Sir Joseph records that his father gave him a scrap of a moss gathered by Mungo Park when almost at the point of death. It excited in him a desire of entering Africa by Morocco, and crossing the greater Atlas. That childish dream, he says, “I never lost; I nursed it till, half a century afterwards, . . . I did (with my friend Mr Ball, who is here by me, and another friend Mr G. Maw) ascend to the summit of the previously unconquered Atlas.”
In 1820 William Hooker was appointed to the newly founded Professorship of Botany at Glasgow. Of this his son Joseph writes, “It was a bold venture for my father to undertake so responsible an office, for he had never lectured, or even attended a course of lectures.” With wonderful energy he “published in time for use in his second course, the Flora Scotica in two volumes.” Sir Joseph’s mother was Maria, daughter of Dawson Turner, banker, botanist and archæologist, so that science was provided on both sides of the pedigree.
It would seem that Sir Joseph’s mother was somewhat of a martinet. When Joseph came in from school he had to present himself to her, and “was not allowed to sit down in her presence without permission.”
In 1832, Joseph, then fifteen years of age, entered Glasgow University, being already, in the words of his father, “a fair British botanist” with “a tolerable herbarium very much of his own collecting”; he adds, “Had he time for it, he would already be more useful to me than Mr Klotzsch” [his assistant].
It was in 1838 that Hooker got his opportunity,
for it chanced that James Clerk Ross, the Arctic explorer, was in 1838 visiting at the Smiths of Jordan Hill. In order that Joseph might meet Ross, both he and his father were invited to breakfast. The meeting ended in Ross promising to take him as surgeon and naturalist. There seems to have been a little innocent jobbery with folks in high places, and it fortunately turned out that the expedition was delayed so that Joseph had the opportunity of spending some time at Haslar Hospital.
The expedition seems to have been fitted out with astonishing poverty. Seventy years later he wrote, “Except some drying paper for plants, I had not a single instrument or book supplied to me as a naturalist—all were given to me by my father. I had, however, the use of Ross’s library, and you may hardly credit it, but it is fact that not a single glass bottle was supplied for collecting purposes; empty pickle bottles were all we had, and rum as a preservative from the ship’s stores.”
It is interesting to find Ross, in his preliminary talk with Hooker, saying that he wanted a trained naturalist, “such a person as Mr Darwin”—to which Hooker aptly retorted by asking what Mr Darwin was before he went out.
I imagine that Hooker was lucky in being taken on Ross’s voyage as a naturalist, since the primary object of the expedition was to fill up “the wide blanks in the knowledge of terrestrial magnetism in the southern hemisphere.”
It seems like a forecast of what was to be the chief friendship of his life, that Darwin’s