News that experts have located the Endeavour – the ship of Captain James Cook – news item

So its a good opportunity  to recall the great work of Sir Joseph Banks

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Sir Joseph Banks is justly celebrated as a “naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences.”

His role as an expedition scientist on Captain Cook’s first voyage set a benchmark for rigour, and helped to lift him to election as president of the Royal Society in 1778.

From that position, he directed and encouraged multinational scientific endeavours for more than four decades. Less well-known is how he used that science to pursue imperial power.

The role of science in the “Age of Enlightenment” has sometimes been imagined as a bubble of purity, where the hunt for new knowledge outweighed all other considerations.

It is certainly true that warring European powers granted safe passage for elite scientific correspondence, and sometimes for individual scholars, or whole expeditions. But the context for this was a consensus on the value of scientific discovery for the pursuit of imperial aggrandisement.

Banks was a hereditary member of the English establishment. Born in 1743, his father and grandfather had been members of parliament and he inherited extensive Lincolnshire estates at an early age.

He blended formal education with self-funded studies, and by his mid-20s, was already a member of the Royal Society, undertaking an expedition to the north-eastern shores of Canada, where he identified the Great Auk for science.

Source : ABC https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-28/joseph-banks-traveller-botanist-agent-of-the-british-empire/12188954

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