Joseph Banks paid his own way onto Cook's first Pacific voyage
When HMS Endeavour sailed in 1768, a 25-year-old landowner named Joseph Banks brought eight people along at his own cost: two naturalists, two artists and four servants from his Lincolnshire estate. He came home three years later famous, carrying the first major haul of Australian plants and a diary entry for an animal he spelled kanguru.
Money made his science possible. He inherited Revesby Abbey at 21 and left Oxford without a degree, though not before paying a Cambridge botanist to come and lecture him there. In 1766, at 23, he sailed to Newfoundland and Labrador, published the first descriptions of its plants and animals using the Linnaean system, and logged 34 bird species, among them the great auk, which would be extinct by 1844.
The Endeavour voyage, Cook's first, took him to Brazil, where he gave the first scientific description of bougainvillea, then to Tahiti for the transit of Venus, New Zealand and Australia's east coast. After the ship tore a hole in itself on the Great Barrier Reef, the crew spent almost seven weeks ashore at the Endeavour River while it was patched up. Banks, Daniel Solander and Herman Spöring collected intensively, and Sydney Parkinson drew almost 800 specimens. The resulting Florilegium did not appear in full until 1980 to 1990, in 35 volumes. Banks also took on Tupaia, a navigator and mapmaker from Raʻiātea, who translated for the expedition but died in the Dutch East Indies before reaching England.
Back home, the Admiralty found his demands for another voyage unacceptable and withdrew permission for him to sail, so he took Solander to Iceland instead, climbing Hekla and visiting the Great Geyser. He then spent more than 41 years as president of the Royal Society and turned Kew into arguably the world's leading botanical garden, sending out plant hunters such as Francis Masson. He backed Vancouver's voyage and Bligh's breadfruit missions, one of which ended in the Bounty mutiny, and funded William Smith's first geological map of a whole country.
He championed a British convict colony at Botany Bay and advised the government on Australian affairs for twenty years. Around 80 plant species carry his name, along with the genus Banksia.
Source: Joseph Banks
