ABSTRACT
Stromness in the Orkneys on 15 October, where they remained for a week. Here they visited Skara Brae and Stennis to see the semicircle of stones and spent some time in opening up ancient tombs.5 On 22 October they left for Leith and arrived in Edinburgh a week later.6 The Scots Magazine published an item on the voyage, reporting that: ‘The gentlemen were very hospitably received by the inhabitants of Iceland, who are strong, simple, honest, and industrious, in general excellent players at chess, and exceedingly fond of spirits and tobacco.’7 After a three-week stay, Banks, Solander and Lind left Edinburgh for London on 19 November 1772.8
Was the Icelandic voyage a success or was it a scientic asco? In the New Oxford History of England, published in 1989, Banks is portrayed as an arrogant ‘primadonna’ having ‘initially outshone Cook in fame’ then being forced to go oŠ on a ‘less than successful Icelandic voyage’.9 There is of course no comparison to the Endeavour voyage. From Banks’s point of
view the expedition must in some ways have been disappointing. No volcanoes were in eruption – Hekla erupted on average only twice a century, the last time being in 1766 – a major eruption which lasted for two years leaving a eld of lava of some 25.1 square miles (65km2) – so Banks had unfortunately just missed one. These keen botanists found ‘but few plants from the lateness of the season’,10 though they could hardly have expected much. As far as is known only two species were directly introduced by Banks from Iceland: the Koenigia Islandica (Iceland purslane) and Salix myrtilloides (bog willow). And Bjarni Pálsson – who served the shark and whale – may well have told them that he himself, along with Eggert Ólafsson, had been the rst recorded persons to climb Hekla some twenty years earlier. Since then he had even been up a second time. In fact,
1 21 October 1722, Bjarni Jónsson to Solander, in Duyker and Tingbrand, Solander, pp. 302-5. 2 Espólín, Íslands Árbækur, XI, p. 3. 3 See Appendix 5. 4 According to Roberts. Banks did not note the date. 5 The excavations of Gordon Childe in the 20th century revealed the best-preserved Neolithic village in the
western world. See a detailed account of Banks’s visit in Lysaght, ‘Joseph Banks at Skara Brae and Stennis’, pp. 221-34.
