How the Royal Society shaped public science funding

The transit of Venus is an astronomical phenomenon that happens roughly twice in every century at a space of about 13 years. In the middle of the 18th century, there was a transit of Venus, when that planet travelled in between the sun and the Earth. For about 10 minutes, you could see a little black dot crawling across the surface of the sun.

There was an international programme to measure the transit of Venus from different places on the Earth, because by doing that, you could work out important dimensions of the solar system – for instance, how far away the sun was from the earth. So, for the second transit of Venus in the 18th century, the king and the Admiralty provided money for James Cook to go to Tahiti to observe and measure it. And Joseph Banks, who was a very wealthy young man and a fellow of the Royal Society, if not yet the president, announced that he was going to finance himself to travel with James Cook.

Cook and Banks landed in Tahiti and stayed there for about six weeks, carrying out their astronomical observations. Several European ships had been there before, so by this stage, the Tahitians knew what to expect and were rather wary of the new English arrivals. French ships, which had arrived previously, had already introduced sexually transmitted diseases, so the Tahitians were absolutely right to be rather wary of this shipload of British people.

We know a lot about what Cook and Banks and their shipmates felt when they arrived in Tahiti. What we don't know so much about is how the local Tahitians felt. There's a few scattered observations. For instance, they were surprised that Europeans rode their boats backwards and that they had such blonde hair. They were also very surprised that they attached such great significance to these metal objects with glass. They kept looking at the heavens and using triangular shaped brass instruments to play around with and write down numbers that seemed very vague and strange to the Tahitians. They were probably also pretty surprised by the clothes that the English people wore, because they usually were dressed in their full naval uniform.

From the English point of view, they thought that Tahiti was a wonderful place. They thought it was a paradise, because they found that all the women were very happy to have sex with them.

From the Tahitians’ point of view, there was one element that they really needed. There’s no iron on Tahiti. So the local women slept with the men from the ship in exchange for iron nails – to the extent that the carpenter had to issue a ban on taking any more iron nails out of the ship because it was getting dangerous. So from the British point of view, they'd arrived in this paradise where women were just longing to have sex with them. From the Tahitians’ point of view, these new arrivals were a wonderful source of iron who could be exploited. So, there's some exploitation happening on both sides.

In terms of building the Empire, Joseph Banks was absolutely crucial. He served on the African committee when that was first set up, and he knew that there was gold in Africa. He suggested, therefore, that it would be a very good idea if Britain seized most of the West Coast of Africa.

He had this wonderful paternalistic model in which it would be to everybody's benefit, Africans and British, if the Africans dug up all the gold in the mines and shipped it back to Britain, so that Britain would become wealthy. Africans would benefit at one remove, he argued, since they would be ruled by Britain and introduced to Christianity. In his words, Britain was going to civilise Africa.

Another country where he had enormous influence was Australia, since he was one of the very few people who'd been there. So, when the government was wondering what to do with all its prisoners (a lot of people were being imprisoned for quite small offences, like stealing food for themselves and their family, and the prisons were overflowing), Joseph Banks suggested that they ship them out to Botany Bay in Australia.

In terms of plant classification, Banks was a great supporter of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish taxonomist who set up the double name or binary system that we still use today.

Every species has two names; human beings, for example, are Homo sapiens. Linnaeus applied that system to plants, and although the Linnaean system is so familiar to us it seems like it must be natural, it is, in fact, quite arbitrary. It had a lot of critics at the time. Banks was one of the main people who ensured that the Linnaean classification system was the one that became the most important.

What Linnaeus did was base his system on the sexual characteristics of flowers. He divided flowers into 24 categories, depending on the number of male stamens that they have. The secondary classification system was based on the number of female pistils. So the most important category was how many male stamens; the secondary criterion was the number of female pistils.

It’s quite a common phenomenon in science that this human order is imposed on the natural world. It starts to seem obvious, like second nature. Then scientists can turn around and say, oh, look, in the plant kingdom, males are superior to females. If that happens in nature, then that must be true in human societies as well.