Botany and Revolution: The Roots of Disorder

The Resolution first caught sight of the Pacific island of Tahiti on the evening of 15 August 1773. Among those onboard were the German naturalists Johann Reinhold Forster and his 19-year-old son, Georg, whose main task was to produce illustrations of the plants and animals they encountered and deemed to be new to European natural history. Nearly two decades later, in 1790, Georg Forster, accompanied by the young naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, travelled across Europe to London, where he visited a range of natural history collections. One of these was held at 32 Soho Square, the home of the botanist and president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, who had previously travelled on James Cook’s first voyage of discovery between 1768 and 1771. Forster was disappointed: ‘Everything is in bad shape except for botany’, he said, adding that there was ‘absolutely no understanding’ of natural history on display. Banks’ and Forster’s divergent views on natural history, as well as politics, came to the fore in the production and distribution of a single publication – Icones Plantarum (c.1800) – a book compiled from 129 botanical illustrations Forster had produced in the Pacific. Banks had purchased these images in 1776 and his ownership of them led to repeated conflicts with Forster, which grew in intensity as their political views diverged with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789. 

Expensive volumes

In addition to collecting, illustrating and describing thousands of species previously unknown to Europeans on voyages of discovery, a major part of the practice of natural history involved publishing large, expensive volumes of text and copperplate illustrations designed to present a systematic classification of species. From the 1760s, the hierarchic system developed by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, which involved grouping plants into kingdoms, classes, orders, genera and species, dominated British botanical practice. The Linnaean system subjected nature to a set of taxonomic rules, ordering plants according to a series of predetermined physical features. These divisions had been developed by Linnaeus since the 1730s, although they reached fruition with the publication of Species Plantarum in 1753, which combined a hierarchic system with Latin binomial names designed to represent the lower ranks of genera and species. The specificity and hierarchy of the Linnaean system combined with its strict reliance on specific physical characters, most notably the position of the stamens and stigmas in the flowers of plants, shaped the construction of botanical images. From 1794 Banks began to have 126 copper printing plates engraved, all of which have recently been identified, with images based on the botanical illustrations Forster produced in the Pacific. Banks named this book Icones Plantarum and paid special attention to the Linnaean system during the process of constructing the engraved plates and when ordering and binding the images. 

French Revolution

Banks’ production of Icones Plantarum coincided with the political upheaval of the French Revolution, which had major implications for the construction and distribution of natural history books during the 1790s. The flora of the Pacific, the original source of many of the species represented in Forster’s illustrations, became intertwined with a utopian vision that accelerated and reinforced revolutionary views of an egalitarian society. Erasmus Darwin, one of the most notable supporters of the French Revolution in Britain, combined ideas inspired by the Pacific with critiques of aristocratic social hierarchies, the Anglican Church and the taxonomic order of nature, which he based on the perceived egalitarian composition of Tahitian society and its sexual freedom as reported in the accounts of travellers such as James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville. In his Loves of the Plants (1791) Darwin wrote that ‘the society, called the Areoi, in the island of Otaheite, consists of about 100 males and 100 females, who form one promiscuous marriage’ and in a later letter to a friend he expressed the hope that the French would ‘preserve their liberty and spread the holy flame of freedom over Europe’. 

Natural systems

This challenge to established social and taxonomic structures was entwined with the new systems of classification developed in France by botanists such as Antoine de Jussieu and the revolutionary Michel Adanson. They developed ‘natural systems’ of classification, moving away from the Linnaean approach to defining species based on specific physical characters and instead comparing the more general physical features of species with one another, threatening to erode Linnaeus’ hierarchic ranks. The simultaneous challenges that natural systems and the political situation in France posed to social and scientific hierarchies were extremely worrying to the close-knit circle of wealthy British landowners and aristocrats who used their positions in society to patronise, practise and promote their version of natural history. Many naturalists, landowners and politicians aligned the hierarchy of the Linnaean system with the established aristocratic structure of British society; Edmund Burke, in his monumental Reactions to the Revolution in France (1790), compared the classification of nature into ‘known classes, genera and species’ with established social and religious hierarchies. Banks was a prominent member of this group and his position as a wealthy landowner and president of the Royal Society inspired his political loyalism towards the British monarchy and government, influencing  the construction, production and distribution of Icones Plantarum.

Pacific utopia

When he visited Tahiti in 1773 Georg Forster cautiously admired the relative equality between the three main classes of Tahitian society, observations that inspired his views on social reform and later revolutionary writings. He had seen plentiful supplies of food and a perceived lack of poverty brought about by a less hierarchic social structure when compared with that of Europe. The society Forster experienced in Tahiti became even more appealing when he and his father found it difficult to extract the £4,000 they deemed due to them from the Admiralty for their participation in the voyage. In 1778, Georg published a pamphlet entitled A Letter to the Right Honourable Earl of Sandwich, a bitter complaint against the First Lord of the Admiralty. Seeing the root of the injustice in the European courts, Forster began to view the utopia of social harmony and equality that he had encountered on Tahiti as a model to which Europeans should aspire. 

In 1788 Forster moved to the Rhineland city of Mainz and, by 1792 after the city had been occupied by the French army, collaborated with the occupying force, earning himself the reputation of the ‘best known supporter of the French Revolution in Germany’. Forster maintained that the Revolution – and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 – was part of an unavoidable natural cycle and a force of nature designed to induce social and economic harmony. These views earned him criticism from philosophers in Britain and in the German states. The poet, philosopher and physician Friedrich Schiller commented in a letter to a friend that ‘Forster’s conduct will certainly be criticised by everyone, and I can see in advance that he will derive nothing but shame and regret out of this business.’ 

Forster led a delegation to Paris in 1793, whose responsibility was to unite Mainz with the French Republic. Meanwhile the allied forces reoccupied Mainz, leaving Forster exiled in Paris. This was enforced after the Holy Roman Emperor Franz II passed a decree that labelled all German subjects who collaborated with the French as traitors. As a result of his revolutionary views, Forster was abandoned by his former German and British correspondents, including Banks, and was left in Paris to witness the brutality of the Terror. In a final letter to his wife, Therese, Forster commented that he had ‘no home, no fatherland, no kinsfolk any more; everyone who was otherwise attached to me has gone on to form other connections’. Forster died alone, bankrupt and exiled in Paris on 10 January 1794, half a world away from his utopian vision of the post-revolutionary society inspired by his time in Tahiti.

Kings of Arcadia

Banks’ views had also been formed in Tahiti, which he visited in 1769. Unlike Forster, however, he appreciated the hierarchy of Tahitian society, commenting in his journal that the scene before him was ‘the truest picture of Arcadia of which we were going to be kings’. Banks believed his social and economic position gave him sufficient authority to preside over this utopian society as a kind of monarch. After his return to England in 1771 and rapid social elevation through his election to the presidency of the Royal Society in 1778 and the award of a baronetcy in 1783, Banks built a ‘learned empire’ of naturalists. Figures such as the American chemist Benjamin Silliman described how Banks, ‘in the various departments of natural history’, has ‘by common consent become a kind of monarch over these intellectual dominions’. 

This position as a ‘monarch’ of natural history and a wealthy landowner inspired Banks’ hatred for the Revolution and the war that followed, which disrupted his network of naturalists across Europe and reduced his authority on the international stage. This was not helped by the execution and exile of many of his French colleagues, the most notable being the chemist and tax farmer Antoine Lavoisier, who was guillotined on 8 May 1794. The abbot and botanist Pierre André Pourret explained to Banks in 1791 that the ‘Revolution has overturned my fortune and my hopes in quick succession’, adding that this had caused his correspondence to dwindle. In response, Banks offered Pourret sanctuary in Britain, away from what he described as a ‘terrible calamity’. Banks’ London home soon became a haven for French émigrés.

The combination of Revolutionary ideals, the threat of a French invasion and the possibility of a revolt of the English lower classes concerned Banks, not least because he was one of the most prominent landlords in Lincolnshire. In 1794 he issued a pamphlet, Outlines of a Plan of Defence Against a French Invasion Intended for the County of Lincoln, in which he proposed the best means for defending his native county. It placed Banks’ support firmly behind William Pitt the Younger’s government and cemented his relationship with George III. Fears of political change, the horror of the events in France and the disruption of patronage and correspondence networks set Banks on a fiercely loyalist agenda throughout the Revolution. These views and his desire to maintain social and ‘natural’ hierarchies in his scientific practice, contributed to the commission of the plates for Icones Plantarum.

Producing the Plantarum

Georg Forster’s death had provided Banks with the freedom to produce Icones Plantarum, distancing the publication from a radical revolutionary agenda as well as any claims Forster might have made regarding the intellectual content of the images. Its 129 copperplate engravings, based on the botanical drawings Forster produced in the Pacific which Banks had purchased in 1776, were engraved in the mid-1790s by Banks’ resident engraver Daniel Mackenzie. 

Perhaps the most obvious impact of the Revolutionary Wars on Banks’ natural history work was the problem of obtaining materials. The plates for Icones Plantarum were engraved on both sides, halving the expenditure on the copper. This was essential, given that the need for copper in the smelting of bronze for armaments during the Revolutionary War caused the price of raw copper to almost double in the decade after 1788. This, coupled with an additional government duty on paper, meant that by the late 1790s the production of a large copperplate botanical book was something of a challenge. As the Dutch lawyer and naturalist Pieter Hieronymus van Westrenen wrote in a letter to Banks in 1798: ‘Times of wars and revolutions are not faiborable [sic] to literary productions, it makes that few books are coming out worth of any notice.’

Colour and shade

Many of the plates engraved for Icones Plantarum depict plants Forster collected and illustrated in Tahiti between August and December 1773. Several were produced as pen and ink illustrations and painted over in watercolour. The addition of colour and shade to the leaves of the plants of Tahiti could reflect the quality of light available on the island and convey the health and beauty of the plant itself – all of which serve to show Tahiti as an abundant utopian society. These illustrations were produced to preserve the physical structure of a plant before Forster dried it for his herbarium. After he purchased the illustrations from Forster in 1776, Banks had them bound according to the order stipulated by Linnaeus. Illustrations should be produced to the same scale as the living plant and depict the flowers and fruit, essential features for ascribing the plant a genera and species, the two lowest ranks of the hierarchic system of classification. For Banks, the ability to order these images according to a pre-ordained taxonomic hierarchy brought the botany of the Pacific in line with established European aristocratic social and political structures. 

Banks went to great lengths to standardise the copperplate images to ensure they all conformed to the Linnaean system. Shade and colour were removed from Forster’s images following Linnaeus’ instructions in Critica Botanica (1737), in which he stated that colour was a product of local conditions and could not be used as a distinguishing character. Banks was careful to produce a series of archetypal images that avoided features particular to a single botanical specimen from a specific geographical locality and emphasised certain physical features to support the placement of each species in Linnaeus’ system. For Banks, images were more important than textual descriptions. Accurate images made letterpress redundant, he held:

It will appear singular, at first sight, that engravings of plants should be published without the addition of botanical descriptions of their generic and specific characters; but it is hoped, that every Botanist will agree, when he has examined the plates with attention, that it would have been an useless task to have compiled, and a superfluous expense to have printed, any kind of explanation concerning them; each figure is intended to answer for itself every question a Botanist can wish to ask.

The death around 1800 of Daniel Mackenzie resulted in the last of Banks’ plates remaining incomplete; etched outlines are left awaiting their finer details. The combination of the death of the engraver and the problems caused by the war meant that Icones Plantarum was never completed. However, these were not the only factors which influenced the extraordinarily limited distribution of this publication. 

To understand the processes and controversy behind the publication of Icones Plantarum, it is necessary to step back to 1776 and the period that follows Banks’ purchase of Forster’s illustrations. Shortly after this event, the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman, who had travelled on Cook’s voyage after they made port in the Cape of Good Hope, asked Forster how much Banks had paid him. Sparrman commented that he ‘would prefer to send somebody less avaricious of collections than he [Banks] is’. Banks believed anything in his personal possession, including Forster’s illustrations, was his private property, both physically and intellectually. For example, in 1782, when Forster proposed to publish a ‘Spicilegia’ of miscellaneous images of plants and animals from the Pacific, Banks sent an angry response: ‘You will not be surprised at any steps which I may take in consequence of such a publication.’ And, in other cases, he threatened to prosecute authors who proposed to publish images from his collection. 

Property rights

Banks saw attempts to publish material from his collection as an attack on fundamental concepts of personal property. In 1783 Britain had just finished fighting the American Revolutionary War, during which American forces pirated printed books as a means of defying British authority in the New World. This was also the case in Dublin, where commercial publishers continually ignored copyright legislation, a practice that became identified with the Irish Rebellion of 1798. As a result of this entanglement of commercial publishing with radical political upheaval, Forster’s publication of materials from Banks’ collection became an act of defiance, not only against Banks’ authority, but that of the Admiralty. 

The association of commercial publishing with insurrection and violent political events reinforced Banks’ view that natural history books should be reserved for a select audience that would benefit from the information they contained. This practice was common among Banks’ contemporaries, such as John Stuart, the 3rd Earl of Bute, who ensured that only 12 copies of his Botanical Tables (1785) were published and then presented to naturalists and aristocrats who had interests in, as well as the ability to patronise, natural history. The selective distribution of natural history books continued an aristocratic gift economy that began in the 16th century. Presenting lavish publications as gifts secured Banks’ reputation as a patron of natural history and a gentleman who did not need to rely on profits from commerce for his income. Forster, in a letter to the German historian and political writer Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, described Banks as: 

A Monopolist of everything that comes from the Southern Seas, he hates my father, envies me, publishes nothing, but leaves behind his enormous work of 1700 copperplates as opus posthumum, because nobody can complete the text after Solander’s death, and enjoys for the rest of his life to have this work in his possession, so that people can always ask him if and when it will come out. 

As a result, those who wished to view this material had to do so under the strict supervision of Banks or his curators when they visited his library at 32 Soho Square.

For Banks, Forster’s original images of the plants of the Pacific retained vestiges of the perceived beauty of a region which had been embroiled in radical revolutionary thought from the late 1780s. Utopian visions of the Pacific, and especially the perceived egalitarian society of Tahiti, challenged European social structures, especially after the mutiny on HMS Bounty in 1789, which was often seen as a direct result of the time the crew spent in Tahiti. Banks’ efforts to erase any aspect of the perceived beauty and ‘utopian’ society of Tahiti from Icones Plantarum resulted in the removal of features such as colour to reduce the potential of associating these vibrant images with a plentiful society and ideas of liberty and sexual freedom. The Pacific origins of these images, Forster’s reputation as a radical revolutionary and Banks’ wish to portray himself as an aristocratic gentleman-naturalist strengthened the latter’s resolve to print Icones Plantarum privately and to distribute copies of it to a select group. 

Enlightenment views

Forster, however, believed that mass publishing was central to advance his position as a naturalist. This view was shared by notable Enlightenment figures, the most prominent of whom was Voltaire, whose major motivation for publishing was to use booksellers’ desire for profits to spread learning. When Forster attempted to publish the images of plants he had collected in the Pacific during his visit to London in 1790, Banks employed his private wealth and institutional power to stop him. In a letter to the philosopher Freiderich Heinrich Jacobi, Forster stated that: ‘I wished to move the book sellers to publishing my plant descriptions from the Southern Sea. The fear to offend a man like Sir Joseph Banks, who believes to have a monopoly on the Southern Sea plants, held them back.’ Indeed, Banks’ hold over London publishers was so advanced by the 1790s that he could actually stop publications. This position was reinforced after Pitt’s Government passed the Treasonable Practices Act of 1795, designed to halt the spread of radicalism in print. 

Secure orthodoxies

As a result, Banks only printed two copies of Icones Plantarum in the period around 1800 and kept one in his library. Banks gave the other to his friend and fellow botanist Aylmer Bourke Lambert, who could be relied on to reserve these images for a select group of botanists who would not use them to combine botanical knowledge with revolutionary ideas. Lambert had purchased Forster’s herbarium after the death of Johann Reinhold Forster in 1798 and he and Banks had a close relationship and similar political views. Lambert spent many hours in Banks’ library and herbarium and was an original founding member, alongside Banks, of the Linnean Society of London. The gift of Icones Plantarum united Banks’ and Lambert’s large botanical collections, securing the orthodoxies of British botany and natural history for decades to come.

Edwin Rose is currently completing a PhD in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.