history
THE NATURALIST MIND
Greg Dening
Edward Duyker
Nature's Argonaut: Daniel Solander 1773-1782
The Miegunyah Press $49.95hb, 380pp
0 522 847420 X
EXPECT TO HAVE your botanical-zoological vocabulary stretched to the limits in this remarkable biography of Daniel Solander, naturalist and voyager with Cook and Banks on the Endeavour. Meet megalop and amphipoda. Know how to be autotrophic and epiphyte. If you haven't come across a left-eyed flounder (Bothus podas maderensis ) or a 'choirboy' (Pontinus kuhlii), you will now. Don't be worried, though. One of the delights of reading this brilliant wander through the mind of a naturalist genius is the way Edward Duyker in a simple, direct phrase can lay open the most complex issue.
No, perhaps the real joy in the reading is the continued sense of revelation and discovery Duyker conveys as he follows Solander from Lappland to Tierra del Fuego, from Madeira to Tahiti, from Botany Bay to Possession Island, from St Helena's to Iceland, from the cabinets of English country houses to the British Museum. It is a moment of sadness to come to the morning of May 8, 1782. Solander was at breakfast in Sir Joseph Banks' Soho Square house. He was talking of that day in Tierra del Fuego when he nearly died of cold, and of Banks' two black servants who did. He suddenly found he could not put his left hand on the table. Within days he was dead of a massive stroke at forty-nine years, much of his life's work undone and unpublished. Banks, his dearest friend, was shattered. He couldn't find enough words --`decency, justice, moderation, benevolence, diligence'-- to catch all that Solander had been.
Daniel Solander was born in 1733 at Piteå, a town on the edge of Lappland at the head of the gulf that separates Finland and Sweden. The land- and sea-scapes of this north country were spawning grounds for naturalists. Carl Linnaeus, whom the whole world at that time wanted to know, recognised the abilities of Daniel Solander when he became a student of his at the University of Uppsala. In 1760 Solander took an opportunity of a trip to England. The wealthy landowners there recognised him as Linnaeus' successor. He was the darling of Enlightenment England as he brought modern botany to their amateur antiquarianism. These were years of near delirious excitement for Solander as he discovered that the ends of the earth had come to England and were to be found in living gardens and cabinet collections. He was a natural choice to begin the cataloguing of the nascent British Museum.
In 1768, Joseph Banks, who was using his inherited wealth to educate himself in everything botanical, found he had the chance of a lifetime to go with James Cook on the Endeavour. He persuaded Solander to go with him, employed Herman Spöring to assist them, and took two artists -- Alexander Buchan for portraiture and Sydney Parkinson for illustration of their collections and observations. Banks spent 10,000 pounds -- more than the whole expedition cost the Admiralty -- on every instrument of collection, observation and preservation. The Endeavour was a travelling museum.
From the moment they left Deptford, there was nothing that did not excite them at sea or on land. If it wasn't luminous jellyfish, it was all the life to be collected from the Endeavour 's stern; strange fish out of the depths, every kind of birdlife. There was hardly a day -- and on a voyage that would be three years long -- that was not filled with their labours of love. From 8.00am to 2.00pm they sat studying in the Great Cabin, directing the draughtsmen, entering descriptions in their journals. At 4.00pm `when the smell of cooking had vanished' after dinner, they began again, till it was too dark. If they had nothing new to describe, they returned to what they had done and ordered it into their books.
Duyker takes us, with simple strategies of narrative, on this voyage of the Endeavour. We see everything from the perspective of these men who looked at nature with a microscopic eye and described it with a precision of language few of us possess. He has lateral pursuits: on Solander's reported 'laziness', or on Johann Forster's -- and many others' -- plagiarism of Solander's work. But the overall pleasure of the book is its review of this most famous of voyages with fresh eyes.
Do not think that there is much romanticism in this. Indeed as we see this voyage of the Endeavour through different eyes, the cost of it becomes apparent. For thirty-six of the ninety-six company, it was a lifetime's cruise. They would be dead before it was over, seven of Banks' own retinue of eleven among them. Duyker's fresh perspective lets us know these thirty-six men personally, as men with friendships, as men doing small services to one another, as young men with short lives.