At each port Banks’s arrogance had caused disaster. He even shot an albatross – sailors were superstitious and it was a well-known sailors’ superstition that if you shot an albatross the expedition was doomed.
The Endeavour sailed out into the Pacific, heading west into the cold giant waves of the south of the Pacific instead of the usual route to the northwards. Even before the orders were opened and announced to the crew at Tahiti, Cook was already hunting for the Great South Land.
The cold was extraordinary. It grew worse. Five of the crew were lost to cold and waves as they rounded the Horn. Day after day the ship plunged across the waves in seas where possibly no boat had ever been. Slowly the grey sky turned blue, the dark sea shifted to aquamarine. Another member of the crew committed suicide, vanishing overboard after being disciplined. Many times the lookout called out that land was on the horizon, but each time as they sailed towards it the ‘land’ turned into a bank of cloud.
There was no land. Worse, there were no new currents. As Cook was to write in his log: ‘this must be a great sign that we have been near no land of any extent because near land are generally found currents; it is well known that on the north side of the Continent in the North Sea we meet with currents above 100 Leagues from Land.’
Banks, too, accepted that there was no Great South Land in this part of the Pacific Ocean. He was to write of the armchair scientists back home that ‘they have generally supposed that every foot of sea which they had believed no ship to have passed over was land’.
The Endeavour kept searching. It had now been three months since they had sighted land. Even Banks, well-fed on his private stores of food, found his gums bleeding with the early signs of scurvy. He took an extra ration of lemon juice mixed with brandy and found himself improving. But there was too little to give out to the crew, although their sauerkraut and malt wort kept them alive and functioning.
It is difficult to imagine the monotony of a three-month voyage with nothing but sea, sky and apprehension on a tiny ship. The officers and gentlemen at least had private cabins, books and their scientific observations to distract them. But the fear of the unknown must have been worse than the boredom.
Land was dangerous, but the sea could be worse. No one had mapped this ocean, marked doldrums where no wind blew or rocks that might smash the ship at night when no effective lookout could be kept. Day after day they waited for disaster, but at least Tahiti must be near – they were on the right course. Cook had never navigated in the southern hemisphere, away from the familiar northern stars he knew. Tahiti is only about thirty kilometres long in a vast ocean. Its position had only been mapped a year before Cook set out. With no accurate timepieces to correctly work out latitude, and long before GPS satellites, Tahiti might not even be where it was supposed to be.
It was. And Cook’s meticulous observations, using hourglasses and knotted rope to measure the ship’s speed, and sextant and almanac to measure its position by the sun and stars, had been precise. Most of the crew had even survived.
The Endeavour hadn’t found the Great South Land yet, but they had found a large area of sea where they could now prove it wasn’t. And for now, they were safe.
The hunt resumes
They waited from 13 April 1769 until the transit on 3 June. It was not a hardship. As Cook wrote, the women of Tahiti were liberal with their favours. He was more concerned to find that a third of his crew had syphilis or gonorrhoea, and had possibly passed it on to the Tahitian women, from whom the diseases might spread across the Pacific.
The intense sunlight and Venus’s atmosphere made a strange dusky shade about the planet, which meant that the transit couldn’t be observed accurately, though they were able to make some calculations. At last Cook opened the sealed orders. If the crew muttered at yet another journey into the unknown, it isn’t recorded. Perhaps, by then, they had learned to admire, even revere, this meticulous disciplinarian who led them. Perhaps, too, the paradise of Tahiti led them to hope there’d be more of the same to come.
The Endeavour sailed south, to hunt for the Great South Land in the vast unknown of the Pacific Ocean. Banks was convinced that it must be there, somewhere. Cook was sceptical. Day after day they sailed with no sign of land. A comet flared across the sky with an astonishing forty-two degrees of tail – yet another sign of calamity for the sailors, as well as for the Polynesian navigator and translator named Tupaia who Banks had persuaded Cook to take on board.
By the time they reached forty degrees south, the most southerly limit of the Admiralty’s instructions, there was still no land, no land birds, no sign of seaweed, nor any possible indication that there was land in the vicinity. The air seemed to freeze around them and their livestock began to die of cold and lack of fresh feed. The sky grew grey and the waves towered so high that Cook ordered the sails furled.
There could be no habitable land further south.
Cook now turned west, hoping to find the Great South Land towards New Zealand, though it was difficult sailing against the current and into the prevailing wind, but they continued west all through September. One day a seal swam by. For the first time they saw tangles of seaweed, and hauled aboard a barnacle-crusted log. The water grew paler. Land had to be near. They had now been away from England for more than a year.
And then, in early October 1769, land was sighted. For three hours they were convinced they were sailing towards the Great South Land. Slowly, one by one, those on board accepted the truth. It was another bank of cloud.
But they still had the seaweed, the change in waves and currents that promised that the Great South Land must be near. Cook offered a keg of rum to the first person to see land.
On 6 October at 1.30 p.m., ‘Young Nick’ (Nicholas Young, amongst the youngest of the crew) yelled, ‘Land, ho!’ from the masthead. The crew clustered on deck. Others shouted that they could see land as well – even though it was in the opposite direction from the mountain top Young Nick claimed to have seen. They sailed towards it until at last even those on deck, not up on the mast, could just see a group of islands – land, not clouds. They stared as the sun sank ahead of them.
The Endeavour sailed due west that night. As dawn lit the sky, the land was only about forty kilometres away. Banks would write: ‘[A]ll hands seem to agree that this is certainly the continent we are in search of.’ They had found the Great South Land at last.
But Cook looked at the shape of the coast. He deduced that this land that Europeans now called New Zealand was not the edge of a great continent, as Tasman had hoped, but an island. Cook was right.
At least Cook could now map and claim this land for Britain, as he had been instructed to do. They sailed on. Banks still hoped that, as Tasman had thought, this might be the tip of a much larger continent. He even cited a rumour that the Dutch had sent other ships to Tasman’s discovery, and they had been able to follow the land southward to a latitude of sixty-four degrees, making this a continent, not an island. However by March 1770 Cook had mapped the coast meticulously, outlining harbours, winds and currents for all the ships that would follow them, and even Banks had to admit to ‘the total demolition of our aerial fabrication called a continent’.
This land was fertile, well watered, with excellent harbours. The inhabitants were at times friendly, though also fierce defenders of their country; at the Bay of Islands the crew needed to fire the cannons to save their boats from an attack by war canoes. Cook had the Union Jack hoisted on the island of Motuhora off the northern coast and took possession of the land ‘in the name of and for the use of His Majesty King George the Third’. Cook and Banks even speculated about establishing a colony there.
But it was not the Great South Land.
Cook wanted to head back across the Pacific at more northern latitudes to prove once and for all whether a Great South Land still lurked in the Pacific. But winter was approaching, and the Endeavour had been badly damaged in New Zealand storms. The fresh food and grass they’d gathered in New Zeal
and would only allow them another six months’ voyaging at two-thirds of the usual rations for each man, assuming they didn’t find another source of fresh food.
The quickest way to Dutch Batavia, the nearest port where the ship could be repaired, would be to take the southern route that Tasman had already charted beneath Van Diemen’s Land and New Holland then north to Batavia. But could the tattered sails and damaged masts of the Endeavour survive the gales of the Southern Ocean that Tasman warned of?
The most sensible option was to follow Tasman’s route north, so they could stop at Fiji, Tonga and the other Pacific Islands for fresh water, pigs, coconuts, bananas and other provisions, then go around the north of New Guinea, as Tasman had, and approach Batavia that way.
Then there was option three: to sail up the east coast of New Holland and use the strait discovered by Torres to get to Batavia – if the strait existed. Tasman had said it didn’t, Dalrymple said it did. But Dalrymple has also been sure the Great South Land existed, and his only evidence for that vital strait was one old forgotten map. Cook must also have known about the ‘dangerous waters’ the Portuguese maps warned of.
But it was his only chance to map land no other European had surveyed. If he headed back to England by a known route now, he’d just be yet another captain who didn’t discover the Great South Land. If Cook could prove that Torres’s strait existed he’d have found a new and possibly faster way to get from Batavia to the Pacific.
Cook was a cautious, careful man, deeply protective of his crew, especially the younger ones who were traditionally bastardised, insisting that each man ate as healthily as possible and that their quarters were scrubbed twice a week. Other captains had found New Holland to have little grass or fresh water, except Tasman’s Van Diemen’s Land, a place of giants, tigers and ferocious winds that could batter a ship against the cliffs. Cook would be risking his ship, his crew and his life – and all his new maps of the Pacific, Southern Ocean and New Zealand – just to map uncharted shores.
Against all orders, and expectations, and common sense, Cook and the Endeavour sailed to Australia.
His decision would wreck his ship.
Towards the unknown
The Endeavour left the northern tip of New Zealand’s south island from near the point they named Cape Farewell at the beginning of April 1770 and sailed across unknown seas to the uncharted coast of New Holland. Cook wanted to land on the south coast of Tasmania, so he could start his maps where Tasman’s had stopped. But gales from the south forced the Endeavour north. Three weeks after they left New Zealand, birds and waves indicated land ahead.
At 1 a.m. on 19 April, Cook ordered the crew to ‘drop line’ and see how deep the water was below them – approaching unknown land in the darkness was risky, as there might be shallows and reefs. At 5 a.m. he ordered the top sail reefed so that the ship travelled more slowly and cautiously during the darkness, when waves and wind might drive them onto unseen rocks.
Then, with the first light on the morning of 19 April 1770, Lieutenant Zachary Hickes, Cook’s second-in-command, ‘saw ye land making high’, as he recorded in his Journal of a Voyage in the Endeavour. The land was about thirty kilometres away. Below them was a fine sandy bottom, with no rocks or reefs. There was no sign of land to the south of them, though according to Tasman’s calculations land should have been in sight, so Cook was unable to tell if Van Diemen’s Land joined the land he now saw, if they were two islands, two continents, or one continent and one island. The land that they could see went off to the west and north, which made Cook believe that this was the most southerly point.
Cook named the place he first glimpsed Point Hicks after his lieutenant, who died of tuberculosis on the return voyage to England. (Point Hicks and its lighthouse are now in Croajingolong National Park, on the northeast coast of present-day Victoria.) It was a green and hilly country covered in trees, with large stretches of sand along the coast. Smoke rose above the treetops, a sign that this part of New Holland was probably inhabited, as Tasman had said Van Diemen’s Land was.
The ship sailed north, looking for a safe place to anchor and send the ship’s boats ashore with barrels to get fresh water, as well as to cut grass and gather firewood to replace the coal for cooking that was now almost used up. But the strong southerly winds didn’t allow the ship to manoeuvre into the bay that Cook named Batemans, or into Jervis Bay either.
* * *
The wrong point
The position and date Cook gave for the expedition’s first Australian land sighting were wrong. This led to years of arguing about where the first European sighting of land on the east coast was.
In 1852 a surveyor named George Smythe mapped the area and named the point Cape Everard. But in 1970 the premier of Victoria, Henry Bolte, renamed it Point Hicks in honour of the Cook expedition.
* * *
Sting Ray Harbour
At last on the morning of 29 April they found a reasonably sheltered bay. The strong southerly dropped enough for them to sail inside. If a storm blew up they might be dashed on the rocks but now, in fine weather, it seemed safe enough.
There was no river or even a creek to be seen. But there were grass and good trees. There were also the Kameygal people, dark-skinned and naked, with their huts, women, children, men with white powder on their faces, spears and four canoes. If there were people, there must be fresh water. Below the ship the stingrays flapped slowly in the waves. Cook named the place Sting Ray Harbour, but when they departed he would rename it Botany Bay, in honour of Banks’s and Solander’s botanical discoveries.
The Endeavour dropped anchor. The crew gazed eagerly at the people on the shore, but the Kameygal people didn’t gaze eagerly back. They didn’t seemed surprised or even interested in the large canoe that had appeared in their harbour. More Kameygal women and children came out from the trees. The fishermen hauled their canoes out of the water. An old woman began to cook dinner.
The people on the Endeavour dined too, though probably not nearly as well as the Kameygal. After dinner, Cook ordered the ship’s boat to be launched (removing the hens and scrubbing out the chook manure first, as they had to do on every visit ashore). As the crew rowed towards the shore the locals vanished, except for two men, one middle-aged and the other about nineteen. The Kameygal might not have been fascinated by the newcomers, but they were wary. The two men waved their spears and spear throwers and yelled, obviously telling the newcomers to go away.
They were only two warriors facing a party of forty sailors. Cook admired their courage. He asked Tupaia the Tahitian to try to talk to them. Tupaia yelled a few words across the waves at the men; the warriors yelled back. But even though Tupaia had been able to understand Maori, he wasn’t able to understand anything of the language here.
The sailors threw nails and beads to the two men to try to appease them. The Kameygal warriors failed to be impressed. At last Cook fired a musket between them. The youngest warrior dropped his spears in shock at the noise, smoke and smell, then picked his spears up again. The other threw a stone at the boat.
Finally Cook ordered a musket filled with small shot – small pieces of metal that would scatter when the musket was fired but not do any great harm – to be fired, and the shot hit the leg of the older man. The English had not even set foot on New Holland before local blood was spilled.
The wounded man ran to one of the huts to fetch his shield. The two men threw their spears at the landing party. They were superb throws at that distance. The spears landing in the boat among the sailors but didn’t hit anyone. Cook ordered a third musket with small shot to be fired. The men threw one more spear and ran towards the trees. Cook wanted to chase and capture them but for once Banks was the cautious one, warning that their spears might be poisoned.
And then they landed.
A superficial survey
The shore party explored. The Kameygal had vanished. Cook judged their huts were rough, but the spears superb. Cook ordered the spears to be confiscat
ed so that they couldn’t be used against them. At last they found a little fresh water in a hole in the sand.
They landed again the next day. Cook, Banks, Dr Solander and seven others explored the country, while others of the crew cut grass and slowly filled the barrels with water. The grasslands were lush and green; the timber looked good. Above them flocks of bright birds flickered through the trees. It was beautiful.
For a botanist and zoologist like Banks, it was also paradise. He shoved handfuls of specimens roughly into bags while his assistants worked methodically, collecting and sketching. He noted a fascinating ‘quadruped’ as big as a rabbit, which his greyhounds almost caught – perhaps a small wombat, or more likely a pademelon or bandicoot, as the soil of Botany Bay is probably too sandy to support wombat holes.
They had no more contact with the local people. As Cook put it in his log: ‘ [A]fter our first contest at landing they would never come near enough to parley; nor did they touch a single article of all that we had left at their huts.’ He did not think much of them. ‘[T]hey did not appear to be numerous, or live in societies, but like other animals were scattered about along the coast and in the woods.’4 Cook came from a culture where status was measured in possessions: great houses, uniforms, the ermine cloak of a member of the House of Lords. What he found here was both an environment and a culture he didn’t understand. Even Dampier hadn’t referred to his ‘servants’ as animals.
Every day they were ashore Cook had the ship’s colours displayed, a display any onlookers who happened to understand British naval protocol would recognise. The ship’s name, with the date and the year, was inscribed on one of the trees near the freshwater pool. This effectively – for Cook and other Europeans – declared that Cook had claimed the land for Britain, although he would make a more formal proclamation when he believed they were leaving the land.
Let the Land Speak Page 12