Lay, Graeme.
The Collector: The life & loves of young Joseph Banks.
Austin Macauley.
2023.
ISBN 9781035801985.
306 pages.
The challenge for a novelist when telling a true story is that the plot is pre-established. All events are known; in the fictionalization, there is no allowance for any variation from the historical record. And the novelist who sets out to tell an historical figure’s life story is bound to the lifeline of that person. The novelist-biographer’s task is to bring the subject to life via a combination of rigorous research (for authenticity) and bold imagination (for colour). This novel attempts that ambitious feat for Joseph Banks, from childhood to the age of 29. The extent to which the author Graeme Lay has taken liberties for story-telling purposes will be clear to those who have studied Banks’s life. In this review I shall focus on the story he tells, and have not checked it against historical records.
The Collector opens in 1755, when Banks was twelve. Life on his father’s estate in Lincolnshire had already stoked his interest in nature, an interest that was indulged by his mother and tolerated by his father, William. He was a practical man, focused on his estate, and the reclamation of land from the fens. Nature was all fine and good to him, but it could be improved upon, and profitably so. Joseph was the heir, and William expected him to pursue a career in law and politics. The boy, though, was unaccomplished academically, and not inclined at all towards the classics; a transfer from Harrow to Eton did not change his inclinations. In 1760, bowing to his son’s appeals, William Banks allowed him to pursue studies in the natural sciences at Oxford. Oxford, though, did not have instructors in botany, and Joseph convinced his father to hire him a tutor. Wealth and self-motivated determination would prove a potent combination in Joseph’s career. He liked, and expected, to get his way.
William Banks died in 1761. One senses it was no great loss to his son. The two had never been close. William had been unsympathetic to Joseph’s interests, although by William’s actions it cannot be said that he impeded his son’s ambitions. Two years later, Joseph left Oxford for London. His inherited wealth allowed him to pursue his interests in the natural sciences unfettered by the annoyance of making a living. He networked (in today’s terms) with men of similar interests, botanized throughout England, and lived high on the town. Lord Sandwich, 25 years his senior, befriended him, and sponsored his membership in the Lucallan Club, a bawdy gentleman’s establishment in Pall Mall, London. At his first Lucallan bacchanal, the young man outbid his sponsor for a night with a courtesan. The incident illustrates some core character and personal traits. Banks was preternaturally confident in himself, conscious of his standing among others, and unafraid to show it. He had a massive ego with narcissistic tendencies. And he was a randy fellow.
In 1766, Sandwich’s influence secured Banks a berth as a supernumerary in HMS Niger, which was bound for Newfoundland. In Lay’s account, soon after Niger’s arrival at St John’s, Banks left the ship, and set off inland, alone, to botanize. He was unprepared for the rigours of botanizing, let alone surviving, under the island’s harsh and rugged conditions, but he persevered. Banks delighted in the diversity of the region’s flora and fauna, and collected many specimens. How he hauled them through the bush by himself is unclear. In one instance, he was thrilled to observe, up close, a great auk—then blasted it with a shotgun, and added it to his specimen trove. It would, he thought, take pride of place in his collection in London. (His collection, I note, not the British Museum’s, nor the King’s.) His botanizing extended to Labrador, where his field work was brought short by illness. Back in St John’s, he met a well-regarded naval surveyor engaged in the mapping of Newfoundland’s coast. Banks was not favourably impressed with James Cook; he found him dour, taciturn, provincial, and (what was perhaps worst) impertinent. It was a harsh assessment of the 38-year-old mariner by the privileged 23-year-old.
Back home in England, Banks’s work in North America attracted attention (and a fiancée), but he was restless. His experiences had whetted his appetite for further travel, adventure and botanical discovery. In early 1768, Banks learnt about a plan to mount an expedition to the South Seas to observe the transit of Venus—to be commanded by the self-same James Cook. Banks secured for himself the role of expedition botanist. A contribution of £10,000 towards the expedition’s £14,000 cost sealed the deal. Banks then assembled a retinue of eight men to support him on his botanical mission: naturalists, artists and four servants. (This action begs the question for this reviewer: how had Banks managed in Newfoundland by himself? I think it is unlikely that he did.)
Members of the Captain Cook Society know a great deal about Cook’s first circumnavigation and Banks’s role on the voyage. For this reason, I will hereon focus on themes brought out in Lay’s account, particularly those that touch on Banks’s personality and character, and his methods of collecting—the book’s title is, after all, The Collector.
Banks botanized whenever he could, whether it was ashore in Madeira, Brazil, or Tierra del Fuego, or in a ship’s boat towed behind Endeavour at sea. Soon after arriving in Tahiti, he moved ashore, delighted to be on land again after the long voyage; he was never a comfortable sailor. He rambled extensively, collecting samples, and observing (and engaging with) the natives. His methods were opportunistic, and sometimes ruthless. Lay tells of one foray to bag a sacred flower that grew only on a Huahine mountaintop; Banks was warned by Tupaia, a Polynesian, that it was taboo to pick the flower, and Banks assured him that he would only look at it—while winking at Daniel Solander. On another occasion Banks was given a small live gecko. He stroked it gently, telling the giver, “I will treasure this”. Later, Lay slyly reports in passing that the gecko was safe in Endeavour’s hold, in a jar of preserving fluid.
Banks kept a clear focus on his own interests. He could be callous in their pursuit. In Tahiti, he and Cook examined the site of a native battle. Cook was sombre and reflective in the face of the devastation. Banks, for his part, picked up the skull of a young child, and placed it carefully in his pack: “he would keep it on his mantelpiece at home, it would make a fine memento of Mahaiatea. Put a small candle in the skull hole; that would make a talking point, too”. Not only did Banks fail to distinguish specimen from trophy, the items he collected had to reflect well upon him. Alas, in the telling, they do not. Banks was nothing if not a man of his times and class. He abhorred slavery, yet he was eager to collect human artefacts, dead or alive. When the two men that joined the voyage at Tahiti, so Banks could take them to England, fell ill at Batavia, we hear Banks thinking, “They must not die, if they did he would have no living South Sea specimens to parade before the King and the Royal Society”. Tragically, they did die, and Banks lamented the loss of one of them. “Tupaia, was a remarkable man... Although at times his arrogance irritated me”.
Cook, focused as he was on the forthcoming Transit of Venus (in which Banks was uninterested), left the naturalist to his studies. Still, in Lay’s account, there were tensions between the two in Tahiti and the long voyage. Banks disapproved of the Captain’s commitment (per orders) to exploring and mapping the unknown regions of the South Sea. Banks bridled at Cook’s meticulous running survey technique because it kept him aboard Endeavour, helplessly watching unknown, un-botanized shores passing in front of his eyes. If he had any geographical interest at all, it was in the Southern Continent. He felt Cook should search for it where he thought it should be, orders from the Admiralty be damned. At one point in the novel, Banks ascribes to Cook a look of jealousy towards him; yet Banks himself seems jealous of Cook, and keen to overshadow him; Banks believes that his own scientific discoveries will (and should) eclipse the achievements of the doughty Yorkshireman.
The Joseph Banks depicted by Lay craved recognition, and sought glory. On the voyage home, he contemplated the distinction that would greet him in England. “Fortune he already possessed, fame would undoubtedly come next”. After the loss of many shipmates and his human specimens, he felt “exhilarated and brimming with satisfaction” at his accomplishments. And, indeed, they were significant. He was returning with the considerable fruits of his work, a collection of hundreds of specimens as well as cultural artefacts of the peoples he had encountered.
Once back in England, Banks set about promoting himself and his discoveries, and creating the legend of Joseph Banks. He became a society darling, but was annoyed with any attention to others that distracted from a direct focus on him. Lay illustrates this nicely with a scene in which Cook and Banks were granted an audience with King George III. The monarch repeatedly addressed and praised Cook before Banks. The naturalist’s irritation was palpable.
The Collector concludes with the preparations for Cook’s second circumnavigation, Banks’s disastrous modifications to HMS Resolution, and his angry outburst when Sandwich ordered them undone. It also considers the dropping by Banks of his fiancée and the taking of a mistress, whom he also abandoned.
I found the novel’s dialogue to be wooden at times; it is always a challenge to write period dialogue, and every author must decide how to do it. I doubt even Banks would address Lord Sandwich, decades his senior, as “Sandwich” or “Montagu”; or, for that matter, Cook as “Cook”. These are minor nits, and Graeme Lay succeeds in what he set out to do: he brings Banks to life.
I enjoyed the novel, and I wonder if Lay plans a sequel to cover subsequent chapters of the botanist’s life. I would find these interesting, for an older Joseph Banks plays an off-stage role in my novel, The Wind From All Directions, which is set during George Vancouver’s 1791-1795 voyage in the Pacific.1
There was bad blood between Banks and Vancouver. The two men clashed before Vancouver sailed from England in 1791. Banks called Vancouver’s conduct towards him “not such as I am used to receiving from Persons in his situation”. I have often wondered if Vancouver’s antipathy towards Banks had its origins in 1772, the year Vancouver joined Resolution as an impressionable 15-year-old midshipman. He would have seen for himself the modifications Banks had insisted upon, and witnessed Cook’s (and all his shipmates’) reaction to them. It is likely that he absorbed the view then that Banks was, as historian John Naish put it, “an officious busybody whose money and influence allowed him to interfere in matters which were the proper province of trained seamen”.2
Ron Thompson
References
- Thompson, Ron. The Wind From All Directions. Double Dagger. 2024. Reviewed in Cook’s Log. 2025. Vol. 48, no. 1. Pages 10–11.
- Naish, John M. The Interwoven Lives of George Vancouver, Archibald Menzies, Joseph Whidbey and Peter Puget: the Vancouver voyage of 1791–95. Edwin Mellen. 1996.
Originally published in Cook's Log, page 24, volume 48, number 3 (2025).