Sir Joseph Banks

Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), British naturalist and collector, who famously accompanied Captain James Cook on the Endeavour as a gentleman naturalist. Banks was a man of scientific letters and a long-term president of the Royal Society of London. This position, and his personal friendship with King George III, led to the transformation of Kew from a private royal pleasure garden to a centre of scientific research in botany and to the economic understanding of plants (see Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew).

Banks was born in London although he grew up on his family’s extensive estates, located around Revesby Abbey, Horncastle, in Lincolnshire. He later attended Harrow School (1752), Eton College (1756), and Christ Church, Oxford (1760), enduring a typical 18th-century classical education, which he enlivened by teaching himself botany.

Banks’s father William died in 1761, and when Joseph left Oxford in 1764 he inherited a sizable fortune—enough to support the collection of a magnificent herbarium and library, and allow Joseph to undertake three sea voyages during which he devoted himself to natural history.

The first of these voyages (1766) took Banks to Labrador and Newfoundland, the second (1768-1771) to the South Pacific Ocean with Captain Cook, and the third (1772) to Iceland. At the age of 29 Banks had become the first naturalist to traverse such extremes of longitude as north to Iceland and south to Tierra del Fuego.

Despite his energy for travel and collecting, Banks was less interested in publishing the results of his voyages. During the Endeavour years he kept a journal for ultimate publication. This project faltered after his travelling companion and personal librarian Daniel Solander died in 1782. Solander had learned his botany from Carolus Linnaeus, and had moved to England to help spread the new Linnaean system of botanic nomenclature.

If not through publications, Banks should certainly be remembered for his role as president of the Royal Society. Elected a fellow in 1766, in 1778 he became president, and stayed in office until his death. During these years his home in Soho Square became an unofficial meeting place for scientists. Banks was a generous host, holding weekly receptions and famous breakfast parties to honour select guests. From his vantage point as president of the Royal Society, he helped found both the Linnaean Society and the Royal Institution in London.

Banks left his collections and library to his last librarian, the botanist Robert Brown. Brown transferred these to the British Museum where he became keeper of the botanical department. Banks’s other legacy was the transformation of Kew into a centre for botanical research, particularly concerned with the cultivation of plants from around the British Empire so that they might prove of economic importance in the future of the colonies.