There are numerous accounts of Banks, the well known botanist and traveller with Captain Cook and Dr Carl Solander on H.M.S. Endeavour to Australia, including one by a Coleopterist (C. MacKechnie Jarvis, 'Sir Joseph Banks, Bt., K.B. (Naturalist), 1743-1820’ in Proc.S.Lond.ent.nat.Hist.Soc., 1943-4, 60-68). Others are listed in the comprehensive account in DNB. All mention that Banks collected insects but give little further information.
Banks’s collection, which includes Coleoptera, survives in the NHM and is interesting because it contains the types of many species described by Fabricius. In his 'Autobiography' (Trans.Ent.Soc.Lond., IV, 1845-7.) Fabricius explained that 'from 1772-1775 I spent the winters in Copenhagen and the summers in London. My friends Mr Banks and Dr Solander had returned from their voyage round the world, and had brought with them innumerable specimens of natural history and insects. I now lived very pleasantly. With Banks, Hunter and Drury, I found plenty of objects to engage my time...’. Another entomologist who also regularly visited Banks at this time was C.P. Thunberg. Like Fabricius and Solander, Thunberg was also a pupil of Linnaeus.
In 1819, shortly before his death in the following year, Banks's collections passed to the Linnaean Society where they remained until 1863 when they were given to the NHM. Sometime after acquisition, the collection was re-housed, all the insects except the Coleoptera which are now stored on the Coleoptera floor, being placed in two twenty drawer cabinets on the Hymenoptera floor. The Coleoptera collection includes 180 species from Brazil, S. Africa, Madeira, India, Siam, China, America, Australia and other countries. Twenty of the Fabrician types are missing and these are listed in the IDR for the year 1863, where all the other specimens are also listed. (MD 9/01)