WILLIAM WEBB ELLIS, COOK’S SCIENTIFIC ARTIST; PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 10, Issue 2, 1 October 1977, Page 10

WILLIAM WEBB ELLIS, COOK’S SCIENTIFIC ARTIST; PROBLEMS AND POSSIBILITIES

Michael E. Hoare

William Hodges, the artist on James Cook’s second voyage, in the Resolution (1772-75), was one whose graphic style and artistic perspectives were profoundly influenced by his Pacific and other extraEuropean experiences. In 1793 he wrote: A constant study of simple nature, it is well known, will produce a resemblance which is sometimes astonishing, and which the painter of ideal objects can never arrive at. 1

Cook’s three voyages contributed significantly to an evolution in artists’ ideas and perspectives on how to view, record, reproduce and compose visually the rich and ‘curious’ objects and phenomena seen in exploration. Science and the more practical interests of naval men, argues Bernard Smith, helped change the artist’s vision in the South Pacific, influencing him away from neo-classical or other preconceptions of art form to a more naturalistic and a more rigorously scientific—and hence accurate —record of what was seen: ‘typical landscape’ and interests in individual life or still forms or groups of such forms (including islanders and their natural and material environments) emerged as developing desiderata for the artist’s styles and skills. In consequence, the graphic records of Cook’s and later voyages became experimental; like the voyages themselves in all their aspects they explored and opened up new frontiers to the European experience. All this evolved in the Pacific, a vast region ripe to influence the European mind, science and ideas for another one hundred years and ready—for good or ill is not material in this argument —to be influenced by Europe in art, culture, religion and ways of life. ‘ln the end’, notes Smith, ‘scientific method triumphed in both the description of nature and man’. 2

‘Scientific method’ involves, of course, both theory and the trials and observations upon which theory advances —experimentation. In the latter, William Webb Ellis, surgeon’s second mate in the Discovery on the third voyage, stood high among Cook’s scientists and artists. Ellis strove to be both scientifically accurate and delicate in his artistic recreations and experimentally artistic in his work on views and landscapes and in the recording of individuals or groups—animal, vegetable or mineral. Of course, becoming an ‘experimental gentleman’ on Cook’s voyages was not in itself the sole passport to success in all ‘departments’ of natural philosophy and art —the stimulation, the advance (as in science itself) lay in the very trial and error, in the unknown ‘novelty’

of the experience. Novelty and curiosity counted for much but, increasingly, so too did technical competence as art, science and natural philosophy set more rigorous demands. In all these ‘branches’ Cook’s voyages opened up new facets in a new era in the European experience.

The 74 pages of drawings on 49 sheets of paper recently acquired by the Alexander Turnbull Library form an honest, unvarnished, immediate record by an experimental, visually perceptive, skilled hand and mind. They represent the honest striving by an eye unhindered or not conditioned, we must suppose, by classical or neo-classical artistic training—an effort to reproduce in Hodge’s words ‘a constant study of simple nature’. They represent, too, and graphically, the evolution of one man’s skill during ‘a long, tedious and disagreeable’ four years and three months of exploration (1776-80).

That third voyage was a fatal voyage; in lives a costly voyage. Valuable, skilled and influential were the men who died. For Ellis it meant the loss of his Captain, his scientific medical superior and his immediate patron. Beaglehole summarises the melancholy list: ‘On 4 October [l7Bo] the ships were in the Thames; without Cook, without Anderson, without Clerke’. 3 Those three influenced Ellis.

Ellis was not the sole young man to learn much from this voyage. His friend the bardic ‘highly Welsh’, highly literary and ‘darting’ David Samwell put it best in 1781: ‘there never was such a Collection of fine Lads take us for all in all, got together as there was in the Resolution & the Discovery’. 4 Among those likely lads, among the Andersons, Blighs, Burneys, Kings, Portlocks, Rious, Sam wells, Vancouvers and so on, William Webb Ellis stands as perhaps the most obscure.

His graphic legacy (now considerably extended by this latest collection) and one book—a surreptitious career-destroying two-volume work on the voyage —are his gifts to posterity from those floating, questing, highly important ‘schools’ of Pacific science and exploration led by the master, Cook. And of Ellis’s posterity we know more than of his antecedents. What we know about him, anyway, is little enough.

He was, said Samwell, his friend and fellow professional medical man (Samwell sailed in Resolution as surgeon’s mate and then, after Anderson’s death, as surgeon in Discovery from August 1778), ‘ a genteel young fellow and of a good education’. 5 He joined Discovery on 22 March 1776. Behind him was a Cambridge education and some medical experience at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, that ancient venerable institution. 6 Here is a glimpse, perhaps, of where his artistic delicacy and precision may have been enhanced in the study and drawing of anatomy. But that, like much else with Ellis, is speculation.

On the voyage through his pen, pencil and brush he becomes a more real young man. He had, notes Beaglehole, ‘a patron in Banks’ 7 —Banks, now the scientific stay-at-home but Banks still the scientific supercargo

in absentia on all great voyages, English and others, from Cook onwards. Ellis’s Banksian patronage was mediated through that devil-may-care and rather whimsical man Charles Clerke (1743-79). Consumptive, ailing, dying, Clerke ‘in the Resolution at sea’, bereft of Cook and burdened with his command, wrote to Banks on 10 August 1779 off Kamchatka. This valedictory letter —Clerke knew he was to die soon—is a ‘document that carries most pathos in all the records of these voyages’. 8 It gives us, too, some of our most valuable clues concerning Ellis’s rise to notice, to his emergence, in short, as a scientific artist.

Gierke, we surely must conclude, had seen some early talent in his surgeon’s mate. Perhaps he discerned it during that first desperate ‘damn’d long stretch’ 9 from England to the Gape between August and November 1776 as Clerke, belatedly released to his command from the King’s Bench Prison, pushed Discovery to overhaul Cook, three weeks in front. Did Clerke see in Ellis, too, a kindred spirit ‘down on his luck’, for Ellis, slender evidence suggests, was, like Clerke, not a man of unlimited means? Together anyway, decided Clerke, they would ‘serve’ Banks in art, in science, in collecting. Clerke willed to Banks in that last letter the ‘best collections of all kinds of matter I could that have fallen in our way in the course of the voyage’. Collecting, however, was hindered by poor health. Among what there was Banks might ‘find many . . . worthy of your attention and acceptance. I have bequeated you the whole of every kind, there are great abundance so that you will have an ample choice’. 10 But abundance of what? Drawings, specimens, observations, artifacts? There came also with the collection ‘a very worthy young man’, W. W. Ellis. This courier would ‘furnish [Banks] with some drawings & accounts of the various birds which will come into your possession’. This surgeon’s mate, dictated Clerke to King,

has been very useful to me in your [ i.e . Banks’s] service in that particular, & is I beleive [.hc] a very worthy young man & I hope will prove worthy of any services that may be in your way to confer upon him. 11 Worthiness, art, science and a dying commander’s testimonial therefore gained Ellis, newly arrived at Deptford in October 1780, a ready entree into the Banksian salons at Soho Square. By Banks he was certainly ‘noticed’. But, just over twelve months later, relations between patron and artist were low and they involved money. Like the Forsters before him—and others would follow—Ellis threw himself on Banks’s generosity. His collateral was his drawings. Ellis, bludgeoned, blinded, fooled, avaricious merely (we do not know precisely) had turned in his poverty first to a publisher and offered to

write a book on the third voyage. His publisher, as sometimes those gentlemen did, treated him badly.

On 14 December 1781 G. Robinson of Paternoster Row published twenty-one dated engravings for inclusion in Ellis’s book. Only three of those engravings were, it seems, supervised or done by Ellis himself. 12 The rest, all based upon Ellis’s voyage sketches or paintings, some of the elements of which can be clearly related to the Turnbull collection, were farmed out, such was the haste, to other engravers—J. Collyer, J. Heath, E. Scott and W. Walker.

The book appeared in 1782 as the two-volume An Authentic Narrative of a Voyage performed by Captain Cook and Captain Clerke in His Majesty 1 s ships Resolution and Discovery during the years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779 and 1780; in search of a north-west passage between the continents of Asia and America. Including a faithful account of all their discoveries, and the unfortunate death of Captain Cook. (London; ‘Printed for G. Robinson . . .; J. Sewell . . .; and J. Debrett . . .’). It had a title to sell; a title, as a first account, to capture a public agog for more on the immortal Cook. It must have sold well for it went soon to a second edition in London in 1783. In the same year an abridged translation by Johann Christoph Adelung appeared in Frankfurt and Leipzig. 13 In 1782, such was the interest, George Forster devoted eight pages to a review of the first English edition in the influential Gottingischen Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen. 14

But Ellis’s book did not enrich him personally and its engravings certainly did not do him justice as an artist. Banks, the Board of Admiralty and others were not, it seems, amused. The book, writes Beaglehole, is ‘inadequate but interesting’; the two volumes are ‘at least .. . unpretentious’. 15 In the latter characteristic we might say in mitigation, they were perhaps like their author. Samwell and his ‘fine lads’ read the Narrative and by May 1782 were ready to pronounce upon it. Samwell wrote that they all agreed

. . . that the greatest part of it is written from Memory; he tells no Lies ’tis true but then he does not tell you half the odd adventures we met with; it is an unentertaining outline of the voyage . . , 16 It is Ellis’s book, however, that we must first take in the hand when we study his landscapes, drawings and views. It is suggested that inscriptions on the majority of the Ellis drawings now in the Turnbull are contemporary with the drawings themselves. 17 Volume and page references on the drawings relate also to passages in Ellis’s Narrative or plates therein. Examples of this occur in the drawing of the harbour (probably Christmas Harbour) in Kerguelen’s Land (vol. I, p. 12); the ‘South View of Mangia-nooe’ (Mangaia), Cook

Islands (vol. I, p. 33); ad in the detailed pencil sketch of a village on Anamooka (Nomuka), Tongan Islands, with an inscription referring to vol. I, p. 59. Such inscriptions, if by Ellis himself (and strong evidence points to the fact that they are) provide, of course, a very useful aid in identifying the more precise locations of the subject drawings or paintings. 18

One point is clear; the art historian of Cook’s voyages will have in these Ellis drawings —many of them experimental as the artist wrestled with problems of proportion, perspective and representation, especially in his human figure work —a most unusual and useful guide to the collection of one artist’s skills and technique as the voyage progressed. For there is no doubt that Ellis improved with time in his human figures. His representation of Polynesians is still very much ‘European’ but, nearer the end of the voyage, his depiction of Aleut Eskimos (see e.g. ‘A man of Unalaschka’, folio 41 in the collection and plate VII), shows how much his technique had improved. Of interest, too, in the collection are Ellis’s experiments in positioning, proportion, symmetry and shape of the human figure (see e.g. ff. 16b, 29a and b) .

Banks was, it seems, genuinely sorry that Ellis compromised his future career by publishing An Authentic Narrative. . . On 23 January 1783 he wrote to Ellis, who may still have been living at his old address in Gough Square, Fleet Street, chiding the younger man for not seeking his advice before publishing the book. 19 Banks, the implication is clear, would have used his immense influence at the Board of Admiralty to further Ellis’s naval and hence, perhaps, his medical and artistic careers. The appearance of the surreptitious account drove a formal wedge between Ellis and his patron and erstwhile employers. But just how effective was that wedge—was it final ?

By the end of 1781 and certainly by early in 1782 Ellis was on his beam ends. He had been to Banks for a loan of £3O, got it, and in a last move of sheer desperation had gone again to Soho Square bearing some ‘drawings’. Banks, generous as ever, cancelled the debt and gave Ellis a further £2O for the ‘drawings’. He also offered Ellis assistance in gaining some revenge or satisfaction with the booksellers (perhaps Robinson of Paternoster Row?) ‘for his Judaic treatment’. ‘lf you would heartily join in it I would assist’. 20 What did Ellis do, apart from writing a book, between his arrival home in October 1780 and his apperances before Banks begging—for such it must have been—late in 1782 or thereabouts? We know something. He worked on drawings for plates for the official publication of the third voyage. That, at least, is what John Webber (1752-98), the official artist on the voyage, reveals in a letter to Banks of 27 September 1782. 21 Now here are interesting, fascinating facets of Ellis the artist; how much did he work with Webber during and after

the voyage and how much part, disgraced by his Authentic Narrative albeit, did he play in the art and engraving work for that much delayed official Voyage to the Pacific Ocean . . . for making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere (3 vols, London, 1784)? What, we must now ask of the art historian, are the connections between Ellis’s and Webber’s views and paintings in their various forms—of Christmas Harbour, for example, at Kerguelen? 22 ‘No voyage undertaken in the days before photography,’ writes Bernard Smith, ‘ever returned so well documented with pictorial illustrations’ as this third voyage of Cook. ‘Nor had so great an area of the earth’s surface come under one artist’s observation’. 23 We must now say two artists. In Smith’s book William Ellis is relegated—indexed as a ‘seaman’!—to an acting ‘natural-history draughtsman’, as scientific artistic assistant to the surgeon and excellent unofficial naturalist, William Anderson. Of Ellis’s delicate landscapes, of his achievements in toning using his characteristic grey-greens and greenish-yellow, we read nothing in Smith. But it must have been on those landscapes and upon the finishing and perfecting of his natural history drawings that Ellis laboured during 1781-82 and certainly later.

They brought back so many drawings and charts from the third voyage that a committee, with Banks and Webber involved, sat to select those which would go into the official narrative. 24 That was one reason why it was so delayed. Ellis must have been associated with that enterprise ; even if only on the fringe as an adviser. He was certainly intimately—in art at least —associated with and influenced by Webber. Bernard Smith speaks of Webber as lacking ‘Hodges experimental attitude to his art’; Webber is

. . . essentially illustrative. He sought to depict as faithfully as he could not only memorable incidents but also the dresses, houses, and customs of the people visited on the long voyage. He drew vegetation both in its individual plant forms and in mass with great care and attention as though he was seeking to satisfy the critical eye of professional botanists. Indeed, it is likely that the care which he took in thus depicting plant form was influenced by the sustained interest in botany which characterized the three voyages. This must be stressed. For the minute precision of his rendering of plant forms is a feature only of his finished work. 25

Webber was, in short, scientifically acurate —or strove to be. In Ellis he found a ‘complement’, one who was, Beaglehole writes, a ‘relief’ from Webber yet by no means an equal contributor to our visual impression of the voyage; a bonus, not part of the documentary bargain struck by the Admiralty. 26

Dr Peter Whitehead, editing for publication some of the fish drawings from Cook’s voyages, makes the perceptive remark that in his drawing Ellis sometimes (often?) looks over Webber’s shoulder. 27 What do we have from Ellis the scientific artist? Certainly his most widely used drawings have been those which he passed (and sold?) to Banks after the voyage: ‘A Collection of Drawings executed between 1776 and 1780 by William Ellis surgeon’s mate on HMS Discovery and Resolution during Captain Cook’s Third Voyage to the Pacific’. This bound volume of 115 paintings and pencil drawings is in the British Museum (Natural History), London, and consists of representations of 90 birds (ff. 7-76), 15 fishes (ff. 97-111) and the rest of crustaceans and mammals, including a walrus. The bird drawings Latham, the ornithologist, for his eighteenth century descriptions. In her work on the Banksian collection of bird drawings Averil Lysaght (together with those of the Forsters and Parkinson) were used by John notes that those by Ellis ‘are water-colour drawings of considerable charm and delicacy’ and in many cases include life-size pen and ink sketches of the head of the bird which helps to identify the species. 2B

Dr Lysaght’s ornithological work is the most complete yet on any of Ellis’s drawings and paintings. Obviously the pencil, ink and wash drawings of whole birds, birds’ heads and feet in the Turnbull collection, which display the characteristic Ellisian fineness and delicacy, must be considered as a part or perhaps a stage in the evolution of the drawings which finished up in the Banksian Library (see ff. 32-5, 38 (see plate XI), 40 (see plate IX), 42 and 48 of the collection). Beaglehole reproduces a number of Ellis bird drawings in Cook’s Journals in black and white and Murray-Oliver some of the Hawaiian species, in colour. 29

If Webber is the botanical illustrator of the third voyage, mainly within his broader compositions—very few formal botanical illustrations have survived—then we must allow that Ellis, apart from the zoological interest and emphasis he shared with Anderson, has some claim through his drawings to a successful although perhaps minor interest in accurate geological illustration (see ff.l, 39, 43a (see plate VIII) and 43b). He also displays, like Hodges, a fascination with atmospheric and light effects. He makes, however, no concessions to classical or neo-classical form and composition in landscapes. 30

Perhaps topography and the production of coastal profiles were, if he did not start with anatomy, the means and media whereby Ellis came to his art. The detailed pencil drawing (folio sa) and the ink and colour wash drawing (folio 4, see plate III) of Mangaia Island are, surely, earlier studies for the watercolour drawing ‘View of Discovery Island’ (Mangaia, Cook Islands), signed and dated in 1779, and now in the Hocken Library, Dunedin. As Janet Davidson points out elsewhere, Ellis

had a keen eye for topographical detail and this collection certainly enhances his reputation in this area. Before the acquisition of these 131 drawings for critical scholarship, Ellis was represented in the British Museum (Natural History) by the 115 drawings and paintings aforementioned, by 16 watercolour landscapes in the Rex Nan Kivell Collection in the National Library of Australia, Canberra; in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (10), the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Honolulu (3), the Mitchell Library, Sydney (1), the Public Record Office, London (1) and in the Hocken Library, Dunedin (1). Compared with Webber his known representation and output seems small. All the more welcome, therefore, to wider ‘Cook scholarship’ are these Turnbull acquisitions. Since, apart from the astronomer William Bayly and the Kew gardener David Nelson, no civilian scientists were carried on the third voyage, it is to the naval ‘scientists’ Anderson, King and Ellis that we must look for the scientific record of this exploration.

Until now Ellis has been the least known of Cook’s artists and scientists. Any addition to the body of information concerning him is welcome to all scholars of Cook. Ellis—mute except for his book, drawings, paintings, a couple of letters and some scanty notes —leaves us tantalized and puzzled. No Ellis log is known or none has survived, although Samwell said he helped Clerke write up ‘his log &c’ 31 Whitehead has pointed to the ‘remarkable contrast’ between the ‘determination, courage, good planning and great care’ exhibited by all the scientific staff of Cook’s three voyages and the later ‘delays, misfortunes, dissensions, intrigues (and at times downright malice) that so beset the publication of the results’. 32

Through his own folly or straitened circumstances Ellis perhaps became part of the ‘misfortunes’. But we would like to think the magnanimous Banks soon forgave him, even if he could do little to advance him in the Navy. The Forsters, whose career Ellis must have felt was something like his own with debts, unofficial narratives, sales of drawings to Banks and so on, returned to Germany to pursue their careers. In 1785—perhaps guided or recommended by Banks—William Webb Ellis took ship for the Continent, going (so it is said) to take up an appointment under the patronage of the ‘radical and rational’ Habsburg Emperor Joseph II (1741-90) for a voyage of discovery. But Ellis’s odyssey ended in June 1785 when he fell to his death from the mainmast of a ship before reaching Ostend. 33 To know more of Ellis, to find more relics of Ellis and put flesh on to that ‘worthy’, delicate surgeon and artist we will need to search some Continental archives; to search, too, in Cambridge and St Bartholomew’s for an undergraduate and a medical student. Of seven

of the crowded creative last years of a young man’s life we know something.

On a voyage where, allegedly, Cook cursed all civilian scientists and ‘science into the bargain’ 34 Ellis, approved by naval commanders to prosecute science and art, is a bonus. Anything he adds is noteworthy.

NOTES 1 Smith, Bernard. European vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850. . . Oxford, 1969, p. 58 (quoting from Hodges, William. Travels in India, 1793, p. 153). 2 Ibid, p. 7. 3 Beaglehole, J. C. The Life of Captain James Cook. London, 1974, p. 686. 4 Ibid, p. 501, Samwell to Gregson, 20 November 1781. 5 Cook, James. The journals . . .; 111, The voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780. Edited by J. C. Beaglehole. 2 parts. Cambridge, 1967, p. lxxxvi (quoting Samwell to Gregson, 16 May 1782). This work subsequently referred to as Journals 111. 6 The Gentleman’s Magazine, LV, Pt. 11, 1785, p. 571. This is the only short obituary notice so far known on Ellis. 7 Journals 111, p. lxxxvi. 8 Beaglehole, op. cit., p. 682. 9 Journals 111, pp. 1513-4, Clerke to Banks, 1 August 1776. 10 Ibid, p. 1542-4, Clerke to Banks, 10 August 1779. Original in the Mitchell Library, Brabourne Papers, MS 78 -1 . 11 Ibid. 12 Artist and engraver are given for these plates. 13 Zuverldssige Nachricht von der dritten und letzten Reise ... A copy is in the Alexander Turnbull Library. The best bibliographical description of Ellis’s books is in du Rietz, Rolf. Bibliotheca Polynesiana . . . Oslo, 1969, pp. 126-7. 14 St. 54, 4 May 1782, pp. 433-40. 15 Journals 111, p. ccvii. 16 Ibid, Samwell to Gregson, 16 May 1782. 17 A collection of drawings executed between 1776 and 1780 by William Ellis . . ~ typescript catalogue prepared (1975?) by the South Sea Library, London. This catalogue, copies of which are in the Alexander Turnbull Library, provides the first catalogue of the collection. It contains the numbers of drawings referred to in the text hereafter. 18 Evidence is presented briefly in the above catalogue. 19 Banks to Ellis, 23 January 1782, copy in Dawson-Turner Copies, 2, 89, British Museum (Natural History). See also Smith, Edward. The Life of Sir Joseph Banks . . . London, 1911, pp. 52-3. Ellis had addressed an apologetic letter of 25 December 1781 to Banks from Gough Square, Fleet Street, just as his book was coming from the press. See The Banks Letters . . . edited by W. R. Dawson, London, 1958, pp. 220-1. 20 Banks to Ellis, 23 January 1782. 21 Webber to Banks, London, 27 September 1782, Banks Letters, p. 862. 22 A watercolour, ‘View of Christmas Harbour in Kerguelen’s Land, 1776’, attributed to Webber, is in the Dixson Library, Sydney, and another wash drawing of the same picture is in the British Museum. The Alexander Turnbull

Library Ellis Collection contains a detailed wash and ink drawing of a harbour in ‘Kerguelen’s Land’ which may relate to the Ellis watercolour in the Nan Kivell Collection (No. 53P) of the National Library of Australia, Canberra. See Vaughan, T. and A. A. St. C. M. Murray-Oliver, Captain Cook R.N. . . . Portland, 1974, pp. 62-3. 23 Smith, Bernard, op. cit., p. 78. 24 Beaglehole, op. cit., pp. 691-2. 25 Smith, op. cit., p. 77. 26 Journals 111, p. ccxiii, which see for Beaglehole’s fuller assessment of Ellis’s contribution to the third voyage ‘graphic record’. 27 Whitehead, P. J. P. Forty Drawings of Fishes made by the Artists who accompanied Captain James Cook on his three voyages . . . London, 1968, p. xv. Whitehead describes Ellis as one of the voyage’s ‘scientific staff’. The range and quality of fish drawings published is wide. 28 Lysaght, A. M. ‘Some Eighteenth Century Bird Paintings in the Library of Sir Joseph Banks’, Bull. Brit. Mus. (Nat. Hist.) Hist. Ser. 1 (6), 1959, pp. 251-371, p. 322. Ellis’s birds are listed herein, pp. 322-39. 29 Murray-Oliver, A. A. St. C. M. Captain Cook’s Hawaii . .., Wellington, 1975, plates 54-7. This work also contains other Hawaiian engravings and drawings by Ellis, including two of fishes (plates 58-9). 30 See e.g. ‘View up the Valley which goes from Matavai-Bay; with the River, in the Island Otaheite, South Sea’, Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia, Canberra. Reproduced in colour in the Alexander Turnbull Library’s exhibition catalogue (compiled by A. Murray-Oliver) The Rex Nan Kivell Collection of Early New Zealand Pictures, Wellington, 1953. 31 Journals 111, p. ccvii, Samwell to Gregson, 16 May 1782. As Beaglehole notes this is difficult to follow since Clerke’s extant logs are in Clerke’s own hand. It is the ‘&c’ of which we would like to know more. 32 Whitehead, op. cit., p. x. 33 The Gentleman’s Magazine, L V, Pt. 11, 1785, p. 571. 34 The episode is reported by J. R. Forster, Journals 111, p. 502.