Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière (28 October 1755 – 8 January 1834) was a French biologist noted for his descriptions of the flora of Australia. Labillardière was a member of a voyage in search of the La Pérouse expedition. He published a popular account of his journey and produced the first Flora on the region.
Early life Jacques Labillardière was born in Alençon, Normandy, France, on 28 October 1755. The ninth of 14 children of a lace merchant, he was born into a devoutly Roman Catholic family of modest means. The surname Labillardière originated with Labillardière's grandfather, Jacques Houtou, who, in an affectation of nobility, appended the name of the family's estate, La Billardière, after his surname. Labillardière was thus baptised under the surname Houtou de Labillardière, but he later dropped the patronymic, retaining only Labillardière in both his publications and his signature. As a child, he attended the Collège royal d'Alençon, where he excelled in his studies. Around 1772, he matriculated to the University of Montpellier, studying medicine under Antoine Gouan. He did not graduate from Montpellier, instead transferring to the Reims University around 1774. After graduating in 1779, he moved to Paris, where he spent much of his time at the Jardin du Roi. Having decided to pursue his interest in natural history, rather than a medical career, he took up an opportunity to collect specimens for Louis-Guillaume Le Monnier.
Voyages
Early voyages Labillardière undertook his first voyage as a naturalist in 1783. Sent to Britain by Le Monnier to study the exotic plants in cultivation there, he ended up staying almost two years, during which time he established enduring friendships with Sir Joseph Banks, James Edward Smith, Aylmer Bourke Lambert and George Williams. On returning from Britain, Labillardière immediately set out on a voyage through the French Alps.
Near East Labillardière's early voyages seem to have fired a passion for exploring foreign lands because, on his return to Paris, he immediately began making plans for a voyage to the Near East, in order to study the plants described by physicians of the Islamic Golden Age. He again secured Le Monnier's sponsorship, and Le Monnier in turn secured the support of France's foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, making Labillardière's voyage virtually an official mission. Labillardière left Paris in November 1786, and departed France via Marseille in February 1787. He travelled first to Cyprus, then on to Latakia, Syria. From there he moved south along the coast as far as Acre, before turning inland to Nazareth, via the Mount Carmel Range. From Nazareth, he headed north to Damascus, visiting Mount Hermon en route. He then crossed the Mount Lebanon Range, arriving in Tripoli in late June. After a detour to Bsharri to see the Cedars of Lebanon, he returned north along the coast, departing from Latakia in November. The following year, Labillardière made another voyage to the eastern Mediterranean. Little is known of that voyage, except that he made landfall at Crete, Corsica, Sardinia and Lampedusa. The result of the two voyages was a collection of around 1000 specimens. As sponsor of the expedition, they were the property of Le Monnier, but Labillardière retained a great many duplicate specimens. The voyage also resulted in Labillardière's botanical account of the region, later published as Icones plantarum Syriae rariorum. Only 55 taxa were published in it but, according to Duyker, "this was sufficient to secure for him a place among the founders of modern botany in the Near and Middle East".
Australia
In 1791, Labillardière was appointed as a naturalist to Bruni d'Entrecasteaux's expedition to Oceania, in search of the lost ships of Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse. D'Entrecasteaux failed to find any trace of the missing expedition, but his ships visited south-west Australia, Tasmania, the North Island of New Zealand, and the East Indies, where Labillardière, Claude Riche and Étienne Pierre Ventenat, assisted by gardener Félix Delahaye, collected zoological, botanical and geological specimens, and described the customs and languages of the local Indigenous Australians. While the expedition was exploring Oceania, the French Revolutionary Wars had broken out in Europe and, when the ships reached Java, Labillardière's scientific collections were seized by the British as spoils of war. Labillardière despaired at the loss of three years' painstaking work, but he had an ally in Joseph Banks, who campaigned for the return of the collections. In 1796, Banks's lobbying succeeded, and he was able to write to William Price at the British Museum:
... his Majesty's Ministers have thought it necessary for the honour of the British nation and for the advancement of Science that the right of the Captors to the Collection should be on this occasion wav'd and that the whole should be returned to M. de Billardiere, in order that he may be able to publish his Observations on Natural History in a complete manner ... By this her Majesty will lose an acquisition to her herbarium, which I very much wish'd to see deposited there, but the national character of Great Britain will certainly gain much credit for holding a conduct towards Science and Scientific men liberal in the highest degree. Labillardière returned to France with his collections in 1796. In 1799, he published a popular account of his voyage, Relation du Voyage à la Recherche de la Pérouse, and was elected to the Académie des sciences. Between 1804 and 1807, he published Novae Hollandiae Plantarum Specimen, the first general description of the flora of Australia. In 1816, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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