A letter from Sydney Parkinson in Batavia to Dr John Fothergill

In the summer of 1980 while I was searching unsuccessfully for the date of Sydney Parkinson’s birth, generally assumed to be about 1745, I found in the Manuscript Collection of the Friends House Library, Euston Road, London, a letter written by Sydney Parkinson on 16 October 1770, live days after the Endeavour had anchored in Batavia Road. A version of this letter published in a Quaker journal in 1911 (1) appears to have been overlooked in the many recent publications on the voyages of Captain James Cook. Since it is apparently the only letter by the young artist to have survived in manuscript it is of exceptional interest, quite apart from its contents which throw light on Joseph Banks and Dr John Fothergill, the eminent Quaker physician and horticulturalist who supplied Banks with one of his trained collectors for the voyage.