ABSTRACT
Sir Joseph Banks’s relations with Iceland began in 1772 when he set oŠ to explore the island, leading the rst scientic expedition undertaken there by British naturalists. As a consequence of that visit, Banks became the acknowledged British expert on Iceland and a faithful friend of the Icelanders. Three decades later during the Napoleonic Wars, Banks assumed a crucial political role as self-appointed protector of Iceland, smoothing the way for their trade during the conŽict and repeatedly urging the British government to annex the island for the benet of the inhabitants. He became the architect of Britain’s political and commercial policy towards the Atlantic dependencies of the Danish realm. This volume contains the journals of the Iceland expedition and almost all letters and papers worldwide in the Banks archives pertaining to Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.
Joseph Banks1 was born on 13 February 1743 to great wealth and a privileged position in society. His great-grandfather had bought the extensive estates of Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire in 1714. His father, William Banks Hodgkinson (1719-61), had been a member of parliament, as had his father and grand-father before him, and DeputyLieutenant of Lincolnshire. Much land had been successively added and by Banks’s time the family owned considerable estates, mostly in Lincolnshire, where he had 268 tenanted farms, StaŠordshire and Derbyshire. He thus belonged to the landed gentry. Banks was educated rst at Harrow and then Eton. In 1760 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner, the rst member of his family to attend university, where his main studies were in botany.2 Four years later he left without a degree which in itself was quite common at the time for members of his class,3 though there is little evidence that he was much of a scholar. His father died in 1761, when Banks was 18, and when he came of age three years later he was a very wealthy young man indeed, with an income of about £6,000 a year,4 and thus able to pursue whatever kind of life he chose. He decided to devote his
