Joseph Banks was born in London in 1743 to a wealthy Lincolnshire squire and schooled at Harrow and Eton, but a severe illness after smallpox inoculation at 17 ended his schooling and turned him toward botany. At Oxford he ignored the classical curriculum and paid the Cambridge botanist Israel Lyons to lecture him privately. Inheriting the Revesby Abbey estate at 21, he befriended Daniel Solander, corresponded with Carl Linnaeus, and in 1766 sailed on HMS Niger to Newfoundland and Labrador, where his Linnaean descriptions won him election to the Royal Society. In 1768 he bought his way onto James Cook’s Endeavour voyage with an eight-person scientific entourage, describing bougainvillea in Brazil and collecting nearly 800 plant species while the ship was repaired after striking the Great Barrier Reef.
Fame went to his head: his demands for an extra deck got him dropped from Cook’s second voyage, so he went to Iceland instead and climbed Mount Hekla. From 1773 he ran Kew Gardens informally for George III and served more than 41 years as president of the Royal Society, backing George Vancouver, William Smith’s geological map and William Bligh’s breadfruit voyage that ended in the mutiny on the Bounty. He pushed for a penal colony at Botany Bay, received the severed head of the Aboriginal resistance leader Pemulwuy from Governor Philip Gidley King, and saw his protege Bligh overthrown again in the Rum Rebellion led by his rival John Macarthur. He died in 1820 with no children.
- He sponsored the Polynesian navigator Tupaia aboard the Endeavour, viewing him partly as a living souvenir; Tupaia died in the Dutch East Indies on the way home.
- The Endeavour’s artists painted specimens before their colors faded, work that became the 35-volume Banks’ Florilegium.
- He documented 34 bird species in Newfoundland, including the great auk, which he mistook for a penguin.
- During the Napoleonic Wars he secured a British passport for Aimé Bonpland so Humboldt’s expedition would not be seized.
- The Banksia genus, the Lady Banks rose named for his wife Dorothea, Banks Island and Bankstown all carry his name.
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