The Three Voyages of Captain Cook Round the World, Vol. I (of VII) (ePub)

Excerpt: 'With Lieutenant Cook, in this voyage, embarked Joseph Banks, Esquire, a gentleman possessed of considerable landed property in Lincolnshire. He received the education of a scholar rather to qualify him for the enjoyments than the labours of life; yet an ardent desire to know more of Nature than could be learnt from books determined him, at a very early age, to forego what are generally thought to be the principal advantages of a liberal fortune, and to apply his revenue not in procuring the pleasures of leisure and ease, but in the pursuit of his favourite study, through a series of fatigue and danger, which, in such circumstances, have very seldom been voluntarily incurred, except to gratify the restless and insatiable desires of avarice or ambition. Upon his leaving the university of Oxford, in the year 1763, he crossed the Atlantic, and visited the coasts of Newfoundland and Labradore. The danger, difficulty, and inconvenience that attend long voyages are very different in idea and experience; Mr. Banks, however, returned, undiscouraged, from his first expedition; and when he found that the Endeavour was equipping for a voyage to the South Seas, in order to observe the Transit of Venus, and afterwards attempt farther discoveries, he determined 4to embark in the expedition, that he might enrich his native country with a tribute of knowledge from those which have been hitherto unknown, and not without hope of leaving among the rude and uncultivated nations that he might discover, something that would render life of more value, and enrich them, perhaps, in a certain degree, with the knowledge, or at least with the productions, of Europe.'