Vice-Admiral William Bligh was an officer of the Royal Navy and a colonial administrator. The Mutiny on the Bounty occurred during his command of HMS Bounty in 1789; after being set adrift in Bounty's launch by the mutineers, Bligh and his loyal men all reached Timor alive, after a journey of 3,618 nautical miles. Bligh's logbooks documenting the mutiny were inscribed on the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World register on 26 February 2021.
Sir Joseph Banks, 1st Baronet, was an English naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences.
The maritime European exploration of Australia consisted of several waves of European seafarers who sailed the edges of the Australian continent. Dutch navigators were the first Europeans known to have explored and mapped the Australian coastline. The first documented encounter was that of Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, in 1606. Dutch seafarers also visited the west and north coasts of the continent, as did French explorers.
The First Fleet was a fleet of 11 ships that brought the first European and African settlers to Australia. It was made up of two Royal Navy vessels, three store ships and six convict transports. On 13 May 1787 the fleet under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, with over 1400 people, left from Portsmouth, England and took a journey of over 24,000 kilometres (15,000 mi) and over 250 days to eventually arrive in Botany Bay, New South Wales, where a penal colony would become the first European settlement in Australia.
Allan Cunningham was an English botanist and explorer, primarily known for his travels in Australia to collect plants.
Robert Brown was a Scottish botanist and paleobotanist who made important contributions to botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope. His contributions include one of the earliest detailed descriptions of the cell nucleus and cytoplasmic streaming; the observation of Brownian motion; early work on plant pollination and fertilisation, including being the first to recognise the fundamental difference between gymnosperms and angiosperms; and some of the earliest studies in palynology. He also made numerous contributions to plant taxonomy, notably erecting a number of plant families that are still accepted today; and numerous Australian plant genera and species, the fruit of his exploration of that continent with Matthew Flinders. RATIO
Daniel Carlsson Solander or Daniel Charles Solander was a Swedish naturalist and an apostle of Carl Linnaeus. Solander was the first university-educated scientist to set foot on Australian soil.
Archibald Menzies was a Scottish surgeon, botanist and naturalist. He spent many years at sea, serving with the Royal Navy, private merchants, and the Vancouver Expedition. He was the first recorded European to reach the summit of the Hawaiian volcano Mauna Loa and introduced the Monkey Puzzle tree to England.
John Lindley FRS was an English botanist, gardener and orchidologist.
HMS Guardian was a 44-gun Roebuck-class fifth-rate two-decker of the Royal Navy, later converted to carry stores. She was completed too late to take part in the American War of Independence, and instead spent several years laid up in ordinary, before finally entering service as a store and convict transport to Australia, under Lieutenant Edward Riou. Riou sailed Guardian, loaded with provisions, animals, convicts and their overseers, to the Cape of Good Hope where he took on more supplies. Nearly two weeks after his departure on the second leg of the journey, an iceberg was sighted and Riou sent boats to collect ice to replenish his water supplies. Before he could complete the re-provisioning, a sudden change in the weather obscured the iceberg, and Guardian collided with it while trying to pull away. She was badly damaged and in immediate danger of sinking. The crew made frantic repair attempts but to no apparent avail. Riou eventually allowed most of the crew to take to Guardian's boats, but refused to leave his ship. Eventually through continuous work he and the remaining crew were able to navigate the ship, by now reduced to little more than a raft, back to the Cape, a nine-week voyage described as "almost unparalleled". Riou ran Guardian aground to prevent her sinking, but shortly afterwards a hurricane struck the coast, wrecking her. The remains were sold in 1791.
As with other flowering plants, the taxonomy of Banksia has traditionally been based on anatomical and morphological properties of the Banksia flower, fruiting structure and seed, along with secondary characteristics such as leaf structure and growth habit. Increasingly, molecular evidence from DNA is providing important new insights into relationships within the genus and between this and other genera in the Proteaceae.
The taxonomy of Banksia integrifolia has a long and complex history, the result of confusion caused by the species' great variability, and similarities with some closely related species. The existence of hybrids between B. integrifolia and related species as well as early attempts to classify the species based on dried specimen material have also contributed to the confusion.
Ben Rudolph Finney was an American anthropologist known for his expertise in the history and the social and cultural anthropology of surfing, Polynesian navigation, and canoe sailing, as well as in the cultural and social anthropology of human space colonization. As “surfing’s premier historian and leading expert on Hawaiian surfing going back to the 17th century” and “the intellectual mentor, driving force, and international public face” of the Hokulea project, he played a key role in the Hawaiian Renaissance following his construction of the Hokulea precursor Nalehia in the 1960s and his co-founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society in the 1970s.
Peter Good was the gardener assistant to botanist Robert Brown on the voyage of HMS Investigator under Matthew Flinders, during which the coast of Australia was charted, and various plants collected.
HMS Porpoise was a 12-gun sloop-of-war originally built in Bilbao, Spain, as the packet ship Infanta Amelia. On 6 August 1799 HMS Argo captured her off the coast of Portugal. Porpoise wrecked in 1803 on the North coast of what was then part of the Colony of New South Wales, now called Wreck Reefs, off the coast of Queensland, Australia.
George Austin was one of two gardeners trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London and sent by Joseph Banks to care for plants on a voyage to the British colony in New Holland (Australia) in 1789.
James Mangles was an officer of the Royal Navy, naturalist, horticulturalist and writer. He served during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, rising to the rank of captain. In the post-war period, with his brothers Robert and George, who shared his interests in horticulture, botany and plant collection, James was actively involved in the botanical, horticultural and commercial life of early colonial Western Australia.
Hugh Ronalds was an esteemed nurseryman and horticulturalist in Brentford, who published Pyrus Malus Brentfordiensis: or, a Concise Description of Selected Apples (1831). His plants were some of the first European species to be shipped to Australia when the British colony was founded.
A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, in His Majesty's ship, the Endeavour is a 1773 book based on the papers of Sydney Parkinson, who accompanied Joseph Banks as botanical illustrator on the first voyage of James Cook. Parkinson died at sea in 1771 on the return voyage, and the Journal was compiled by William Kenrick for Parkinson's brother Stanfield, who quarrelled with Banks about his brother's papers and belongings and attacked Banks and others in the book's preface. A legal injunction prevented the publication of the Journal until after the official account of Cook's voyage, edited by John Hawkesworth, had appeared. A second edition appeared in 1784 with explanatory remarks by John Fothergill.
