Banks by Grantlee Kieza

Author:Grantlee Kieza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2020-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

BANKS FIRST SAW THE coast of Iceland on 25 August 1772, and the Sir Lawrence encountered fishing boats there on the morning of the twenty-eighth. The boats sped off at the sight of an English vessel, their crews believing that war must have broken out with Denmark, but Solander eventually spoke to one of the fishermen in their common tongue of Norwegian, and the local man piloted the ship into Hafnarfjorour, about ten kilometres south of Reykjavík. At 4 p.m. on the twenty-ninth, Banks arrived ‘upon a country rougher & more rugged than imagination can easily conceive’.33

‘We seemed here to be in another world’, von Troil lamented; ‘we now only saw the horrid remains of many devastations.’ Under Denmark’s ‘rod of iron’,34 the Icelanders were skint: victims of bad politics, famine and all that ice, which according to von Troil caused ‘so violent a cold in 1753 and 1754, that horses and sheep dropped down dead . . . horses were observed to feed upon dead cattle, and the sheep [ate] of each other’s wool’.35 Grit and sand and snow were everywhere; there was very little grass and ‘no wood sufficient to be call’d Trees, the chief being Shrubs of Birch’. 36

No wonder Banks never saw any locals laughing. As recently as four years before his arrival, the volcano Hekla was spewing so much lava that it destroyed land as wide as an English county.37 But he immediately wanted to climb that dangerous mountain, known as the ‘Gateway to Hell’.

He called on the Norwegian-born governor, Lauritz Thodal,38 and was initially mistaken as a servant because he was dressed far more casually than his attendants in their blue coats, scarlet and silver waistcoats, and scarlet breeches.39

Banks was given the use of empty Danish warehouses as his base. He spent the first week in Iceland fishing and botanising, and making notes about two species previously unclassified: Iceland purslane and swamp willow.

On Sunday, 6 September, Governor Thodal and some of his family and staff came to dinner. The two French horn players entertained the dignitaries, and Banks’s chef, Antoine Douvez, turned out his finest fare on his boss’s new Wedgwood Queen’s Ware service. At about 8 p.m., the governor’s servants arrived with sturdy little mountain ponies, and the guests – men and women – galloped away over the rough lava fields.

Later that week, Banks and Solander led a group to see hot springs at Reykjavík, while the artists worked on drawings of local scenes, and Douvez cooked an eagle.

On the Endeavour voyage Banks had shown that he would eat just about anything except human flesh, and he ordered a traditional Icelandic dinner when he dined with Iceland’s surgeon-general Bjarni Palsson,40 a fellow naturalist who back in 1750 had made the first ascent on Hekla in conjunction with Eggert Ólafsson.41 Banks enjoyed the dried fish, sour butter and spirits but turned his nose up at a dessert made from shark and whale meat.

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