Joseph Banks

Sir Joseph Banks (13 February 1743–19 June 1820) was a British naturalist, collector, landowner, scientific patron, and administrator whose career connected maritime exploration with the organization of natural history in Britain and its overseas territories. Born in London, he was the only son of William Banks, a Lincolnshire landowner and member of Parliament, and Sarah Bate. Educated at Harrow and Eton, he entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner in December 1760. Dissatisfied with the available botanical teaching, he arranged for Israel Lyons of Cambridge to lecture at Oxford in 1764. His father’s death in 1761 and his accession to the family inheritance at twenty-one provided financial independence. He left Oxford without graduating, receiving an honorary doctorate of civil law after his return from the Pacific in 1771.

Banks’s early investigations combined field collecting with the study of specimens and books in London. His association with Daniel Solander, a pupil of Linnaeus employed at the British Museum, supplied a lasting foundation in systematic botany. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 1 May 1766, Banks sailed that year aboard HMS Niger to Newfoundland and Labrador with his former schoolfellow Constantine Phipps. He returned in January 1767 with botanical, zoological, and geological material and practical experience of preserving collections at sea. These specimens also provided work for the young natural-history artist Sydney Parkinson, subsequently employed on the Endeavour expedition.

Banks accompanied James Cook’s first Pacific voyage, 1768–1771, financing a scientific party that included Solander, Parkinson, the landscape artist Alexander Buchan, the naturalist and draughtsman Herman Spöring, and assistants and servants. The expedition combined observation of the transit of Venus at Tahiti with Admiralty instructions concerning geographical exploration. Collecting proceeded through Madeira, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the Society Islands, New Zealand, eastern Australia, and Java. Solander supplied taxonomic descriptions and working records, while Parkinson drew specimens before their colours and structures deteriorated. The resulting collections comprised approximately thirty thousand specimens, including material representing some thirteen hundred species previously unknown to European science. Their observations of Pacific societies also depended upon Indigenous intermediaries: Tupaia, who joined the expedition in 1769, contributed geographical knowledge and interpreted during encounters with Māori communities.

The losses within Banks’s party occurred at different stages. Buchan died at Tahiti in April 1769; Parkinson and Spöring died during the homeward passage following the disease-stricken stay at Batavia. After the expedition reached England in July 1771, the surviving specimens, drawings, and manuscripts entered several distinct channels of publication. Banks supplied his journal to John Hawkesworth, whose three-volume An Account of the Voyages … for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere appeared through William Strahan and Thomas Cadell in 1773. Hawkesworth combined the commanders’ journals and Banks’s papers into a continuous narrative. A separate dispute concerned ownership and publication of Parkinson’s papers: A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, prepared by his brother Stanfield Parkinson, was delayed by an injunction until Hawkesworth’s account had appeared. These publications established the voyage’s early public narrative through editorial selection and contested rights over its records.

Banks simultaneously undertook a much more ambitious botanical publication. Between 1771 and 1784, he employed five artists to develop Parkinson’s field drawings into finished compositions and eighteen engravers to produce 743 copperplates. Solander prepared accompanying botanical descriptions; artists including Frederick Polydore Nodder and John Frederick Miller contributed to the visual reconstruction. The project now known as Banks’ Florilegium therefore embodied several successive operations: collecting and recording living plants, preserving specimens, completing watercolours, preparing descriptions, and engraving matrices for publication. Solander died in 1782, before the engraving programme ended. The projected illustrated flora remained unpublished during Banks’s lifetime, although its specimens and manuscripts continued to be consulted by other botanists.

Banks intended to accompany Cook’s second expedition, but withdrew in 1772 following disagreement over the accommodation and alterations required for his scientific establishment aboard HMS Resolution. He instead organized a voyage with Solander to the Hebrides and Iceland. Its results reached print through several authors. His account and drawings of Staffa’s basalt formations were incorporated into Thomas Pennant’s A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772, published in 1774. Another participant, Uno von Troil, published letters describing Iceland; their English translation, Letters on Iceland, appeared in London in 1780, printed by William Richardson for James Robson and Nathaniel Conant. Banks’s sponsorship of the expedition thus supported publications whose authorship and editorial responsibility belonged partly to his travelling companions.

At 32 Soho Square, Banks developed a private establishment in which books, specimens, drawings, correspondence, and visiting scholars could be brought together. Solander worked on the collections until his death; Jonas Dryander subsequently served as librarian and botanical curator, and Robert Brown succeeded him in 1810. Their duties included identifying specimens, managing access, answering enquiries, and maintaining the relationship between objects and published descriptions. The household also had its own collecting interests. Banks married Dorothea Hugessen on 23 March 1779; they had no children. His sister Sarah Sophia Banks, who lived with them, assembled substantial independent collections of coins, prints, and printed ephemera. Her material, later divided among public collections, should be recognized as a separate scholarly enterprise within the Soho Square household.

The principal printed record of Banks’s library was Dryander’s Catalogus bibliothecae historico-naturalis Josephi Banks, issued in five octavo volumes between 1796 and 1800, with the imprint of William Bulmer and Company. Dryander was its compiler; Banks owned the collection. Organized into general natural history, zoology, botany, and mineralogy, with supplementary material and an author index, the catalogue described a research library assembled around the identification and comparison of natural objects. Its final volume incorporated acquisitions made after earlier sections had appeared. The work consequently served both as a catalogue of a particular collection and as a classified bibliography through which naturalists could locate relevant literature.

On 30 November 1778, Banks succeeded Sir John Pringle as President of the Royal Society, retaining the office until his death and establishing its longest presidential tenure. He influenced elections, the reception and publication of papers, scientific appointments, and recommendations to government. His administration encountered serious opposition during the “Dissensions” of 1783–1784, precipitated by the forced resignation of the mathematician Charles Hutton as foreign secretary. The controversy brought together disputes over administrative performance, professional standing, disciplinary interests, and presidential patronage. Banks nevertheless retained sufficient support to consolidate his position. His institutional activity extended further: the meeting establishing the Royal Institution in 1799 took place at his house, and he was among the seven founders of the Horticultural Society of London in 1804.

Banks’s relationship with George III gave him extensive influence at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, exercised through an unofficial advisory role. He helped organize collecting expeditions, recruit naturalists and artists, and arrange the transport and cultivation of plants. The connection between Kew and his private establishment is visible in William Aiton’s Hortus Kewensis (London, George Nicol, 1789), a three-volume catalogue drawing upon identifications and descriptions supplied by Solander and Dryander. Aiton’s horticultural records, including information about the introduction of plants into cultivation, were combined with systematic botanical scholarship. Banks’s contribution lay in sustaining the personnel, collections, and patronage through which such collaborative publications became possible.

The movement of plants through this network also served agricultural and imperial objectives. Banks organized and supported William Bligh’s breadfruit expeditions, responding to West Indian plantation interests seeking an inexpensive food for enslaved labourers. The first attempt ended with the Bounty mutiny in 1789; the subsequent voyage delivered plants to the Caribbean in 1793. Banks continued to correspond with colonial botanical gardens and encouraged cultivation through prizes and institutional support. His botanical patronage thus participated directly in the provision and economic organization of plantation colonies, extending beyond the acquisition of specimens for European collections.

His involvement with Australia developed through advice, correspondence, and scientific appointments. In 1779 he recommended Botany Bay as a possible location for a penal settlement; after the establishment of New South Wales in 1788, governors and collectors supplied him with reports and specimens. He promoted Matthew Flinders’s surveying expedition and secured places for Robert Brown, the gardener Peter Good, and the botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer aboard HMS Investigator. The resulting research entered print through Brown’s Prodromus florae Novae Hollandiae et Insulae Van-Diemen (1810) and Flinders’s A Voyage to Terra Australis (1814). The latter, printed by William Bulmer and Company and published by George and William Nicol, comprised two volumes and an atlas, with Brown’s substantial botanical appendix in the second volume. Banks’s support consequently connected expeditionary appointments with the preparation and publication of geographical and botanical results.

Banks also published investigations directed towards British agriculture. His A Short Account of the Cause of the Disease in Corn, Called by Farmers the Blight, the Mildew, and the Rust circulated in several forms in 1805. Bulmer’s separate printing contained two coloured engravings after Franz Bauer; a version issued by John Harding combined their subjects on an uncoloured plate. The text also appeared with the fourth edition of William Curtis’s Practical Observations on the British Grasses. An enlarged Harding edition of 1806 incorporated a letter from Thomas Andrew Knight. Banks discussed the fungal disease and its suspected relationship with barberry, presenting a hypothesis subsequently investigated experimentally. His Some Circumstances Relative to Merino Sheep, printed by Bulmer in 1809, drew upon communications to the Board of Agriculture and information obtained from Spanish shepherds accompanying imported royal flocks. These publications document his participation in observation, the circulation of practical information, and attempts to improve agricultural production.

Banks was created a baronet in 1781, became a Knight of the Order of the Bath in 1795, and entered the Privy Council in 1797. He served as a British Museum trustee and advised public bodies on subjects extending from exploration and plant cultivation to currency and measurement. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, he maintained scientific correspondence across national boundaries and participated in negotiations over the return to France of Labillardière’s natural-history collections in 1796. In 1818–1819, despite increasingly disabling gout, he remained involved in royal commissions concerning banknote forgery and weights and measures. These were governmental scientific enquiries, distinct from parliamentary select committees.

Banks died at Spring Grove, near Isleworth, on 19 June 1820, and was buried at Heston. His testamentary arrangements gave Robert Brown the use of his scientific library and collections; in 1827, the principal botanical and bibliographical holdings passed to the British Museum, with Brown appointed Keeper of the Banksian Botanical Collections. They subsequently became major components of the Natural History Museum. The private correspondence and other papers followed a more dispersed history, producing a different pattern of survival from that of the herbarium and library.

The Endeavour journal acquired a separate editorial identity in 1896, when Joseph Dalton Hooker published an abridged text through Macmillan, with portraits, charts, and biographical material. Hooker’s preface explicitly sought to recover Banks as a working observer and collector, presenting him as a predecessor of later naturalist voyagers, particularly Darwin. J. C. Beaglehole’s two-volume The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, published by Angus and Robertson in 1962 for the Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales, supplied a much more extensive critical edition. Its editorial treatment retained Banks’s spelling and many manuscript features while introducing punctuation and other conventions to make the text readable.

The botanical illustrations followed their own publication history. James Britten’s Illustrations of Australian Plants Collected in 1770 during Captain Cook’s Voyage Round the World in H.M.S. Endeavour, issued by the British Museum in 1900–1905, reproduced a selection of Australian images by photolithography. Captain Cook’s Florilegium, published by the Lion and Unicorn Press in 1973, presented impressions from original copperplates with accounts by Wilfrid Blunt and William T. Stearn. The comprehensive edition, Banks’ Florilegium, appeared through Alecto Historical Editions in association with the British Museum (Natural History), 1980–1990, with scientific editorial work by Judith Diment and Christopher Humphries. It comprised 738 plates in thirty-four parts, followed by five supplementary plates, bringing the total to 743. Printed in colour à la poupée, with additional watercolour finishing, it was limited to one hundred numbered commercial sets, alongside proof, exhibition, and hors-commerce copies.

The correspondence has likewise been reconstructed through successive documentary editions. Neil Chambers’s six-volume Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765–1820 was published by Pickering & Chatto in 2007, followed by the eight-volume Indian and Pacific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768–1820 in 2008–2013. These editions brought together documents dispersed among institutions and private collections, providing a printed record of the decisions, exchanges, appointments, and negotiations through which Banks conducted his scientific affairs.