Where was joseph banks born

It is well known that Joseph Banks became famous after accompanying Captain James Cook on the voyage to Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia on board HMS Endeavour, from 1768 to 1771. His contributions in the field of botany and in establishing the collections at Kew Gardens are also well documented, as is his influence on the creation of Australia as a British colony. However, Banks’ contribution to manufacturing and industry are overlooked, although in many ways they are as exciting as his three-year voyage in mainly uncharted waters.

Banks owned large estates in Lincolnshire and Derbyshire. These gave him the opportunity to practice improvements in agricultural methods and animal husbandry. But he did not limit himself to farming methods to improve his land. He also spent large efforts, and considerable sums of his own money, to sponsor acts of Parliament for the building of canals in Lincolnshire and the drainage of large tracts of Lincolnshire Fen.

Banks was no simple bystander during the design and construction of these feats of civil engineering.  He had taken a very early interest in canal building and drainage. In 1767, when he was only 24, he made two journeys — one in and around the Bristol area and the second to Wales and north-west England. During these trips he kept detailed journals of everything he saw, including accounts of the construction of the second phase of the Bridgewater Canal. These valuable documents are the earliest records of Banks’ writing about waterways. As one of the earliest eye-witness accounts of canal building in this period, these journals are of great interest today.

It is drainage and the movement of water which links Joseph Banks with Matthew Boulton (1728-1809), and subsequently with other engineers and manufacturers of the day. Banks and Boulton had already established good relations when Banks, as a shareholder of the Gregory mine in Derbyshire, involved himself in the completion and commissioning of a Boulton & Watt engine to pump water in the mine.  The two men also corresponded about Boulton’s establishment of the Soho mint in 1788-89, an idea which Banks supported.

Having become connected with civil engineering via canals and with mechanical engineering via Matthew Boulton, it was but a small step for Joseph Banks to become an influential member of the Lunar Society (an informal club of inventors, engineers, entrepreneurs, thinkers).  The members corresponded with one another, met frequently and visited each other’s houses and manufactories.

The delightful letters from Lady Banks to her friend Miss Heber* record her husband’s visits to industrialists, philosophers, politicians and the county gentry. He was at the centre of a social network where influence and ideas passed freely, and where Banks both gives and takes advice.

Dear Miss Heber. An eighteenth-century correspondence. Letters written to Mary Heber of Weston, ed. Francis Bamford, DATE, ETC….