By award-winning bestselling writer Grantlee Kieza, Banks is a rich and rollicking biography of one of the most colourful and intriguing characters in the history of exploration.I have enjoyed two other biographies by Grantley Kieza, those of Macquarie and Paterson, and this one is of the same high standard. For decades, major British voyages of exploration around the globe only sailed with his backing. Early governors in the colony answered to him as he set about unleashing Australia's vast potential in agriculture and minerals. It was Banks, one of the first Europeans to set foot on Australia's east coast, who advised Britain to establish a remote penal settlement and strategic base at Botany Bay, and he eventually became the foremost expert on everything Australian. As the longest-serving president of Britain's Royal Society, Banks was perhaps the most important man in the scientific world for more than half a century. He returned with thousands of specimens of plants and animals, generating enormous interest in Europe, while the racy accounts of his amorous adventures in Tahiti made him one of the most famous and notorious men in England.
Financing his own team of scientists and artists, Banks battled high seas, hailstorms, treacherous coral reefs and hostile locals to expand the world's knowledge of life on distant shores. In 1768, as a gallivanting young playboy, he joined Captain James Cook's Endeavour expedition to the South Pacific. Fabulously wealthy, Banks was the driving force behind monumental voyages and scientific discoveries in Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and the Arctic. A fearless adventurer, his fascination with beautiful women was only trumped by his obsession with the natural world and his lust for scientific knowledge.
Lust, science, adventure - Joseph Banks and his voyages of discovery The extraordinary life of one of the world's most famous and notorious adventurers Sir Joseph Banks was a man of passion whose influence spanned the globe.
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