Fact meets fiction

As per the recommendation of one of my colleagues, to whom I mentioned my love of The Luminaries, I am now reading The Signature of All Things. This is by Elizabeth Gilbert, who also wrote Eat Pray Love, unleashing the stream of 'going to find myself in another country' literature that we're still being flooded by. The Signature of All Things, however, is surprisingly good. It is quite similar to The Luminaries in style (although without the astrological references) and setting, with some strong female characters and lots of historical details. Somehow, there is this whole new market for nineteenth century and early twentieth century stories, as also shown by the many new BBC tv series coming out. Which is good for me, because I like both the period and most of the stories.
Apart from this novel, I'm also reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, because someone gave me a book on the Higgs particle and this confused me so much that I realised I hadn't actually read Bryson's more general audience work, so I decided to read that one first. And it's great, of course; hilarious but informative, colourful but factual. I hope I will be able to talk in more detail to my chemistry and physics colleagues after finishing this work.
Now the interesting thing was that in one single day, I read about the same person in both works. This was Joseph Banks, an English naturalist living in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The father of the protagonist in The Signature works for this man for a while, before starting up his own plant enterprise. He is quite a minor character, interesting because he enables the protagonists father to get on in life, but no more than that.  Just a couple of hours after reading this, I read about the same Banks in Bryson's work. As it turned out, the man has really lived, he wasn't someone Elizabeth Gilbert made up.
Fact meeting fiction. I must have encountered this before, but no proper example springs to mind. Somehow, it made The Signature a more interesting book. Some of this has really happened! Funnily enough, I loved finding this out by myself, and would have appreciated it less if it had the 'based on a true story' recommendation stamped all over it, as is the rage with so many movies (and tv series) these days. Also, I would have liked the novel just as much if I hadn't accidentally found out that it's partly based on real people (which should have been obvious because Captain Cook is also mentioned, but that's such a famous name that she may have just put that in to lend the story some credibility, whereas Banks is so obscure that you wouldn't know from just reading about him). It just adds that little bit extra, a dimension that wasn't there before but that makes one wonder about the rest of the characters, and all the events.

I haven't actually looked whether the main character and/or her family are also based on real historical people. I want to finish reading the novel, and appreciate it in its own right, before I look into that. Somehow, it makes it feel like I'm cheating on the author when I check this, also because the 'based on true events' wasn't splattered all over the cover. Apparently, she also wants me to appreciate it without that recommendation. And also, it wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't based on real events, it would just give extra sparkle to an already wonderful novel.