Joseph Banks & Daniel Solander

Joseph Banks & Daniel Solander

The woods … abound in excellent timber, fit for any kind of building in size, grain, and apparent durability. One, which bears a conspicuous scarlet flower made up of many threads, and which is as big as an oak in England, has a very heavy hard wood which seems well adapted for the cogs of mill-wheels …

From Joseph Hooker (ed), Journal of The Right Hon Sir Joseph Banks, Macmillan & Co, 1896, p228

In 1769, Joseph Banks led the first scientific investigation of New Zealand’s natural history. A wealthy amateur botanist, Banks was educated at Cambridge and Oxford universities and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society at just 23. His wealth gave him the financial independence to follow his passion for botany and, at the age of 25, he was appointed to the Royal Society’s scientific expedition to the South Pacific, the purpose of which was to observe the Transit of Venus and search for Terra Australis Incognita, the Unknown Southern Continent. Using thousands of pounds of his own money, Banks equipped the ship with a natural history library and scientific equipment for collecting and preserving specimens. He engaged the services of a team of artists and servants and was joined by the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander. One of Carl von Linnaeus’s most talented pupils, Solander was welcomed for his skill and familiarity with Linnaeus’s new botanical classification system.

The HMS Endeavour, under the command of Captain James Cook, set sail in August 1768. After observing the 1769 Transit of Venus from Tahiti, the ship travelled south and on 8 October 1769 made landfall in New Zealand. Cook circumnavigated the country, discovering a long  group of mountainous islands rather than the anticipated great Southern Continent.

In New Zealand, Banks and his team fished for local species, collected and pressed coastal plants, used muskets to shoot birds, and collected butterflies, beetles and other insects. As well as marvelling at the new species they were encountering, they were impressed by the abundance of tasty seafood (particularly the lobsters, of which they bought great quantities from the local Māori) and the exotic birds, many of which they also ate, keeping only the beak and claws for science.

After returning to London, Banks and Solander were in great demand in the city’s social and scientific circles. Banks retained Solander as his librarian and assistant, but Solander made slow progress cataloguing the expedition’s specimens, and died before the task was complete. Banks was slow to publish the results of his expedition. Publication of his expedition diary was left to Joseph Hooker in 1896, while copper plates of illustrations of the botanical species collected on the voyage, including 360 New Zealand species, were engraved but not published until the 1980s.  

By Rebecca Priestley

Medals and awards

Joseph Banks: FRS, President of the Royal Society

1778-1820, Knighted 1781

Daniel Solander: FRS 1764

Further reading

Joseph D Hooker (ed), Journal of The Right Hon Sir Joseph Banks, Macmillan, 1896;

Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas, Penguin,2004;

Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: the story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks, Icon Books, 2003

Image courtesy of the National Library of Australia

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