Botany, art and cultures meet Paradise Lost: Daniel Solander’s legacy
The museum had planned 2020 as a year to explore the impact of James Cook’s first Pacific voyage through a sailing program by the Endeavour replica and a suite of exhibitions. Despite COVID cancellations, one of the museum’s current exhibitions seeks to probe the scientific and cultural legacy of the original voyage of 1768–71, writes Daina Fletcher.
ON BOARD COOK’S ENDEAVOUR 250 years ago was Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander who, with his patron Joseph Banks, became famous as a result of this expedition. Paradise Lost: Daniel Solander’s legacy features artworks that explore his life and achievements and the effects of European contact on the Indigenous peoples encountered on the voyage. The core of this intimate exhibition, which sees Solander in New Zealand through the eyes of 10 contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand artists, was developed as a response to the 250th anniversary of Endeavour’s historic circumnavigation of New Zealand. Also on display are works from the museum’s collection of 337 copperplate engravings of Australian specimens collected from April to August 1770, published as Banks’ Florilegium and given to the National Maritime Collection by Dr Eric and Mrs Margaret Schiller. Daniel Solander (1733–82) was a student of the noted naturalist Carl Linnaeus at Uppsala University in the 1750s. He travelled to London in 1760, became engaged in cataloguing natural history collections in the Linnaean system and worked as assistant librarian at the British Museum from 1763. The following year he was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society, where he met the wealthy young amateur naturalist Joseph Banks, with whom he was to form a lifelong friendship and patronage relationship. 16
Signals 133 Summer 2020–21
New lands, new species
Solander subsequently joined Banks’ well-equipped scientific party on James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to the Pacific from 1768 to 1771, along with artists Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan. Their mission was to observe, collect and record plants and animals at sea and on shore, and to observe the customs of local peoples. On board the ship, Banks and Solander each had a cabin on either side of the commander’s great cabin, which became their shared workspace, as Banks described in 1874: 1 … we sat together until it got dark at the great table with our draughtsman directly across from us and showed him the manner in which the drawings should be done and also hastily made descriptions of all the natural history objects while they were fresh. When a long absence from land had exhausted fresh subjects we finished the former description and added synonyms from the books that we had carried along with us. After Cook’s circumnavigation of New Zealand from October 1769 to March 1770, Endeavour sought the mysterious southern continent then known to Europeans as New Holland. On 29 April 1770 Cook landed at Kamay, a place that he renamed first Stingray Bay and later Botany Bay due to the huge number of plants collected.
