Banks developed a grand network of correspondence with scientists and explorers all over the world. Although he shipped men and specimens to the furthest corners of the globe, the most intimate centers of Banks’s collection of distant lands were his houses, first at New Burlington Street, then at 32 Soho Square. As if finding the world in a grain of sand, scientists, dignitaries, politicians and explorers discovered here a microcosm of the nature and culture of foreign places. Here Banks assembled a massive library, open to scholars of all kinds, and, more impressively, tens of thousands of specimens, including many of the 30,000 he had collected on the Endeavour when he had sailed with Cook. The walls crawled with insects and sprouted plants. One visitor wrote “it would be absurd to attempt a particular description of what I saw there … his house is a perfect museum; every room contains an inestimable treasure.” In one room, Banks had “warlike instruments, mechanical instruments and utensils of every kind, made use of by the Indians of the South Seas”; in another were “an almost numberless collection of animals, quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibia, reptiles, insects … preserved in spirits.” And Banks had his collection available in reproducible form: “the choicest collection of drawings … 987 plants drawn and coloured by Parkinson; and 1300 or 1400 more drawn with each of them a flower, a leaf, and a portion of the stalk, coloured by the same hand; besides a number of other drawings of animals, birds, fish, etc. and what is more extraordinary still, all the new genera and species contained in this vast collection are accurately described.”40 In short, scientists and travelers first saw distant lands through Banks’s classified information. When they traveled to those lands, when they wrote about them, their perspectives were already shaped by what they had seen at Soho Square. In this way, Banks oversaw almost all voyages of discovery Britain undertook during the Romantic period, but Africa was one of his special favorites.
The African Association was composed of members representing a wide variety of Britain’s interests—from scientific to commercial. Interestingly enough, the membership also included the country’s two most prominent abolitionists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. They hoped, as historian John Gascoigne has demonstrated, that “the Association would be a means of combating the slave-trade.”41 But underlying the association’s goals, and those of the abolitionists, was the deeply entrenched belief that British occupation would enlighten Africa. In the process, Britain would enlighten itself about the lands beyond its reach. The original purpose of the association stated, “Certain however it is, that, while we continue ignorant of so large a portion of the globe, that ignorance must be considered as a degree of reproach upon the present age.”42
The desire to explore and enlighten very soon turned to a lust of conquest. In 1792, Banks said that colonizing Africa “did not in my opinion coincide with the purpose of the association,” but just seven years later, in 1799, he recommended “secur[ing] to the British Throne, either by conquest or by Treaty, the whole of the coast of Africa from Auguin to Sierra Leone.”43 He argued that such a colony would make Africans more “happy than they now are under the Tyranny of their arbitrary Princes,” and that Britons would support this colonization effort, especially because Africans would then be converted to the “Christian Religion” and the nation could then end slavery “upon the principles of natural justice & Commercial benefit.”44
This link between African exploration and the demise of British slavery has been carefully critiqued by present-day historians. Most agree, in fact, that abolitionists acted, to a greater or lesser degree, in tandem with the British desire to colonize the world. This particular line of thinking was initiated by Eric Williams, an Oxford historian who went on to become prime minister of postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago, in his 1944 Capitalism and Slavery.45 With originality and striking persuasion, Williams argued that the British slave trade, with all the money and industry it generated, created the conditions for the Industrial Revolution, and this, in turn, funded the large-scale scientific explorations of the nineteenth century. Abolition of the slave trade and emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean, Williams said, was thus a result of economics, not humanitarianism, and it certainly did not have anything to do with transcendental ideals. For historians ever since, Williams’s analysis has been the foundation for rethinking the relationship between antislavery opinion and industrial capitalism, humanitarianism and economics. More recently, David Brion Davis has argued that abolitionists were unwittingly acting out of self-interest in pushing for the end of slavery. Since most of them belonged to the rising middle class, it was in their best interest to support abolition, which promised, in turn, to boost capitalism. Davis writes, “British antislavery helped to ensure stability while accommodating society to political and economic change; it merged Utilitarianism with an ethic of benevolence, reinforcing faith that a progressive policy of laissez faire would reveal men’s natural identity of interests.”46 In short, exploration and subsequent colonization was the flip side of slavery.
In the realm of literature, exploration had different consequences. It brought Africans—or stories about them—home to Britain, but in different ways from the stories circulating about slaves. The first to do this with any success was a protégé of Joseph Banks, the Scottish explorer Mungo Park. In July of 1794, Park, an unemployed ship’s surgeon, found himself in London’s Thatched House Tavern in a meeting with Banks. Though the two were opposites in many ways—Banks was rotund, privileged, and, by this time, homebound, whereas Park was angular, solidly working-class, and moving around the world—they had in common a curiosity about Africa. So Banks drafted a resolution stating, “That Mr Mungo Park having offered his Services to the Association as Geographical Missionary to the interior countries of Africa; and appearing to the Committee to be well qualified for the Undertaking, his offer be accepted.”47 Even as he signed the commission, Park knew that almost every other European who had been sent to navigate the Niger River had died in the process. John Ledyard had gone west from Cairo and Daniel Houghton east from Gambia; neither one returned alive.
Still, Banks vetted, prepared, and sent Mungo Park by way of Gambia, and, as if to double his chances for successful African exploration, Banks also sent a young German named Friedrich Hornemann by way of Tripoli the same year. Both men went in the name of the African Association, and, while Hornemann died along the way, Mungo Park (whether by ingenuity or, more likely, sheer luck) returned in 1797, having accomplished most of his mission. Banks had sent him to explore the Niger Valley with the aim of “rendering the geography of Africa more familiar to my countrymen, and in opening to their ambition and industry new sources of wealth, and new channels of commerce.”48 So naturally, upon Park’s return, Banks and the African Association immediately set about shaping his experiences into a publication designed to open the unknown continent to the eyes of European readers. Banks recruited Bryan Edwards, who had already written the influential History, Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies as ghostwriter. Edwards made sure Park’s narrative was “interesting and entertaining,” and then he had Banks “cast [his] eye” over each chapter for final approval.49 The narrative certainly has dramatic elements, with the requisite amount of humor, sex, danger, and violence. At one point, Park himself is taken captive and is asked to give “ocular demonstration” of his private parts to a group of Moorish women.50 At another point he is robbed, stripped naked, and left for dead.51
Such intimate encounters riveted a public that had been saturated with stories of Africans as slaves. In Park’s estimation, Africans were sometimes fierce, sometimes friendly, most of the time clever, but never subservient. At one of