on the pornographic, and battles over botanical textbooks resembled current debates about allowing children to watch violent videos. Self-appointed moral guardians of society declared that they wanted to protect young women from the corrupting influence of botanical education. They clamped down on mixed flower-gathering expeditions, and sanitised floral vocabulary by introducing meaningless euphemisms. By allying himself with Linnaeus’s supporters, Banks opened himself up to widespread insinuations about his sexual activities.
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One of the most successful parodies of Banks and his sexual prowess was Mimosa: or, The Sensitive Plant, which appeared with Banks’s name on the title page in 1779, seven years after his return from Tahiti. The book was published anonymously, but several Enlightenment writers appreciated the metaphoric potential of this plant that visibly shrinks and grows. It is hard to imagine modern adults laughing at, let alone buying, a long poem that slanders the sexual proclivities of prominent aristocrats through botanical innuendo. Nevertheless, such satires are rewarding to study because humour provides a marvellous entrée into other cultures. The opening sentences of the preface convey Mimosa’s flavour: ‘The world will determine with what justice I dedicate the SENSITIVE PLANT, to a Gentleman so deeply skilled in the science of Botany … The plains of Otaheité … rear that plant to an amazing height … and Queen Oberea, as well as her enamoured subjects, feel the most sensible delight in handling, exercising, and proving its virtues.’
Presumably the poem’s readers did not find such puns tedious, even when repeated several times in different versions. Four pages later, the anonymous author approached the conclusion of his dedication to Banks. ‘Men of science, with equal ardour, have entered on the same task, and you, Sir, stand foremost in the list of those, who, anxious for the propagation of the PLANT, have explored worlds unknown before, and brought home to your native land, discoveries of its virtues, and relations of its vigour.’ Hardly subtle – yet significantly, the writer was drawing on familiar clichés of geographical and botanical pornography to colour scientific exploration with imperial overtones of possession, domination and exploitation.
This Mimosa dedication neatly ties together the three Ss – Sex, Science and the State. Its visual counterpart is Figure 2, another Macaroni caricature of Banks. As in ‘The Botanic Macaroni’, the redundant sword and elaborate feathers hint at sexual ambiguity. Banks had scoffed at the young gentlemen who wanted to complete their education in Europe; his Grand Tour, he had declared, would be one round the whole world. Although he took every opportunity to enjoy himself, Banks regarded himself not as a tourist but as a traveller. Like Linnaeus before him, he wanted to capture the world by classifying it scientifically. And here Banks is being mocked for these imperial pretensions, his feet uncertainly straddling the two halves of the globe. In order to enlarge his scientific collection, he vainly strives to catch a butterfly, symbol of triviality. The caption sneers:
I rove from Pole to Pole, you ask me why,
I tell you Truth, to catch a ___Fly!
Like modern political cartoons, these Macaroni caricatures are superficially funny but also hint at deeper criticisms of social structures. Cook’s voyage of exploration was no na飗e search for scientific truth. The astronomical and botanical observers on board did, of course, make many new discoveries, but the voyage’s backers had provided funding to meet commercial and political objectives. Banks complained about the dishonesty of royal hosts who stole the clothes of their sleeping guests, but apparently had no compunctions about theft on a national scale. While he was taking over the indigenous women and plants, Cook was securing Pacific territories for the British nation.
There is no single correct way of interpreting the past: as people try to make sense of their own lives, they repeatedly create new versions, new memories. Or, as the Danish philosopher S鴕en Kierkegaard put it, life is lived forward but understood backward. Scientists like to browse through earlier centuries and pick out glorious ancestors whose illustrious achievements seem to presage their own success. To boost their own position, they construct stories that celebrate science’s inevitable progress, as if a torch of truth were handed on from one great man to the next (or, very occasionally, a woman). In these triumphant tales, Carl Linnaeus appears as a botanic forefather who introduced a major system of classification that is still in use today; Joseph Banks, on the other hand, features merely as an adventurous explorer, an assiduous disciple who used Linnaeus’s schemes to catalogue the plants and animals he collected.
This heroic style of telling history may be traditional, but it leaves many questions unanswered. To start with, it does not explain how, why and when science and its applications became so fundamental in society. For centuries, the top subjects were theology and the classics, and the balance only slowly started to tip towards science and mathematics. Historians often neglect the 18th century because it lacks famous figureheads like Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin, yet this was a crucial period when science started to become established and gain prestige. Along with their Enlightenment contemporaries, Linnaeus and Banks fought hard to establish that scientific knowledge was valid and valuable.
Men like Newton and Darwin are commemorated as great heroes who – supposedly – produced revolutionary theories, yet soared above the petty demands of everyday affairs. In simplistic visions of the past, science develops in a make-believe world inhabited by disinterested scientists with only one objective – to uncover truth. Reality, of course, is different. Scientific investigators are driven not only by their genuine fascination with nature, but also by other motives – power, money, fame. Linnaeus in Sweden and Banks in Britain illustrate how scientific research is intertwined with commercial development and imperial exploitation.
Science’s history is too often converted into an exciting race between intrepid investigators who are competing to reach the peaks of truth. Such adventure stories may be enthralling to read, but they are not much help in explaining how science has become integrated within our daily lives. Modern science depends on industrial and government financing, and it is na飗e to divorce the growth of scientific knowledge from the development of its importance. When science’s social significance is incorporated within its history, the linked stories of Linnaeus and Banks unfold very differently. Viewed in retrospect, Linnaeus clung to an older vision of imperial domination that ultimately failed as an economic and scientific experiment. In contrast, Banks emerges not as a disciple, but as the prophet of a scientific empire that came to rule the world. Without enthusiastic preachers like him, the theories of our traditional scientific heroes – Newton’s gravity, Darwin’s evolution – would not have become common knowledge, indispensable components of our scientific and technological world.
Banks’s innovations placed science at the heart of Britain’s trading and political empire. Linnaeus may be the scientific star of botany, but Banks had a greater long-term impact. As an autocratic administrator, he perhaps lacks the glamour of Newton, Darwin or even Linnaeus, yet he too deserves to be commemorated as one of science’s founding fathers. President of the Royal Society for over 40 years, Joseph Banks ensured that science and the British Empire flourished and expanded together. He forged an interdependent relationship between science and the state that endures today. |