Title: The Wandering Scholars

Author: John Cawte Beaglehole

Publication details: 1969, Stockholm

Digital publication kindly authorised by: Timothy Holmes Beaglehole

Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

This text is the subject of: Victoria University Library Catalogue

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The Wandering Scholars

The Wandering Scholars

page 39

The Wandering Scholars

Address at the opening of an Exhibition from the
Alströmer Collection of the Ethnographical Museum
of Sweden, Stockholm, at the Dominion Museum, Wellington
On 28 October 1965

I have stolen my title, from a period very much earlier than the one we are concerned with tonight, from the Middle Ages; and I have stolen it from those wanderers, those vagantes, learned men and not so learned, humanists, teachers and students, sometimes not highly respectable, whose great contribution to life, in the twelfth and thirteenth century, was the mediaeval Latin lyric. Their wanderings were a European affair, from university to university, from lecture room to abbey, or even a royal or ducal court; they would celebrate a bishop, the season of spring, an admired lady, the joys of drinking and of song. The men of whom I am about to speak were not confined to Europe, they wandered the world, its continents and islands; they belonged to the eighteenth century; as scholars they were not humanists, they were among the founders of a number of our modern sciences; they wrote a great deal of Latin, but none of it, so far as I know, was lyric—though the excitement of Daniel Solander, as he got a new jelly-fish under the microscope, may well have been of the same order as that of the lyric poet; they were certainly students, sometimes teachers; certainly some of them, at least, were not immune to the attractions of spring, of ladies, of wine or of song. I am speaking of a generation of men who were almost a new type in the history of scholarship; the scientists, particularly the young scientists, who did the primary field-work of their subjects, long before the postgraduate travelling research scholar was loosed on the world. If asked to say what they were, they would probably have called themselves natural historians. Among the men of whom I am thinking, few page 40 had anything in common with the laboratory scientists, the home-keeping parsons who in the same century fastened together their own apparatus and discovered chemistry and physics for us. Their job was the observation and collection of things already visibly existing; they were primarily—if one must particularize—botanists and zoologists. But there were no strict frontiers in science; they would also collect rocks and minerals, thermometrical, barometrical and hydrographical data, articles of clothing, savage furniture, musical instruments and weapons of war. Hence the objects you in your turn have assembled to see tonight. They would also collect—if I may put it in this way—mankind. That is, among the sciences whose virtual birth we witness in this astonishing century is also ethnology—or, if you care to carry it a little further, anthropology. The only real specialists on the great voyages were, I suppose, the astronomers. If you were an astronomer you had little time for anything else; and the mathematical equipment the astronomer needed was not vouchsafed to all and sundry.

Sir Joseph Banks, on one of the occasions—not very many— when he praised himself, wrote, 'I may flatter myself that being the first man of scientific education who undertook a voyage of discovery and that voyage of discovery being the first which turned out satisfactorily in this enlightened age I was in some measure the first who gave that turn to such voyages.'1 This praise is overpraise; though it is true that the voyage was very successful, and that the age was in some respects enlightened. I do not know who the first scientist was who went on a voyage of new discovery specifically as a scientist: but Georg Wilhelm Steller, the German natural historian who sailed across the North Pacific to America and back with Bering in 1741—and, unlike Bering, survived the voyage—would have an early claim. Possibly Banks would have ruled out Steller and his scientific education, as Bering was wrecked. He could not have known much anyhow about Steller and his valuable observations; for Steller died prematurely on his return journey to Russia. The words Russia and German remind us that scientific discovery and travel in that enlightened age were by no means confined to the sea, or to the southern hemisphere, and that page 41 Bering's dying effort was part of a huge enterprise, begun under Peter the Great and continued under his successors the czarinas Anne and Elizabeth and Catherine, for the scientific exploration of the whole of Siberia and its geographical relations with North America. The Russian scientific service, like its naval service, was international. Bering was a Dane; Steller was German; Bering's astronomer, Delisle, was French, one of a famous astronomical and geographical family who had other connections with Russia. The great names in the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St Petersburg were German and French, and their bearers had between them considerable and highly meritorious experience in travel and field-work—like Johann Georg Gmelin, the chemist and botanist; and Peter Simon Pallas, who found the frozen mammoth and became what Americans would call the dean of Russian science, a figure of European repute; and Gerhard Friedrich Müller, who after his Siberian investigations became imperial historiographer, and wrote a notable volume on Russian explorations in northern seas that was of great interest to Captain James Cook.2 There were also more lightweight figures, like Jacob von Stahlin, who became the secretary of the Academy of Sciences: whose map of what we would call the Aleutian islands3 reduced Cook to the last extremity of indignation and disgust. The names one could mention are legion. Our old friend John Reinhold Forster, of Cook's second voyage, tried his luck in Russia, but did not get very far; he did not find the place or the people very congenial; indeed Forster had grave difficulty in finding anybody anywhere who was congenial. There can have been few European scientific men, in the 1760's and 70's, whose minds did not some time turn to Russia, however idly. But there was a sort of brain-drain all over the place, not necessarily of any permanence. Rulers would hold out glittering prizes. Some countries or cities or universities seemed more comfortable for the page 42 enquiring mind than others. Germans and Frenchmen went to Russia. Germans went to England. Frenchmen went to Prussia. Englishmen went to Holland, or round the world. The Dutch went to Sweden. The Swedes went everywhere.

Here at last, you may think, I am coming to the point; and indeed I am. Anyhow I am coming to some point. I have come to the Swedes; and I come to Linnæus. The man behind it all, where the Swedes and some others were concerned, was Linnæus. Carl Linnæus was born in 1707 and died in 1778. In eighteenth-century science there was no more illustrious figure than this princeps botanicorum—to quote the monument close to his grave in the cathedral at Uppsala, this prince of botanists; who, though he revolutionised his favourite study, was so much more than a botanist. He was a man of immense enthusiasms, immense power of work, immense affections. He was an excellent physician as well as a first-rate practical gardener; and when he was appointed to the chair of medicine in Uppsala University in 1741 he lost no time in exchanging it with a colleague for a chair of botany, natural history, mineralogy, zoology, pharmacy, chemistry and dietetics. There was no mere eye-wash about this. Linnæus did actually lecture in all these things, and very successfully. Apart from his teaching, he was one of the great scientific collectors, one of the great systematizers, one of the great inspirers. He was not a man merely of the study, the lecture platform, the herbarium, the stuck-down label. His students got plenty of open-air work. He had his own travels in search of knowledge, to Germany and to Holland, Paris, London; but more important even than all that for the permanent direction of his mind was his young man's Lapland journey of 1732. Before he made it, it captured his own imagination; afterwards, for years, it captured the imagination of Europe, and it never lost its magic for him. It was little enough compared to the journeys of some of his pupils; it was enough to leave him with the conviction that scientific systematization at home was not enough; that the world lay open to the student of natural history, and that it was the duty of the natural historian, as well as a heady excitement for him, to explore the world. And what a world! I do not mean that Linnæus ignored his great predecessors—the French Tournefort, for example, in the Near East, or the encyclopaedic Dutch Rumphius, page 43 Fig. 1. Carl von Linné, 1707-1778. Painting by Per Krafft the E. page 44 in the East Indies; he knew what was going on in North America, and his correspondence grew unconscionably; but he also knew how illimitable nature was. He had some talents as a negotiator, and one of his great achievements was the securing in 1746 of an agreement between the State and the Swedish East India Company for the annual grant by the Company of a free return passage to the East for a student chosen by Linnæus himself. Aid to post-graduate study by great shipping and business corporations, you see, is not a twentieth-century invention. And so a line of earnest students, the 'apostles' of Linnæus as he called them, began to set out for far places to gather in a harvest of knowledge that was the admiration of more domestic science. It was not done easily; it was not done without bravery; it was not done without the pangs of grief to Linnæus in his study at home. The very first of his students to go, Christopher Tärnström, died on the outward voyage at the little island Pulo Condore in the China Sea; and he was not the last whose apostolic mission ended fatally. The passage was not always free; young men would work their way as a chaplain or a ship's doctor; they did not always go to the Far East or with fellow-Swedes. Some time or other the packet of seeds, the dried plants, even a live plant growing in a pot, would turn up at Uppsala, and Linnæus would be rapt into a heaven of classification and naming, would fill with ecstasy his letters to his friends. Sometimes there was a journal for the Master to edit and print, as a memorial of distant travel.

Not long after Tärnström went Fredrik Hasselquist, who wandered for three years in Palestine and Egypt, collecting fishes and reptiles and insects, plants and minerals; studying coins and Arabic manuscripts and Egyptian mummies, until he died at Smyrna in 1752, at the age of 30. Linnæus published his journal, the Iter Palaestinum, in 1757. That was followed by the Iter Hispanicum in 1758 of Pehr Löfling, the most beloved and brilliant student of all, who went to Spain at the request of the Spanish minister, and then to Venezuela, where he died in 1756. Then there was Pehr Forsskål, who accompanied a party of Danish scientists to Egypt and Arabia, and died in 1763 in south-west Arabia while returning home. There were luckier men, like Pehr Osbeck, who went to China by way, of course, of the Cape and Java, and published his page 45 Fig. 2. Carl Peter Thunberg, 1743-1828. Painting by Per Krafft the Y. page 46 own travels in 1757. The book followed the advice of Linnæus in reporting on every aspect of the people the traveller met; it was translated into German in 1765, and into English by Forster, in 1772. Banks knew it well. Osbeck lived to a ripe old age, 82, and died in 1805. And there was Carl Peter Thunberg, who was absent from Sweden for nine years, 1770-79, in France, Holland, the Cape, Java and Japan, and also produced his own book. 'I desire most anxiously to live until your return,' wrote Linnæus to him in 1773. 'What joy for me to be present at your triumph, and to touch with my hands the laurels which are to crown your forehead.'4 Thunberg lived to be 85, which was considerably longer than his master. And there was Pehr Kalm, famous for his American journeys from 1748 to 1751, through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, and up the Hudson River over the Great Lakes to Canada. And there are other names, distinguished in the history of botany, which need not be mentioned now. The careers of some of these men were triumphant: they became professors. Thunberg indeed succeeded to Linnæus's own chair at Uppsala in 1784.

But the men you will be most interested in tonight will not be any of these, however they may shine in the history of science. Your interest will be in the men—the Swedes—whose wanderings took them into the Pacific: whose luck it was to sail with James Cook. In particular you will think of Cook's first voyage, in the Endeavour, to which it seems the exhibition we are now concerned with owes its origin. But curiously enough—or is it curious, in the light of what I have been saying?—there were three Swedes associated as naturalists with Cook: Dr Daniel Solander and Dr Herman Didrich Spöring, on the first voyage, and Dr Anders Sparrman, on the second voyage, in the Resolution. All had degrees in medicine, that being the natural way into science in those days. Solander and Sparrman were students of Linnæus; Spöring was not, though his father, the professor of medicine in the University of Åbo, across the Baltic Sea in Finland, was a valued correspondent of his great contemporary. We do not know enough about him, though he piques my curiosity. Both he and Solander were in London in 1768, when the Endeavour's voyage was in preparation; and both were engaged to go on the voyage not by the Admiralty, page 47
Fig. 3. Sir Joseph Banks, to the right Daniel Solander and to the left Omai, Tahitian native who accompanied Captain Cook to England on his second voyage. Painting by William Parry.

Fig. 3. Sir Joseph Banks, to the right Daniel Solander and to the left Omai, Tahitian native who accompanied Captain Cook to England on his second voyage. Painting by William Parry.

or the Royal Society, or Cook, but by Mr Joseph Banks. Mr Joseph Banks was a young man with a great deal of money and an assured position in society, and like other young men of that sort in that age, accustomed to having his own way. Fortunately he had also a strong devotion to natural history, worshipping Linnæus from afar, and there were great advantages, in the end, in his determination to install himself and a suite in the Endeavour.

Solander was the most notable of these three Swedish naturalists. He was born in 1733, was next to Löfling in Linnæs's affections, page 48 and when letters from London came urging Linnæus to send a pupil to England to spread the gospel, the Master chose Solander. He arrived in England in 1760, young, full of easy good humour and charm, already learned and of acute observation. He seems to have existed on private patronage for a while, with his reputation growing rapidly. Peter Collinson, the well-known Quaker amateur natural historian, writes to Linnæus in September 1762: 'My dear Linnæus cannot easily conceive the pleasure of this afternoon. There was our beloved Solander seated in my Musaeum, surrounded with tables covered with an infinite variety of sea-plants, the accumulation of many years. He was digesting and methodizing them into order, and for his pains he shall be rewarded with a collection of them, which no doubt you will see. Afterwards at supper we remembered my dear Linnæus, and my other Swedish friends, over a cheerful glass of wine … Solander is very industrious in making all manner of observations to enrich himself and his country with knowledge in every branch of natural history.'5 The assumption at this time seems to have been that Solander would return to Sweden. But he did not; he liked London and his new friends, and he even refused to entertain an invitation from the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He was amiable to everybody; he surveyed the enormous miscellaneous collection of the Duchess of Portland for her. In 1764 he became both a Fellow of the Royal Society and an assistant in the British Museum, barely completing its first decade; and it must have been about this time also that he became acquainted with Banks, ten years his junior, who descended upon London as his own master in that same year 1764. Consider that year 1764!—England on the peak of glory at the end of the Seven Years' War, the complete mistress of the seas, securely insolent in the world at large, sending her stream of gilded youth on the Grand Tour across Europe, sending out the first of a series of circumnavigatory voyages across the Pacific Ocean, complacent in art and architecture and learning as the Golden Age of Georgian civilization got into its stride—and Mr Cook, master of the schooner Grenville, got on with the surveying of the tortuous coast of Newfoundland. All the chances were in favour of bringing page 49 Banks and Solander together; but what on earth could they have in common with that hard-working seaman, beating backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, and in and out of obscure bays with his theodolite and compass and Gunter's chain? We know what was to bring them together; and we can picture the scene in 1768, dinner at Lady Anne Monson's, when Banks discoursed so enthusiastically about his forthcoming voyage that Solander leapt to his feet and proposed himself as a companion.

Nothing could have pleased Banks more. To have one of the first natural historians of Europe in his train! And he then picked up another remarkable man in Spöring. Spöring was born about 1730. He had attended his father's university for six years. He had been through a course in surgery at Stockholm, and must have been good with his hands. He had some talent as a draughtsman, as was found when all the visual records of this voyage were closely examined recently for the first time; and something made him take with him on the voyage a set of watchmaker's tools, so that he was later able to repair a quadrant that the acquisitive Tahitians had stolen and thrown away. Banks, it appears, engaged him as a secretary—one would think as a sort of scientific secretary, no mere clerk; and Banks calls him 'a grave thinking man … not at all given to telling wonderfull stories',6 when he did report a very strange bird he saw at Tolaga Bay. So we must think that if the other gentlemen were sometimes a little merry in their pursuit of the wonders of the deep or of strange lands, Dr Spöring would provide a proper probity, would be an anchor to conscience.

Banks in his journal and reminiscences gives us some quite vivid pictures of the regimen the scientific gentlemen set themselves: their unceasing pursuit of birds and butterflies and fishes and shells and seaweeds and plants; their constant recourse to Linnæus; their joyful naming of new genera and species. They read hard in the mornings—at least at sea, they described hard in the afternoons. He and Solander seem to have argued a good deal, but one can guess whose scientific authority prevailed. There is a pleasant little bit in the journal for 3 October 1769, three days before the sighting of New Zealand, and just after a bit of barnacle-covered wood page 50 had been picked up from the water: 'Now do I wish that our freinds in England could by the assistance of some magical spying glass take a peep at our situation: Dr Solander setts at the Cabbin table describing, myself at my Bureau Journalizing, between us hangs a large bunch of sea weed, upon the table lays the wood and barnacles; they would see that notwithstanding our different occupations our lips move very often, and without being conjurors might guess that we were talking about what we should see upon the land which there is now no doubt we shall see very soon.'7 A different background, this, from the Musaeum of Peter Collinson!

They had seen a good deal already, of course—Tierra del Fuego and Tahiti and the Society Islands; their scientific booty was already great, before they had touched on New Zealand or Australia or the East Indies. And among their booty, although Banks says little about it, were undoubtedly a good many of what the age called 'artificial curiosities', as distinct from 'natural curiosities', the pressed plants and bird skins and odd phenomena preserved in spirits of wine: the ethnographical specimens we ourselves are so greatly interested in. We know these things were there, and were added to considerably, because they survive, scattered over museums in various parts of the world, and we can identify them. We can identify some of them, anyhow: like the Maori patupatu that the keen-eyed Mr Webster picked up in a junk-shop in England and that now lies in our own Museum, one of the most treasured of its exhibits. I must not here enlarge on the subjects of scholarship, however; it is of the scholars I am speaking. Let us recall that our men ran as many risks as the other apostles of Linnæus. They endured some very foul weather. They shared the terrors of the Great Barrier Reef: they had perforce to look at death very close. Solander escaped in spite of himself, tramping over the hills on Tierra del Fuego, when he wanted to lie down in a snowstorm and go to sleep, just after he had advised his companions not to do that sort of thing; at Batavia he survived the dreadful fever by the merest hair's breadth. Poor Spöring died at sea, from dysentery, after suffering the tortures of the damned, in January 1771, between Batavia and the Cape. It was pleasant, in the end, for Mr Banks and his friend to get back to England, and page 51 Fig. 4. Anders Sparrman, 1748-1820. Engraving by Hubert after M. Mollard. page 52 be the lions of society. They were introduced to King George III, and Mr James Boswell was introduced to them, and all the world was enchanted by their existence. They were to go on Cook's second voyage, of course; and Linnæus, who had been raised to an apogee of joy by the news of their arrival in England at the end of the first, had declared Banks immortal, and given the name 'Banksia' to what we should call Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland combined—Linnæus was plunged into sleepless despair at the thought that they would set off again without describing for the learned world the spoils they had already gathered. He did not know how swelled was Banks's head. But it was swelled; and Mr Banks, in a rage at the accommodation provided for him, flung off with his party to Iceland instead. And afterwards Solander settled down to his agreeable life in London, dividing his time between the British Museum and Banks's house in Soho Square; working a good deal harder, I fancy, than was at one time thought; and if the full scientific results of the voyage were not properly published, at least on the natural history side, it was not his fault, but Banks's; for there his manuscripts all are, systematic and fair-copied pages of Latin, ready for the learned world to assimilate. After he died, in 1782, of a sedentary life, something went out of Banks, I think; the President of the Royal Society took over too completely from the young man who had raced about Tahiti in a passion of excitement, laying the foundations of Polynesian ethnology.

When Banks declined the second voyage the choice—it had to be a quick one—fell on John Reinhold Forster and his son. Forster was a man who, as I have already implied, ingratiated himself neither with his contemporaries nor with posterity, and it is difficult in cold blood to judge his real capacities. He was a scholar, certainly, and he moved round a good deal, and what he wrote, he wrote at length. It was certainly he who was the cause of Cook's exclamation, which so shocked the young Lieutenant King when he went to call on his captain before the third voyage, 'Curse the scientists, and all science into the bargain!' He was, however, also the cause of the sailing in the Resolution, on the second voyage, among the icebergs and the islands of Polynesia and Melanesia, of our third Swedish scientist, Dr Anders Sparrman; for on the out- page 53 ward passage, at Cape Town, Forster found Sparrman, reflected that it would be advantageous to the Forster work, and no doubt prestige, to have another assistant besides his young son George, and offered to embark this student of Linnæus at his own expense. Cook, 'strongly importuned' by Forster, consented. In 1772 Sparrman was twenty-four. He made his first voyage at the age of 17, when he went, so we are told, as a ship's surgeon—probably, I imagine, a surgeon's boy—in an East India Company's ship as far as China. When he came home he qualified as a physician, in 1770. Then he got permission from the Dutch East India Company to pursue scientific studies in South Africa, and sailed for Cape Town in January 1772. He had strong ethnographical as well as natural history interests, and for some months devoted himself to them in that country, where Cook arrived at the end of October. It was not until March 1775 that he saw Cape Town again, and was able to resume his African researches. By that time he had collected a great many highly interesting ethnographical specimens, now in the State Ethnographical Museum at Stockholm. He returned in 1776 to Sweden and received appropriate honours; practised medicine; went on a short voyage to West Africa to study the possibility of a Swedish colony there; visited Paris and London; in 1777 turned down an offer of employment by Banks; and from 1778 to 1798 directed the museum of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science. He died in 1820. Unlike Solander and Spöring, Sparrman kept a journal and wrote books. His first book of travel, published in 1783, is one of the classics of South African literature, but it devotes only twenty pages to his voyage with Cook. That was the subject of two further volumes, in 1802 and 1818, of which there was no English edition until 1944.8 They make use of information from other voyages than Cook's: the greater part, however, obviously comes from Sparrman's own observations. One deduces from the text a rather sedate young man, rather appalled at the language and some of the behaviour of the English sailors, disapproving even of the hearty 'Goddams' with which Cook enlivened his efforts to page 54 keep his ship off the reef at Tahiti; a young man elated at being able to help the captain or the officers; interested in food; dedicated just a little too rashly, perhaps, to his scientific explorations, as when he wandered too far on the island of Huahine, the inhabitants of which were notoriously more savage than their neighbours, and narrowly escaped with his breeches, though without his plants. He does not appear to have roused Cook's ire, and is never other than discreet in relation to Forster. He was one of the pupils of Linnæus's later days; they must have met, one presumes, after his return home, but on that the records known to me are silent.

Before I end let me say a little about museums, because museums and our wandering scholars are intimately related. People have always collected one thing or another, or one thing and another, and the eighteenth century was the great age of private collections. I do not know of many public collections then, apart from the British Museum; and the British Museum was founded in 1754 on the basis of private collections, principally that of Sir Hans Sloane, who had expended £50,000 on it, and made provision for selling it to the nation at a bargain price. It has engulfed many other collections since—among them the great herbarium that was the pride of Banks's heart and one of the chief scientific ornaments of England. A good many crowned and coronetted heads, apart from plain hatted ones, also had their 'cabinets', as they were called, full of medals, or shells, or precious stones or cameos or minerals, which respectable tourists were generally allowed to look at; and often there, too, were the beginnings of some state museum. In England the habit was quite ingrained, and there was some competition among the leading collectors. I have mentioned the Duchess of Portland. The sale of her collection, in 1786, was spread over thirty-eight days. The large and amazingly miscellaneous collection of Sir Ashton Lever—the so-called Leverian Museum—was, when he died in 1788, deemed so far beyond the resources of any individual purchaser that it was raffled instead; and when it was finally broken up agents attended from all over Europe. You can today see in Vienna Maori and Tahitian objects acquired from the Leverian Museum, into which they came from Cook's men. There was certainly competition between Banks and Lever, as is quite page 55 amusingly evident in some of the correspondence of distinguished persons immediately after the end of Cook's third voyage. Banks had the inside running: he generally had a promise, or gave a commission, before the ships set out; and an anchor was hardly in the mud before there was some speculative sailor on his doorstep. He could pick and choose. I doubt whether Solander was much interested in ethnographical articles. Banks was. Look at the picture of him by Benjamin West, in which he stands swathed in a noble Maori cloak complete with broad taniko border, flanked by Tahitian adze and head-dress, New Zealand taiaha and paddle. Sir Ashton Lever was, too. I doubt whether Miss or 'Mrs Anna Black-burne, a maiden lady ... of an ancient and honourable family' [I quote the Gentleman's Magazine] of Lancashire was, any more than Solander, though she was related to Lever. She was 'the friend and constant correspondent of Linnæus', 'equally fond of botany, and learned in the science', and otherwise collected birds, insects, corals, and shells.9 After the third voyage she wanted to get hold of birds, and they were in short supply. 'Believe me', writes Cook's surgeon David Samwell to a friend, 'when I tell you that very few Natural Curiosities have been brought home in our two ships— the whole of those few have in a Manner been monopolized by Mr. Banks.' But Miss Blackburne could lay out £100 on a good collection of artificial curiosities, if she thought it worth her while.10 I don't know whether she did.

Well, now, we have some light on the fact that when it comes to relics of Cook's voyages, Sweden is relatively strong in 'artificial curiosities'. We have Linnæan connections here too; for Jonas Alstromer, the great industrialist and potato-grower, the founder of the family museum at Alingsås, was also one of the founders, with Linnæus and others, in 1739, of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science for the investigation of Mathematics, Natural History, Economics, Trade, Useful Arts, and Manufactures, a body of which Linnæus was the first president; and when Alströmer set up his museum and library—as how could he help doing, as a magnate of scientific and literary leanings, a leader of the Swedish Enlighten-page 56ment?—its first keeper was Jonas Theodor Fagraeus, a learned physician and—inevitably—pupil of Linnæus. Three of the sons of Jonas Alströmer studied at Uppsala, under Linnæus, and there met Solander. One of them, Johan, starting on hig travels in 1777, spent more than a year in London, about as interesting and exciting to him as were Banks's and Solander's three months in Tahiti to them. He saw a great deal of these two luminaries, and the friendship that sprang up was undoubtedly to the great advantage of the Alströmer Museum, in both 'natural' and 'artificial' curiosities.11 It is pleasant to find a private museum, so typically eighteenth-century, becoming a public one; pleasant to find modern scholarship investigating the deposits of that eighteenth century, transferred from the islands of the Pacific to the shore of the Baltic Sea; it is pleasant to find in one Ethnographical Museum the evidence of Anglo-Swedish cooperation in two great voyages—Cook and Banks and Solander and Sparrman, as it were, all together.

1 Banks to Edward Hasted, undated [1782], In the Banks Papers (Dawson Turner Copies), Botany Library, British Museum (Natural History), II, 97.

2 Properly speaking, this was part only of the third volume [1758] of his Sammlung Russischer Geschichte, separately published in England in 1761 as Voyages from Asia to America for completing the Discoveries of the North-West Coast of America. It was one of the chief literary points of reference for Cook on his third voyage.

3 In the small book translated as An Account of the New Northern Archipelago, Lately Discovered by the Russians in the Seas of Kamtschatka and Anadir (London, 1774).

4 Quoted in Norah Gourlie, The Prince of Botanists (London, 1953), 263.

5 James Edward Smith, A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnceus, and Other Naturalists, from the Original Manuscripts (London, 1821], II, 56-7.

6 Banks, The 'Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, edited by J. C. Beaglehole (Sydney, 1962), I, 421.

7 Banks, 'Endeavour' Journal, I, 396.

8 Resa omkring Jordklotet, I sällskap med Kapit. J. Cook och Hrr Forster. Aren 1772, 73, 74 och 1775. The English translation, by Huldine Beamish and Averil Mackenzie-Grieve, edited by Owen Rutter, was first published by the Golden Cockerel Press in 1944; a cheap edition appeared in 1953.

9 Gentleman's Magazine, LXIV [1794), 180.

10 David Samwell to Matthew Gregson, 1 November 1780; Liverpool Public Library, Gregson Correspondence, XVII.

11 For all this story, see Stig Rydén, The Banks Collection. An Episode in 18th-Century Anglo-Swedish Relations [Ethnographical Museum of Sweden, Monograph Series, No. 8; Stockholm, 1963).