Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM GCSI CB FRS (30 June 1817  10 December 1911) was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend. He was Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, for twenty years, in succession to his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science. On 11 November 1847 Hooker left England for his three-year-long Himalayan expedition; he would be the first European to collect plants in the Himalaya. He received free passage on HMS Sidon, to the Nile and then travelled overland to Suez where he boarded a ship to India. He arrived in Calcutta on 12 January 1848, then travelled by elephant to Mirzapur, up the Ganges by boat to Siliguri and overland by pony to Darjeeling, arriving on 16 April 1848. Hooker's survey of hitherto unexplored regions, the Himalayan Journals, dedicated to Charles Darwin, was published by the Calcutta Trigonometrical Survey Office in 1854, abbreviated again in 1855 and later by Ward, Lock, Bowden & Co., 1891.