Without Joseph Banks, Cook’s first voyage might have been a failure

When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit of Venus, friends asked why he didn’t instead do the Grand Tour. ‘Every blockhead does that,’ Banks replied. ‘My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.’

It was a wise decision, and his voyage on HMS Endeavour would be the making of him. He returned with an extraordinary haul of natural history specimens and would thereafter more or less fall into important roles on the strength of his experiences, whether it was as the unofficial director of Kew, which he would make into the world’s most important botanical garden, or ‘head of Australian affairs’, enthusiastically promoting the newly discovered country as a penal colony.

He had so many interests that he sometimes neglected more important tasks, such as publishing a florilegium of the Endeavour expedition or the journals he kept of the voyage, and this lack of rigour led some to dismiss him as a mere amateur.