Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (30 June 1817 – 10 December 1911) was an English botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For 20 years he served as director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, succeeding his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science.
Biography
Early years Hooker was born in Halesworth, Suffolk, England. He was the second son of Maria Sarah Turner, eldest daughter of the banker Dawson Turner and sister-in-law of Francis Palgrave, and the famous botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker, Regius Professor of Botany. From the age of seven, Hooker attended his father's lectures at the University of Glasgow, taking an early interest in plant distribution and the voyages of explorers like Captain James Cook. He was educated at the Glasgow High School and went on to study medicine at the University of Glasgow graduating with an MD in 1839.
His degree qualified him for employment in the Naval Medical Service. He joined the polar explorer Captain James Clark Ross's Antarctic expedition to the South Magnetic Pole after receiving a commission as Assistant-Surgeon on . On this expedition, Hooker was granted full access to the private library of Richard Clement Moody, then Governor of the Falkland Islands. Hooker described the library as 'excellent', and developed a close friendship with Moody.
Marriages and children
In 1851, he married Frances Harriet Henslow (1825–1874), daughter of Darwin's mentor, John Stevens Henslow. They had three daughters and four sons: William Henslow Hooker (1853–1942) Harriet Anne Hooker (1854–1945) married William Turner Thiselton-Dyer Charles Paget Hooker (1855–1933) Maria Elizabeth Hooker (1857–1863) died aged 6. Brian Harvey Hodgson Hooker (1860–1932) Reginald Hawthorn Hooker (1867–1944) statistician Grace Ellen Hooker (1868–1955)England 1891 census Piece RG12/554 Folio 99 Page 14 as seen on http://ancestry.com.auEngland 1901 census Piece RG13/886 Folio 52 Page 22 as seen on http://ancestry.com.auEngland and Wales Death Index, December Quarter of 1955 as seen on http://ancestry.com.au
Frances Harriet Henslow's contribution to his work included translating French botanical texts which Hooker edited.
After his first wife's death in 1874, in 1876 he married Lady Hyacinth Jardine (1842–1921), daughter of William Samuel Symonds and the widow of Sir William Jardine. They had two sons: Joseph Symonds Hooker (1877–1940) Richard Symonds Hooker (1885–1950).
Lady Hooker was elected a Fellow of the RSPB in 1905.
Sons Willy and Brian Hooker regularly corresponded with the chief government scientist in New Zealand, Sir James Hector. He sent his son Willy (aged 15) to stay in New Zealand with the recently married Hector in 1869, Willy was sickly and coughing up blood, and a warmer climate was recommended. Though well-behaved he was indolent. Hector sent him on a cruise on a Government steamer the Sturt with a son (also 15) of Colonel Haultain the Defence minister. Mrs Hector treated him like a younger brother. After eight months and in better health Hector sent him home to England, saying he had greatly improved. His father was grateful, and surprised when Willy passed the civil service examination. He got an administrative job in the India Office, and lived to age 89.
However, his third son, Brian, was a "great worry" to him. He qualified as a geologist and mining engineer at the Royal School of Mines but unable to get a job in Britain emigrated to Australia, where he married. He resigned a Queensland lectureship to invest (with his brother Willy) in an impressively named but cash-strapped gold-mining company which collapsed, the Queensland Minerals Exploration Company. Joseph was appalled; Brian could not support his wife and children or find employment.
In 1891, Hector sent a pessimistic report on a proposed tin mine on Stewart Island, and saw Brian in 1892 and 1893, after he left his family in Australia. Hector ceased to be involved with mining in New Zealand under the new Liberal government. Brian returned to his family in Australia in 1894.
Death and burial On 10 December 1911, after a short and apparently minor illness, Hooker died in his sleep at home, the Camp, Sunningdale, Berkshire. The Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey offered a grave near Darwin's in the nave but insisted that Hooker be cremated before.
His widow, Hyacinth, declined the proposal and eventually Hooker's body was buried, as he wished to be, alongside his father in the churchyard of St Anne's Church, Kew, a short distance from Kew Gardens. His memorial tablet in the church, with a motif of five plants, was designed by Matilda Smith.
Work
Voyage to the Antarctic 1839–1843
Hooker's first expedition, led by James Clark Ross, consisted of two ships, and ; it was the last major voyage of exploration made entirely under sail. Hooker was the youngest of the 128-man crew. He sailed on the Erebus and was assistant to Robert McCormick, who in addition to being the ship's Surgeon was instructed to collect zoological and geological specimens. The ships sailed on 30 September 1839. Before journeying to Antarctica they visited Madeira, Tenerife, Santiago and Quail Island in the Cape Verde archipelago, St Paul Rocks, Trindade east of Brazil, St Helena, and the Cape of Good Hope. Hooker made plant collections at each location and while travelling drew these and specimens of algae and sea life pulled aboard using tow nets.
From the Cape they entered the Southern Ocean. Their first stop was the Crozet Islands where they set down on Possession Island to deliver coffee to sealers. They departed for the Kerguelen Islands where they would spend several days. Hooker identified 18 flowering plants, 35 mosses and liverworts, 25 lichens and 51 algae, including some that were not described by surgeon William Anderson when James Cook had visited the islands in 1772. The expedition spent some time in Hobart, Van Diemen's Land, and then moved on to the Auckland Islands and Campbell Island, and onward to Antarctica to locate the South Magnetic Pole. After spending 5 months in the Antarctic they returned to resupply in Hobart, then went on to Sydney, and the Bay of Islands in New Zealand from 18 August to 23 November 1841. They left New Zealand to return to Antarctica. After spending 138 days at sea, and a collision between the Erebus and Terror, they sailed to the Falkland Islands, to Tierra del Fuego, back to the Falklands and onward to their third sortie into the Antarctic. When Hooker arrived on the Falkland Islands with the expedition of Ross, he developed a close friendship with Richard Clement Moody, the Governor of the Falkland Islands. Moody granted Hooker full use of his personal library, which Hooker described as 'excellent', and Hooker described Moody as 'a very active and intelligent young man, most anxious to improve the colony and gain every information respecting its products'.
Subsequently, the Ross expedition made a landing at Cockburn Island off the Antarctic Peninsula, and after leaving the Antarctic, stopped at the Cape, St Helena and Ascension Island. The ships arrived back in England on 4 September 1843; the voyage had been a success for Ross as it was the first to confirm the existence of the southern continent and chart much of its coastline.
Geological Survey of Great Britain In 1845, Hooker applied for the Chair of Botany at the University of Edinburgh. This position included duties at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Scotland, and so the appointment was influenced by local politicians. An unusually protracted struggle ensued, resulting in the election of the locally born and bred botanist, John Hutton Balfour. The Darwin correspondence, now public, makes clear Darwin's sense of shock at this unexpected outcome. Hooker declined a chair at Glasgow University which became vacant on Balfour's appointment. Instead, he took a position as botanist to the Geological Survey of Great Britain in 1846. He began work on palaeobotany, searching for fossil plants in the coal-beds of Wales, eventually discovering the first coal ball in 1855. He became engaged to Frances Henslow, daughter of Charles Darwin's botany tutor John Stevens Henslow, but he was keen to continue to travel and gain more experience in the field. He wanted to travel to India and the Himalayas. In 1847 his father nominated him to travel to India and collect plants for Kew. In 2011, a collection of glass plate slides of paleontological fossils, some prepared by Darwin, William Nicol and others, which had been lost following Hooker's brief tenure with the Survey, were rediscovered in the Survey vaults in Keyworth in Nottinghamshire, and they shed light on the international breadth of English scientific research in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Voyage to the Himalayas and India 1847–1851
On 11 November 1847 Hooker left England for his three-year-long Himalayan expedition. This was just 10 days after being granted two and a half years' leave from the Geological Survey to study fossil plants in India and Borneo on behalf of Kew and the Admiralty.Henry de la Beche to Lord Morpeth, 1 November 1847, scan of the original letter He would be the first European to collect plants in the Himalaya, but abandoned the projected visit to Labuan. He received free passage on , to the Nile and then travelled overland to Suez where he boarded a ship to India. He arrived in Calcutta on 12 January 1848, leaving on 28th to begin his travels with a geological survey party under 'Mr Williams', who he left on 3 March to continue travelling by elephant to Mirzapur, up the Ganges by boat to Siliguri and overland by pony to Darjeeling, arriving on 16 April 1848.
Hooker's expedition was based in Darjeeling where he stayed with naturalist Brian Houghton Hodgson. Through Hodgson he met British East India Company representative Archibald Campbell who negotiated Hooker's admission to Sikkim, which was finally approved in 1849 (He was later briefly taken prisoner by the Raja of Sikkim). Meanwhile, Hooker wrote to Darwin relaying to him the habits of animals in India, and collected plants in Bengal. He explored with local resident Charles Barnes, then travelled along the Great Runjeet river to its junction with the Teesta River and Tonglu mountain in the Singalila range on the border with Nepal.
Hooker and a sizeable party of local assistants departed for eastern Nepal on 27 October 1848. They travelled to Zongri, west over the spurs of Kangchenjunga, and north west along Nepal's passes into Tibet. In April 1849 he planned a longer expedition into Sikkim. Leaving on 3May, he travelled north west up the Lachen Valley to the Kongra Lama Pass and then to the Lachoong Pass. Campbell and Hooker were imprisoned by the Dewan of Sikkim as they travelled towards the Cho La in Tibet.Letter number 1558: To J.D. Hooker. 10 March 1854. The Darwin Correspondence Online Database. A British team was sent to negotiate with the king of Sikkim. However, they were released without any bloodshed and Hooker returned to Darjeeling, where he spent January and February 1850 writing his journals, replacing specimens lost during his detention and planning a journey for his last year in India. According to an 1887 journal written by Indian administrator Richard Temple, many of the rhododendrons found in English gardens of the time were grown from seeds collected by Hooker in Sikkim.