The Indian and Pacific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768–1820

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Editor: Neil Chambers

The Pickering Masters

Following his participation in James Cook’s HMS Endeavour circumnavigation of 1768-71, Joseph Banks developed an impressive global network of scientists and explorers. His correspondence shows how he developed effective working links with the Admiralty and with the generation of naval officers who sailed after Cook. He was familiar with most natural philosophers in Britain and across Europe, many of whom consulted his collections, and shared specimens and information with him regarding the Pacific. Banks also advised and assisted British government and commercial enterprise in the development of successive ventures to India, the Far East and the Pacific. His career demonstrates how a private individual could influence global exploration in the Georgian era.

Banks's correspondence is one of the great primary sources for studying the Pacific region during this important period of exploration and colonial expansion. His Indian and Pacific correspondence has not previously been published in a fully edited thematic series. This reset edition of over 2000 letters uses material from archives around the world. Together with The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks 1765–1820, this edition establishes Pickering & Chatto as field leader in the publication of Joseph Banks’s edited papers and ensures that editorial standards are applied consistently across his published papers.

This edition will be important for scholars researching the History of Science, Natural History, Travel and Exploration, as well as Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Contents

Subjects covered include:

• The Endeavour voyage, 1768–71
• Banks’s supervision of the published accounts of Cook’s voyages.
• Banks’s proposal for a settlement on the east coast of Australia
• The East India Company
• Banks’s involvement in early fur-trading ventures to the northwest coast of America and Captain George Vancouver’s survey voyage of 1791–94
• Banks’s supervision of the two breadfruit voyages of Captain William Bligh RN, 1787–93
• Banks’s advice regarding the mounting of the ‘First Fleet’ under Captain Arthur Philip RN to found a colony at Sydney Cove, 1788, and his support for New South Wales up to 1820
• Banks’s assistance in the mounting of the Macartney Embassy to China, 1792
• Banks’s encouragement and guidance in the coastal surveys of Australia, notably those by Captain Matthew Flinders RN
• Banks’s plans for the epic voyage of HMS Investigator and the scientific party that he selected to sail on it
• Banks’s organization of the collectors and observers that were regularly dispatched on naval missions sent to the Pacific. His sorting, distribution and management of the collections made on the voyages and missions that were mounted, and his support of the publication of the accounts of these missions afterwards

Related titles

• Joseph Banks and the British Museum : The World of Collecting 1770–1830
• The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765–1820

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