Hace 250 años: Banks llega a Madeira en el Endeavour

Abstract

HMS Endeavour, the first British ship to circumnavigate the world on a scientific mission, had its first stop in Funchal on 12 August 1768 on the way to the Pacific. It was not a big ship and it sailed on its own. Not only was this a scientific voyage – initially making for Tahiti where Venus’s track across the sky could be accurately measured – but it had a remarkable and unique entourage dedicated to observing and recording the natural world. Though the ship’s commander, Lieutenant James Cook, had a good reason to call into the island’s principal port, it could have been otherwise: sea conditions, unpredictable at the best of times, might have forced him to head for Tenerife instead. Had this happened, the botanical history of Madeira might have been quite different. Fortunately for Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, the ship’s botanists, the sea was kind and the two men, the latter Linnaeus’s best student, were able to bring Hans Sloane’s pioneering botanical observations, made more than seventy years earlier, into the modern age.