Setting sail from Plymouth in 1768, with James Cook at the helm, HMS Endeavour’s crew hoped to achieve much in the fields of astronomy, cartography, botany and ethnology. It was also to be Cook’s first round-the-world voyage.
A 24-year-old Joseph Banks, already an experienced and well-regarded botanist, assembled a small team (including artist Sydney Parkinson) to assist him in the collecting and recording of botanical species of interest as Endeavour made landfall in the varied terrains of Madeira, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the Society Islands in French Polynesia, New Zealand, Australia and Java.
While the voyage’s primary purpose was to observe from Tahiti the rare planetary occurrence of the transit of Venus across the Sun, exploratory forays at each of the stops on their circumnavigation allowed Banks to gather over…
