was couched in the following words, ‘If you will go, we send other ships.’ So strong a
solicitation, agreeing exactly with my own desires, was not to be neglected. I accordingly
answered that I was ready and willing.Banks had returned to England with about 30,000 plant species, of which 1400
were new to science, as well as about 1000 species of animals, birds, fish and insects.
which all required careful study. This news of another expedition, and the delay in
describing these new specimens, sent the elderly Linnaeus into a fit of despair. With so
much work to be done on the first collection, why were Banks and Solander readying
to depart on another dangerous voyage around the world? He replied to his friend John
Ellis who had sent him this news from England:
This report has affected me so much as almost to entirely deprive me of my sleep. How vain
are the hopes of man! Whilst the whole botanical world, like myself, have been looking
for the most transcendent benefits to our science, from the unrivalled exertions of your
countrymen, all their matchless and truly astonishing collection, such as has never been
seen before, nor may ever be seen again, is to be put aside untouched, to be thrust into some
corner, to become the prey of insects and destruction ... I therefore once more beg, nay I
earnestly beseech you, to urge the publication of these new discoveries. I confess it to be my
most ardent wish to see this done before I die.Linnaeus wrote to Solander begging him to stay and catalogue the specimens from
Australia, but for whatever reason Solander never answered his letters. Solander
has been described as a ‘rather charming fellow, radiant with good feeling, yet
constitutionally almost incapable of answering a letter, or of even opening a good
many’. Ultimately Linnaeus had to resign himself to the fact that ‘an ungrateful
Solander’ would neither respond to his letters nor send him ‘one single herb or insect
of all those he collected in Insulis australibus novis’. Eventually some duplicate
specimens were sent to Sweden. The Banksia serrata is regarded as the ‘type species’
of the banksia and it was Carl Linnaeus the Younger who first published the name
‘banksia’, thus commemorating Joseph Banks with his descriptions of three species
found at Botany Bay and another at Endeavour River. Banks later instigated the
acquisition of his precisely catalogued collection by the Linnean Society of London,
which was formed in 1788.
Banks’ party for this second expedition was to include sixteen people, three
draughtsmen, two secretaries, two musicians and nine servants – ‘all practised and
taught by myself to collect such objects of Natural History as might occur’ – plus
himself, his mistress and Dr Solander. The mistress was a mysterious ‘Mr Burnett’ who
tried to board the ship in Madeira disguised as a man, only to find to her embarrassed
(^48) Where Australia Collides with Asia
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