natural history. He became a protégé of Carl Linnaeus, who devised the currently used
system of classifying organisms that includes kingdom, phylum, class, order, family,
genus and species. In particular, Linnaeus devised a binomial system of classifying
plants that grouped them based on their sexual organs. In his Systema Naturae,
published in 1735, he gave species two names, a family name and a personal name in
Latin. His system introduced order into the classification of plants and was a triumph
of empiricism. The frontispiece of Systema Naturae shows Linnaeus in the Garden
of Eden applying his binomial nomenclature to all the creatures of the Creation, and
he liked to say that ‘God created and Linnaeus organized’. For Linnaeus, it was God
who created the laws whereby all plants and animals were perfectly constructed for
the environment in which they were found. His ‘apostles’ including Solander would
travel the world to collect new species from the furthest regions on earth for him to
describe and within his lifetime Linnaeus completed the monumental task of naming
and cataloguing 5600 new plant specimens.
Collecting natural history specimens had become an obsession in eighteenth-
century England and enthusiasts scoured the countryside for new specimens to add
to their collections. Daniel Solander had been recruited from Sweden in 1760 to
catalogue private botanical collections in England according to the Linnaean system
and within a few years he became assistant librarian at the British Museum.
As British explorers reached Africa, South America and Asia they felt duty-bound
to collect bugs, birds, butterflies and plants to send home. Soon every far-flung post
of the expanding British Empire had its amateur collectors who were looking to make
their mark in history by having some previously unidentified species named after
them. Country houses, museums, universities and ordinary drawing rooms became
filled with specimens from around the globe carefully arranged in what were known
as ‘cabinets of curiosity’.
In 1768 Joseph Banks’ name appears as a Fellow of the Royal Society and it was
there that he heard of a planned expedition to the South Seas to observe the transit
of Venus. The astronomer Edmund Halley had predicted that the transit of the planet
Venus, when it crossed between the earth and the sun, would occur in 1769 and he
argued convincingly that many careful observations of the transit, taken from widely
separated points on the globe, would allow scientists to calculate the distance of the
earth from the sun and provide a greater understanding of the extent of the solar system.
The letter from the Royal Society seeking the King’s support for the expedition reads:
To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty. The Memorial of the President, Council and Fellows
of the Royal Society of London for improving Natural Knowledge humbly showeth –
That the passage of the Planet Venus over the Disc of the Sun, which will happen on the 3rd
of June in the year 1769, is a Phaenomenon that must, if the same be accurately observedJoseph Banks – The Voyage of the Endeavour^23