Sir Joseph Banks, 1st Baronet (19 June 1820)Sir Joseph Banks, Baronet. Britannica.com. Retrieved on 22 June 2015. was an English naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences.
Banks made his name on the 1766 natural-history expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador. He took part in Captain James Cook's first great voyage (1768–1771), visiting Brazil, Tahiti, and after 6 months in New Zealand, Australia, returning to immediate fame. He held the position of president of the Royal Society for over 41 years. He advised King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, sending botanists around the world to collect plants, he made Kew the world's leading botanical garden. He is credited for bringing 30,000 plant specimens home with him; amongst them, he was the first European to document 1,400.
Banks advocated British settlement in New South Wales and the colonisation of Australia, as well as the establishment of Botany Bay as a place for the reception of convicts, and advised the British government on all Australian matters. He is credited with introducing the eucalyptus, acacia, and the genus named after him, Banksia, to the Western world. Around 80 species of plants bear his name. He was the leading founder of the African Association and a member of the Society of Dilettanti, which helped to establish the Royal Academy.
Early life
Banks was born in Argyll Street, Soho, London, the son of William Banks, a wealthy Lincolnshire country squire and member of the House of Commons, and his wife Sarah, daughter of William Bate. He was baptised at St James's Church, Piccadilly, on 20 February 1743, Old Style.George Suttor, ed., Joseph Banks, Memoirs Historical and Scientific of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks (Parramatta: E. Mason, 1855), p. 19 He had a younger sister, Sarah Sophia Banks, born in 1744.Hill, J.W.F. (1952) The Letters and Papers of the Banks Family of Revesby Abbey, Lincoln Record Society, vol. 45, noted in Patrick O'Brian, Joseph Banks, A Life, 1987 p. 16
Education
Banks was educated at Harrow School from the age of nine and then at Eton College from 1756; the boys with whom he attended the school included his future shipmate Constantine Phipps.
As a boy, Banks enjoyed exploring the Lincolnshire countryside and developed a keen interest in nature, history, and botany. When he was 17, he was inoculated with smallpox, but he became ill and did not return to school. In late 1760, he was enrolled as a gentleman-commoner at the University of Oxford. At Oxford, he matriculated at Christ Church, where his studies were largely focused on natural history rather than the classical curriculum. Determined to receive botanical instruction, he paid the Cambridge botanist Israel Lyons to deliver a series of lectures at Oxford in 1764.Gascoigne, John (2004) "Banks, Sir Joseph, baronet (1743–1820)", in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, .
Banks left Oxford for Chelsea in December 1763. He continued to attend the university until 1764, but left that year without taking a degree.He was, however, awarded an honorary degree by Oxford on his return from his voyage to the South Seas, see "Banks, Sir Joseph", in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Scribner, 1970. His father had died in 1761, so when Banks reached the age of 21, he inherited the large estate of Revesby Abbey, in Lincolnshire, becoming the local squire and magistrate, and dividing his time between Lincolnshire and London. From his mother's house in Chelsea, he kept up his interest in science by attending the Chelsea Physic Garden of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and the British Museum, where he met the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander. He began to make friends among the scientific men of his day and to correspond with Carl Linnaeus, whom he came to know through Solander. As Banks's influence increased, he became an adviser to King George III and urged the monarch to support voyages of discovery to new lands, hoping to indulge his own interest in botany. He became a Freemason sometime before 1769.
Newfoundland and Labrador In 1766, Banks was elected to the Royal Society, and in the same year, at 23, he went with Phipps aboard the frigate to Newfoundland and Labrador with a view to studying their natural history. He made his name by publishing the first Linnean descriptions of the plants and animals of Newfoundland and Labrador.Tuck, Leslie. Montevecchi, William. Nuttall Ornithological Club (1987). Newfoundland Birds, Exploitation, Study, Conservation, Harvard University. Banks also documented 34 species of birds, including the great auk, which became extinct in 1844. On 7 May, he noted a large number of "penguins" swimming around the ship on the Grand Banks, and a specimen he collected in Chateau Bay, Labrador, was later identified as the great auk.
The Endeavour voyage
Banks was appointed for a joint Royal Navy/Royal Society scientific expedition to the South Pacific Ocean on HMS Endeavour. The voyage started in 1768 and ended in 1771. This was the first of James Cook's voyages of discovery in that region. Banks funded eight others to join him on the ship. The Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander, the Finnish naturalist Herman Spöring who also served as Banks's personal secretary and as a draughtsman, the artists Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan, as well as four servants from his estate: James Roberts, Peter Briscoe, Thomas Richmond, and George Dorlton.
The voyage went to Brazil, where Banks made the first scientific description of a now common garden plant, Bougainvillea named after Cook's French counterpart, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and to other parts of South America. The voyage progressed to Tahiti where the transit of Venus was observed as planned, then to New Zealand. From there, it proceeded to the east coast of Australia, where Cook mapped the coastline and made landfall at Botany Bay. The ship then landed at Round Hill where the scientific expedition stayed 23-25 May 1770. The area is now known as Seventeen Seventy. At Endeavour River near present day Cooktown in Queensland, they spent almost seven weeks ashore while the ship was repaired after becoming holed on the Great Barrier Reef. While they were in Australia, Banks, Daniel Solander, and the botanist Herman Spöring made the first major collection of Australian flora, describing many species new to European scientists. Almost 800 specimens were illustrated by the artist Sydney Parkinson and appeared in Banks' Florilegium, finally published in 35 volumes between 1980 and 1990. Notable also was, that during the period when the Endeavour was being repaired, Banks observed a kangaroo, first recorded as "kanguru" on 14 July 1770 in his diary.
While in the South Pacific Ocean near Tahiti in 1769, Endeavour encountered a Polynesian man named Tupaia, a native of the island of Raʻiātea. Banks decided to sponsor Tupaia because of his evident skill as a navigator and mapmaker as well as a "living souvenir" to bring back with him to England. Tupaia became a valuable translator on the voyage and would have been the first Polynesian to come to England, but died en route in the Dutch East Indies.
Return home and voyage to Iceland
Banks arrived back in England on 12 July 1771. The Admiralty regarded Banks's demands as unacceptable and withdrew his permission to sail. Banks immediately arranged an alternative expedition, and in July 1772, Daniel Solander and he visited the Isle of Wight, the Hebrides, Iceland, and the Orkney Islands, aboard Sir Lawrence. In Iceland, they ascended Mt. Hekla and visited the Great Geyser, and were the first scientific visitors to Staffa in the Inner Hebrides. They returned to London in November, with many botanical specimens, via Edinburgh, where Banks and Solander were interviewed by James Boswell. In 1773, he toured south Wales in the company of artist Paul Sandby.Colley, Linda (2009), "Men at arms", The Guardian, 7 November 2009.
Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
Banks settled in London and began work on his Florilegium. He kept in touch with most of the scientists of his time, was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1773. Banks was appointed as an informal director to the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew by George III in 1773. Banks sent the first Kew plant hunters around the world, including Francis Masson, Allan Cunningham and James Bowie.
In March 1779, Banks married Dorothea Hugessen, daughter of W. W. Hugessen. His sister Sarah Sophia Banks lived in the house with Banks and his wife. He had as librarian and curator of his collections Solander, Jonas Carlsson Dryander, and Robert Brown in succession. Also in 1779, Banks took a lease on an estate called Spring Grove, the former residence of Elisha Biscoe (1705–1776),Susan Reynolds (editor) Heston and Isleworth, A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 3: Victoria County History, 1962 which he eventually bought outright from Biscoe's son, also Elisha, in 1808. Its 34 acres ran along the northern side of the London Road, Isleworth, and contained a natural spring, which was an important attraction to him. Banks spent much time and effort on this secondary home. He steadily created a renowned botanical masterpiece on the estate, achieved primarily with many of the great variety of foreign plants he had collected on his extensive travels around the world, particularly to Australia and the South Seas. The surrounding district became known as Spring Grove. The house was substantially extended and rebuilt by later owners and is now part of West Thames College.
Banks was made a baronet in 1781, three years after being elected president of the Royal Society. During much of this time, he was an informal adviser to King George III and his position at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew was formalised in 1797. Banks continued to dispatch explorers and botanists to many parts of the world, and through these efforts, Kew Gardens became arguably the pre-eminent botanical garden in the world, with many species being introduced to Europe through them and through Chelsea Physic Garden and their head gardener John Fairbairn. He directly fostered several famous voyages, including that of George Vancouver to the northeastern Pacific (Pacific Northwest), and William Bligh's voyages (one entailing the infamous mutiny on the Bounty) to transplant breadfruit from the South Pacific to the Caribbean islands. Banks was also a major financial supporter of William Smith in his decade-long efforts to create a geological map of England, the first geological map of an entire country. He also chose Allan Cunningham for voyages to Brazil and the north and northwest coasts of Australia to collect specimens.
Colonisation of New South Wales Banks's own time in Australia, however, led to his interest in the British colonisation of that continent. He was to be the greatest proponent of settlement in New South Wales. A genus of the Proteaceae was named in his honour as Banksia.
Although Banks remained physically uninvolved in these colonies, he was nonetheless the general adviser to the government on all Australian matters for twenty years. Every vessel that came from New South Wales brought to Banks plants or animals or geological and other specimens and, on at least one occasion, human remains. Governor Philip Gidley King sent Banks the severed head of an Aboriginal man named Pemulwuy that Banks had seemingly listed as among his "desiderata."