Knowledge is power

Photo by Prachaya Roekdeethaweesab

Joseph Banks is extremely famous in Australia, but he's not very well known in Great Britain. He didn't make any great scientific discoveries. On the other hand, he's extremely influential and a very important figure in the history of science.

He was president of the Royal Society for 42 years, which is a long time. And although he didn't write any great scientific papers and was very poor at mathematics (he was often criticised for his lack of mathematical ability), what he did do was bring together the government and scientific research.

There's a famous saying by Francis Bacon that knowledge is power. What Joseph Banks did while he was president of the Royal Society was to convince the government that it was in their interests to invest in scientific research.

The transit of Venus

The transit of Venus is an astronomical phenomenon that happens roughly twice in every century at a space of about 13 years. In the middle of the 18th century, there was a transit of Venus, when that planet travelled in between the sun and the Earth. For about 10 minutes, you could see a little black dot crawling across the surface of the sun.

There was an international programme to measure the transit of Venus from different places on the Earth, because by doing that, you could work out important dimensions of the solar system – for instance, how far away the sun was from the earth. So, for the second transit of Venus in the 18th century, the king and the Admiralty provided money for James Cook to go to Tahiti to observe and measure it. And Joseph Banks, who was a very wealthy young man and a fellow of the Royal Society, if not yet the president, announced that he was going to finance himself to travel with James Cook.

Taking telescopes to Tahiti

Cook and Banks landed in Tahiti and stayed there for about six weeks, carrying out their astronomical observations. Several European ships had been there before, so by this stage, the Tahitians knew what to expect and were rather wary of the new English arrivals. French ships, which had arrived previously, had already introduced sexually transmitted diseases, so the Tahitians were absolutely right to be rather wary of this shipload of British people.

We know a lot about what Cook and Banks and their shipmates felt when they arrived in Tahiti. What we don't know so much about is how the local Tahitians felt. There's a few scattered observations. For instance, they were surprised that Europeans rode their boats backwards and that they had such blonde hair. They were also very surprised that they attached such great significance to these metal objects with glass. They kept looking at the heavens and using triangular shaped brass instruments to play around with and write down numbers that seemed very vague and strange to the Tahitians. They were probably also pretty surprised by the clothes that the English people wore, because they usually were dressed in their full naval uniform.

A wonderful source of iron

From the English point of view, they thought that Tahiti was a wonderful place. They thought it was a paradise, because they found that all the women were very happy to have sex with them.

From the Tahitians’ point of view, there was one element that they really needed. There’s no iron on Tahiti. So the local women slept with the men from the ship in exchange for iron nails – to the extent that the carpenter had to issue a ban on taking any more iron nails out of the ship because it was getting dangerous. So from the British point of view, they'd arrived in this paradise where women were just longing to have sex with them. From the Tahitians’ point of view, these new arrivals were a wonderful source of iron who could be exploited. So, there's some exploitation happening on both sides.

Photo by BMCL

After they'd finished making their observations on Tahiti, James Cook revealed that the whole time he had been holding secret instructions from the Admiralty. He announced that they were going to sail on to Australia and seize whatever lands they could find there for the British Empire. They were also going to establish bases that would be useful strongholds to ensure military and trading supremacy for the British in the Pacific Ocean.

They set off for Australia. Luckily for them, they took with them a local Tahitian called Tupai, who was able to navigate among all the small islands that litter the Pacific. Otherwise it's very unlikely that they would ever have got to Australia. James Cook seized Australia for the British and named Botany Bay in honour of Joseph Banks.

Gold from Africa, convicts to Australia

In terms of building the Empire, Joseph Banks was absolutely crucial. He served on the African committee when that was first set up, and he knew that there was gold in Africa. He suggested, therefore, that it would be a very good idea if Britain seized most of the West Coast of Africa.

He had this wonderful paternalistic model in which it would be to everybody's benefit, Africans and British, if the Africans dug up all the gold in the mines and shipped it back to Britain, so that Britain would become wealthy. Africans would benefit at one remove, he argued, since they would be ruled by Britain and introduced to Christianity. In his words, Britain was going to civilise Africa.

Another country where he had enormous influence was Australia, since he was one of the very few people who'd been there. So, when the government was wondering what to do with all its prisoners (a lot of people were being imprisoned for quite small offences, like stealing food for themselves and their family, and the prisons were overflowing), Joseph Banks suggested that they ship them out to Botany Bay in Australia.

Championing Carl Linnaeus

In terms of plant classification, Banks was a great supporter of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish taxonomist who set up the double name or binary system that we still use today.

Every species has two names; human beings, for example, are Homo sapiens. Linnaeus applied that system to plants, and although the Linnaean system is so familiar to us it seems like it must be natural, it is, in fact, quite arbitrary. It had a lot of critics at the time. Banks was one of the main people who ensured that the Linnaean classification system was the one that became the most important.

What Linnaeus did was base his system on the sexual characteristics of flowers. He divided flowers into 24 categories, depending on the number of male stamens that they have. The secondary classification system was based on the number of female pistils. So the most important category was how many male stamens; the secondary criterion was the number of female pistils.

It’s quite a common phenomenon in science that this human order is imposed on the natural world. It starts to seem obvious, like second nature. Then scientists can turn around and say, oh, look, in the plant kingdom, males are superior to females. If that happens in nature, then that must be true in human societies as well.

The dawn of state-funded science

Photo by Africa Studio

What people like Joseph Banks did was to persuade the government to invest in science. He had many very influential friends in aristocratic families who were politically important. He was also very close to King George III, who was very interested in scientific research.

One strategy Banks adopted was to put very influential, wealthy people on the committees of the Royal Society so that they could see for themselves how scientific research, by extending knowledge, could also extend the power and commercial networks of Great Britain. He helped to show the government how crucial scientific research could be for the welfare of the country, which is a view we still hold.

You no longer have to pay to be a fellow of the Royal Society. There are private companies that carry out scientific research, but a huge amount of research is funded by the government. And Banks was one of the people who initiated that process and made an alliance between science and the State. And it’s actually now very difficult to draw a line between the two spheres.

Discover more about

science and the state

Fara, P. (2004). Sex, Botany, and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks. Columbia University Press.

Fara, P. (2003). Joseph Banks: Pacific pictures. Endeavour, 27(3), 110–112.

Fara, P. (1996). Sympathetic Attractions: Magnetic Practices, Beliefs, and Symbolism in Eighteenth-Century England. Princeton University Press.