10 EARLY DAYS 
in 1816, and, as will be seen hereafter, his son, finding any on 
his travels, never fails to mention the fact in his letters home. 
In his earher days, WilHam Hooker travelled afield botanis- 
ing in Scotland and the Isles, no shght midertaking in 1807 
and 1808 ; and in 1809 made his celebrated voyage to Iceland, 
where he witnessed a bloodless revolution (see p. 108), and on 
his homeward way lost his collections and all but lost his life 
by the burning of his ship. But he was unable to carry out 
his wider plans of visiting Ceylon and Java, S. Africa and Brazil, 
though he visited France, where he made acquaintance with the 
great botanists in Paris and Switzerland, a centre of botanical 
and geological interest. 
In 1815 he married Maria, the eldest daughter of his friend 
Dawson Turner, and at his father-in-law's advice, embarked 
his remaining fortune in a brewery, in which the Turners and 
Pagets were interested. This promised to recoup the loss of 
large sums which he had sunk in the bottomless depths of the 
Spanish Funds. It was an enterprise, however, for which his 
aptitudes were httle suited, and the business went steadily 
down. But this loss of fortune was the beginning of his greater 
career. Had the friendly alliance of Hooker, Turner, and Paget 
prospered, he would have remained an amateur — if a distin- 
guished amateur — in science, and would never have achieved 
the special eminence which was to shape his son's career and 
be continued in it. A growing family and diminishing revenue 
made him look out for some botanical post that should both give 
scope to his special powers and bring m an income. Through 
the influence of his friend Sir Joseph Banks,^ botanist, explorer, 
1 Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), President of the Royal Societj% became 
a botanist in a burst of schoolboy enthusiasm. His ample inheritance enabled 
him to travel and to become a munificent patron of science. His most famous 
expedition \\as that with Captain Cook in the Endeavour, when he took with 
him, at his own expense, Dr. Solander, the pupil of Linnteus, two draughtsmen, 
and two attendants. In 1778 he was elected P.R.S., and held the office till 
his death, exercising a generous but rather autocratic sway over the scientific 
world, for whom his great collections and library were always open, and his 
house in Soho Square a gathering point. He left his library and herbarium 
to Robert Bro^^^l, his librarian, for life, with reversion to the British Museum, 
not only leaving him £200 a j-ear, but providing for the famous draughtsman, 
Francis Bauer, during his life, that he might corrtinue his drawings from new 
plants at Kew. As scientific adviser to George III, he also arranged for 
collectors to gather plants for Kew from abroad. 
