Cook Claims Eastern Australia for Britain
James Cook charted the east coast of Australia between April and August 1770 and claimed it for Britain at Possession Island on 22 August. The Endeavour had been sent to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus in June 1769, an astronomical event whose timing from widely separated points would give the scale of the solar system. Cook carried sealed orders to open afterwards, directing him to search the southern ocean for the supposed great southern continent. He circumnavigated New Zealand instead, charting it accurately in six months and establishing that it was two islands and not a continental promontory. He then sailed west and struck the Australian coast at a point he named Point Hicks, and followed it north for two thousand miles. He landed first at a bay he called Botany Bay for the specimens Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander collected there. The Gweagal people who met them were fired on when they resisted the landing. The ship struck the Great Barrier Reef in June and was nearly lost, saved by fothering a sail over the hole and by seven weeks of repairs at the Endeavour River. Cook recorded that the inhabitants seemed to him far happier than Europeans, being unacquainted with superfluities and desiring nothing they did not have. The claim at Possession Island rested on the doctrine that the land was unoccupied, which his own journals contradict. The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay in 1788. The Australian High Court rejected terra nullius in the Mabo judgment of 1992.
- Year: 1770 CE
- Category: Exploration
