Chapter 13

19 APRIL 1770, THE EAST COAST OF NEW HOLLAND

Thus live these I had almost said happy people, content with little nay almost nothing, Far enough removd from the anxieties attending upon riches, or even the possession of what we Europeans call common necessaries . . .

BANKS FORGETTING, FOR A MOMENT, HIS VAST WEALTH TO SPECULATE ON THE JOYS OF THE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE¹

ROUGH WEATHER HAD forced the Endeavour well north of Tasman’s plotting for Van Diemen’s Land, but on 19 April 1770, Banks excitedly wrote in his journal: ‘With the first day light this morn the Land was seen, at 10 it was pretty plainly to be observd; it made in sloping hills, coverd in Part with trees or bushes, but interspersd with large tracts of sand.’² Although there was a great deal of fog about,³ Banks and the rest of the Endeavour men had their first sighting of New Holland, an island continent that would become known as Australia. They also saw three water spouts that at the same time appeared in different places, all between the ship and the land; one lasted a quarter of an hour.

Cook named the southernmost part of land they could see Point Hicks after Zachary Hickes, the man who first saw it but whose name was constantly misspelt. Because the ship was so far north of where Tasman had positioned Van Diemen’s Land, Cook theorised correctly that they were seeing a different land mass and that Van Diemen’s Land was probably an island.⁴

The Endeavour was off what is now Gippsland, Victoria, between the modern settlements of Orbost and Mallacoota, but Cook gave the coordinates as being several kilometres off shore – perhaps in that era of hostilities with the French, he was concealing Bass Strait from any Frenchmen who might later read his journal.⁵

With a gentle breeze pushing the ship, Cook turned north and aimed for Batavia, with no idea that there were thousands of kilometres of coastline to follow before he got there.

The weather cleared the next day, giving all on board a view of a countryside Banks described as rising ‘in gentle sloping hills which had the appearance of the highest fertility, every hill seemd to be cloth’d with trees of no mean size’.⁶ For Cook the verdant coastline, fronted by a deep blue ocean and lapped by white surf, presented a ‘very agreeable and promising aspect’, and he named Cape Howe, on what is now the border between Victoria and New South Wales, in recognition of Richard Howe,⁷ the Treasurer of the Navy.

At noon Banks reported seeing ‘a smoak . . . a little way inland and in the Evening several more’.⁸ The following night he saw five fires, and on 22 April he spied ‘5 people who appeard through our glasses to be enormously black: so far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampiers account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men’. Since reaching the coast Banks had ‘not observd those large fires which we so frequently saw in the Islands and New Zealand made by the Natives in order to clear the ground for cultivation’. He thus ‘concluded not much in favour’ for the farming methods of his ‘future friends’, the people of New Holland.⁹ He would soon see much bigger fires, but he still thought the air in ‘this Southern hemisphere’ was much clearer than in the northern.

The Endeavour sailed north-east ever so slowly in light winds and against the powerful East Australian Current, which sometimes forced the ship backwards. Cook named Mount Dromedary¹⁰ after its resemblance to a camel’s hump, along with Batemans Bay,¹¹ Cape St George, and Pigeon House Mountain, ‘the little dome on the top of it . . . first thought to be a rock standing up in the sea long before any other part was seen’.¹²

HMS Endeavour off the coast of New Holland, 1794, by the marine painter Samuel Atkins. National Library of Australia

Banks likened the countryside to the back of a lean cow, ‘well enough clothd’ with foliage like long hair but in some places bare ‘like a cow’s scraggy hip bones where the covering had been removed by ‘accidental rubbs and knocks’.¹³ Several brown patches on the sea proved to be clusters of small insects, and on 26 April ‘Chalky cliffs something resembling those of old England’ came into view.

THE ENDEAVOUR HAD PASSED the pearly white sand of what became known as Jervis Bay when on 28 April, with the ship anchored less than three kilometres off the Illawarra coast near present-day Collins Point, Woonona, Cook proposed to hoist the Endeavour’s boats and attempt a landing. When the pinnace was lowered, though, it was found to be too leaky to use.

Banks saw four men walking briskly on the distant shore. Two carried on their shoulders a small canoe, and for a while he thought they might use it to greet their visitors. They did not – instead, Banks, Cook, Solander, Tupaia and ‘four rowers’ climbed into the little two-masted yawl and headed to meet them. ‘They sat on the rocks expecting us but when we came within about a quarter of a mile they ran away hastily into the countrey; they appeard to us as well as we could judge at that distance exceedingly black. Near the place were four small canoes which they left behind.’¹⁴ The surf was too great to permit a landing, so Banks had to content himself with gazing from the boat ‘at the productions of nature’ that he so ‘much wishd to enjoy a nearer acquaintance with’.¹⁵ In the course of the night, many fires were seen.

Following a close call with the breakers on Bellambi Reef, the Endeavour continued her voyage north-east along the coast. At daylight on 29 April, she arrived at a bay that Cook described as ‘tollerably well shelter’d from all winds’. He sent Robert Molyneux in the pinnace to discover the depth of the entrance. Banks thought the land ‘Cliffy and barren without wood’. ‘A small smoak arising from a very barren place’ directed spyglasses to about ten locals who – on the approach of the biggest vessel they had ever seen – left the fire and took positions on a little rise in order to watch these strange visitors. Soon after this, two canoes, each carrying two men, landed on the beach under them. The men hauled up their canoes and joined their companions on the hill.

Four weeks after the Endeavour had sailed from New Zealand, Banks took a deep breath and looked nervously towards an ominous sight on the shore of this new world. He had already had his fill of bloodshed with the Maori. He watched Molyneux approach the shore as the Aboriginal people moved higher up the hill. One man hid among some rocks. Molyneux followed the shore, and the locals followed his course at a distance. When he eventually returned to the Endeavour, he told Banks that in a small cove the black men had come down to the beach and invited him and his companions to land, using ‘many signs and word[s] which he did not at all understand’.¹⁶ He was wary, though, as they seemed menacing: all were armed with long pikes and curved wooden weapons that resembled short scimitars, which Banks later learnt were called ‘boomerangs’. The boomerang blades ‘looked whitish and some though[t] shining’, so that several of the men believed they were metal swords. Banks suggested that they were wood smeared ‘with the same white pigment with which they paint their bodies’.¹⁷

A few of the Aboriginal men who had not followed Molyneux’s boat remained on the rocks opposite the ship and seemed to threaten it with their weapons. Two in particular made Banks nervous: their bodies were decorated with white clay, ‘their faces seemingly only dusted over with it, their bodies painted with broad strokes drawn over their breasts and backs resembling much a soldiers cross belts, and their legs and thighs also with such like broad strokes drawn round them which imitated broad garters . . .’¹⁸ They appeared to be talking earnestly together ‘at times brandishing their crooked weapons . . . in [a] token of defiance’.¹⁹

BY NOON THE ENDEAVOUR was within the mouth of the harbour. Under its south head, Banks observed four small canoes battling the surf, each containing a man who held a long pole with which he speared fish. ‘These people seemd to be totaly engag’d in what they were about: the ship passd within a quarter of a mile of them and yet they scarce lifted their eyes from their employment; I was almost inclind to think that attentive to their business and deafned by the noise of the surf they neither saw nor heard her go past them.’²⁰

At 1 p.m., Cook anchored the ship in nine metres of calm water within a wide but shallow inlet off a low headland fronted by towering sand dunes. Banks and the others observed the shore around what is now the Sydney suburb of Kurnell. He noted that they were ‘abreast of a small village consisting of about 6 or 8 houses’. An old woman, followed by three children and carrying small sticks, walked out of the bushland. When she arrived at the houses, three younger children came out of one of them to meet her. She often looked at the ship but expressed neither surprise nor concern. She lit a fire, and the four canoes returned from fishing. ‘The people landed, hauld up their boats and began to dress their dinner to all appearance totaly unmovd at us, tho we were within a little more than ½ a mile of them. Of all these people we had seen so distinctly through our glasses we had not been able to observe the least signs of Cloathing: myself to the best of my judgement plainly discernd that the woman did not copy our mother Eve even in the fig leaf.’²¹

After dinner Cook had the boats manned, and on a cloudless autumn afternoon, a group of Endeavour men set off to meet the inhabitants of this mysterious land. The hope was that they would be as unconcerned by the presence of their uninvited guests as they had seemed earlier in the day at the sight of a Whitby collier flying the British flag in their waters.

Banks, Cook and some of the others approached the shore in Cook’s eighteen-foot-long pinnace. Three dozen or so²² Europeans were about to make first contact with Aboriginal people living on the eastern coast of what would one day be called Australia.

Two Gweagal warriors stood apart from the others on a rocky outcrop, seemingly ready to fight. They had thick woolly hair and bushy beards,²³ and each held a spear three metres in length and a spear-hurling device. Banks made the mental notes of a dedicated scientist, despite the peril.

As two boats now approached the shore, many of the warriors on the rocks retreated to vantage points in the scrub, but not the two most fierce. Parkinson, the master of understatement, observed that their ‘countenance bespoke displeasure’.²⁴

‘Lay upon your Oars, men,’ Cook ordered in his thick north-country accent, bringing a halt to the momentum of the boats. ‘Lay upon your oars.’²⁵

The skipper tried making himself understood through Tupaia’s Polynesian words, though he might as well have been speaking Polish. The Gweagal scowled, raised their weapons and yelled back, ‘warra warra wai’ [you are all dead].²⁶ Banks described these words as being in ‘a harsh sounding Language of which neither us or [Tupaia] understood a word, shaking their lances and menacing, in all appearance resolvd to dispute our landing to the utmost tho they were but two and we 30 or 40 at least’.²⁷ ‘In this manner we parleyd with them for about a quarter of an hour,’ Banks recalled, ‘we again signing that we wanted water and that we meant them no harm’ and the Aboriginal men ‘waving to us to be gone’.²⁸ Tupaia kept trying to find a common tongue, but no Tahitian or Maori word could do anything to soothe the men shouting threats and brandishing their spears.

After attempting to appease them with a gift of nails and beads, Cook eventually fell back on the old strategy of using superior firepower to resolve conflict. With his flintlock musket, he fired a warning shot between the two warriors. But while this gunfire would echo through the ages, it had little effect at the time. ‘The youngest of the two dropped a bundle of lances on the rock,’ Banks noted, ‘he however snatched them up again and both renewed their threats and opposition.’

One of the men picked up a stone and threw it towards Cook.²⁹ The skipper took another musket, this one loaded with bird shot, and fired at the older of the two, who was about forty metres from the boat. The blast struck him on his naked legs, but Banks observed that the little pellets only stung and ‘he minded it very little’.³⁰

Cook’s family would recount that as the skipper’s boat neared the shore, he told young Isaac Smith, squatting in the bow, ‘You go first’,³¹ making him the first European to land on the continent’s east coast.

No sooner had Banks and Cook set foot on the rocky beach than the warriors hurled two spears at them. Cook raised another musket to his shoulder, took aim and fired a third time. The warriors ran towards a bark hut only to return, the older man with a ‘wooden sword’ and an oval wooden shield ‘painted white in the middle with two holes in it to see through’.³² Both men launched more spears, one landing at the feet of Parkinson, who stood terrified in the midst of the invaders.

Cook ordered two more muskets with bird shot to be fired. One of the warriors was hit, and both ran away after shouting for assistance – ‘hala, hala, mae’³³ – as their wives and children began a ‘most horrid howl’ from the distance. Cook knew that the bird shot from long range could have done the men ‘no material harm’, and he wanted to placate them. He called on his men to follow him to the huts – they would later learn that the Aboriginal people called them ‘gunyahs’ – but Banks warned the skipper to be careful. Banks examined the spears quickly: almost all of them had four prongs ‘headed with very sharp fish bones, which were besmeard with a greenish colourd gum that at first gave me some suspicions of Poison’.³⁴

This made Cook cautious in how he ‘advanced into the Woods’.³⁵ His men fanned out through the trees fronting the beach, ready for trouble, but all the Aboriginal people seemed to have vanished. Inside one of the huts, though, Cook and Banks found ‘4 or 5 Small Children’³⁶ hiding behind a shield and a piece of bark, terrified by these weird-looking invaders. ‘We therefore resolvd to leave the children on the spot without even opening their shelter,’ Banks noted, ‘[and] threw into the house to them some beads, ribbands, cloths etc. as presents and went away.’

The Endeavour men carried off as many Aboriginal spears as they could find: up to fifty, of various lengths, from six to fifteen feet (about two to five metres). ‘The people were blacker than any we have seen in the Voyage,’ wrote Banks, ‘tho by no means negroes . . . they were of a common size, lean and seemd active and nimble; their voices were coarse and strong. Upon examining the lances we had taken from them we found that the very most of them had been usd in striking fish, at least we concluded so from sea weed which was found stuck in among the four prongs.’

Three canoes lay upon the beach, the worst-made vessels Cook had ever seen, ‘about 12 or 14 feet long, made of one piece of the Bark of a Tree, drawn or tied up at each end’.³⁷

After searching for fresh water without success, except a little in a small hole dug in the grey sand, Cook and his men went to the north point of the bay. Several locals were on shore, but they ran away. Fresh water was found trickling down into pools among the rocks – but it was difficult to reach.

At night Banks watched moving lights in different parts of the bay and supposed that the people in New Holland struck fish with spears in the darkness just as the Maori had done.

The next morning Cook sent his men to the place where they had first landed, ordering them to dig holes in the sand. They uncovered a small stream, sufficient to water the ship. The skipper raised the British flag and ordered it to be displayed ashore every day, and he arranged for an inscription to be cut out upon one of the trees near the watering place, setting forth the ship’s name and date.

Cook also sent men on shore to cut wood and grass for the sheep. The locals who had been seen the previous day had disappeared, leaving Cook’s gift of beads and nails in their huts, probably afraid to take them away. The skipper and Banks toured the bay in the pinnace and saw some of the inhabitants, but they all fled. At one place Cook noted that people had departed in haste, leaving behind small fires with fresh mussels broiling upon them and a vast heap of the biggest oyster shells he had ever seen.³⁸ Banks and Solander went into the bush and ‘found many plants, but saw nothing like people’.

When at noon the Endeavour men all came on board the ship to eat, a dozen Aboriginal people emerged from the trees and returned to their huts. In the evening, fifteen of them, all armed, approached the men collecting water but ‘gently retired’. At the time Banks and Cook were in a sandy cove on the northern side of the bay, hauling their fishing net to catch almost 150 kilograms of fine fish, ‘more than all hands could Eat’.³⁹

ON THE NIGHT OF 30 APRIL, Forby Sutherland, the ship’s thirty-year-old poulterer ‘and a native of the Orkneys’,⁴⁰ died of tuberculosis, a condition that had troubled him since they had left Cape Horn. He had prepared the birds that Banks shot for the table, and Cook had him buried at the watering place. The skipper then named the southern point of the bay⁴¹ in honour of the first British subject to die in New Holland.

On his third evening in the bay, Banks took a boat to a small island on the northern side in order to search for shells. He saw six Aboriginal people who shouted to him ‘but ran away into the woods before the boat was within half a mile of them’.⁴² The Gweagal may not have been as confrontational as the Maori, but their spears were sharp and plentiful. When Banks, Cook and Solander next ventured into the bush, their party carried twelve muskets. They walked for hours, until they were completely tired out, and saw only one man, ‘who ran from us as soon as he saw us’.⁴³ It was swampy country but in the light sandy soil there were a few species of trees, ‘one which was large yeilding a gum’. Banks likened the sap from these ‘gum trees’ to being ‘much like sanguis draconis’,⁴⁴ the ‘Dragons Blood’ gum resin taken from the berries of palm trees and used for thousands of years as a dye.⁴⁵ Every place was covered with vast quantities of grass, and there were many huts and places where the native people had slept upon the ground without shelter. Banks left beads and other trinkets as gestures of goodwill.

He saw ‘one quadruped about the size of a Rabbit’, and his greyhound was off in the first recorded race of such kind on this continent. Eyes blazing and teeth bared, the greyhound rocketed away but lamed himself crashing into a tree stump concealed in the long grass: ‘we saw also the dung of a large animal that had fed on grass which much resembled that of a Stag [the kangaroo]; also the footsteps of an animal clawd like a dog or wolf and as large as the latter [most likely a dingo]; and of a small animal whose feet were like those of a polecat or weesel. The trees over our heads abounded very much with Loryquets and Cocatoos of which we shot several; both these sorts flew in flocks of several scores together.’⁴⁶

The Aboriginal people had cut steps into the cabbage palms,⁴⁷ ‘3 or 4 feet asunder for the conveniency of Climbing them’, but observing their handiwork was still as close as Banks could get to studying the people. The stand-offs continued, with Lieutenant Gore and a midshipman being confronted by twenty-two locals who were ‘parleying but never daring to attack him tho they were all armd with Lances’.⁴⁸

When rain came the next morning, Banks welcomed the excuse to stay on the ship and examine 132 plant species that he and Solander had collected from the bay: the first recorded scientific gathering of Australian flora.⁴⁹ The collection had grown so large that it was necessary for extraordinary care to be taken,⁵⁰ and Banks devoted the next day to preserving his specimens. He carried ashore all the drying paper and nearly two hundred lots of four-sheet ‘quires’ full of plant samples, then he spread them upon a sail in the sun, keeping them exposed the whole day and often turning them.

That evening he found a cloud of Quails, ‘much resembling’ English ones. Although he might have shot as many as he pleased, he reminded himself that his ‘business was to kill variety and not too many individuals of any one species’.⁵¹

While Banks sorted his collection, Isaac Smith – Elizabeth Cook’s teenage cousin – became friendly enough with the Gweagal on the bay’s northern shore to document twenty words of their language. Dr Munkhouse gathered thirty-one, and Zachary Hickes listed nine. They were simple words, such as moola for ‘man’ and peeal for ‘no’, and they matched word lists compiled by colonists after the First Fleet’s arrival eighteen years later.⁵²

Cook and Solander, meanwhile, toured the bay in the pinnace. They saw fires at several places, along with people who again ran away as they approached, leaving behind the shellfish they were cooking. Cook and Solander ate what they found, leaving beads and trinkets behind as payment – not that the Gweagal could have cared less about them. The British men also found several magenta cherry trees, now known as lilly pillies. The fruit was eaten by Aboriginal people, and Cook and Solander brought an abundance back to the Endeavour. They were consumed with ‘much pleasure tho they had little to recommend them but a light acid’.⁵³

One of the midshipmen, walking by himself, met by accident a very old Aboriginal man and woman and some children. ‘They shewd signs of fear but did not attempt to run away. He had nothing about him to give to them but some Parrots which he had shot: these they refusd, withdrawing themselves from his hand when he offerd them in token either of extreme fear or disgust.’⁵⁴

Banks and Cook went ‘a good way into the countrey’ on the north side of the bay, which Cook called ‘a barren heath’⁵⁵ and which Banks likened to the desolate moors of England ‘as no trees grow upon it but every thing is coverd with a thin brush of plants about as high as the knees’.⁵⁶ With them was New York-born midshipman James Matra, the son of a Corsican doctor.⁵⁷ The area they walked over would one day be called Matraville.

While they were exploring the countryside, some of the men caught ‘a great number of small fish’, which the sailors called ‘leather jackets’ because of their thick skin.⁵⁸ Gore caught several large stingrays ‘in not more than 2 or 3 feet [of] water’; one, Banks noted, ‘weigh’d when his gutts were taken out 239 pounds [about 108 kilograms]’.⁵⁹ On 5 May, despite troublesome mosquitoes all about, Gore took another ‘which weighd without his gutts 336 pounds [153 kilograms]’.⁶⁰

Cook ‘found a very fine stream of fresh Water on the North shore’,⁶¹ which would be called Cooks River. He described the bay as ‘capacious, safe, and Commodious’, and he and Banks agreed it would make a good area for a British settlement. Cook called it Stingrays Harbour, after the great sea creatures they had caught. He later renamed it in honour of ‘the great quantity of plants’⁶² Banks and Solander had found – and ‘Botanists Bay’ soon became Botany Bay. Among Banks’s plant samples were six species of Leptospermum, four of Acacia and a crimson bottlebrush, as well as four plants that would become known as species of ‘banksia’.⁶³

COOK HAD WANTED to set sail earlier, but the winds were coming from the north, his direction of travel, so he waited until they were more favourable. Finally, ‘having seen everything this place afforded’, he weighed anchor at daylight on 6 May and put to sea.⁶⁴

The captain was disappointed that he could not report much of the Aboriginal customs, ‘as we never were able to form any Connections with them; they had not so much as touch’d the things we had left in their Hutts’.⁶⁵ But Banks and Solander were taking home an impressive record of their time in New Holland.

As Cook made his way to the open water, he named the northern headland of the entrance to the bay Cape Banks, and the southern side, Cape Solander. By noon, travelling north, the Endeavour was abreast of a bay ‘wherein there appear’d to be safe Anchorage’,⁶⁶ and without entering what would become known as Sydney Harbour, Cook named it Port Jackson after one of the Admiralty secretaries.⁶⁷ Banks noted that the land they sailed past during the whole forenoon ‘appeard broken and likely for harbours; in the afternoon again woody and very pleasant’.

He wrote of their meal: ‘We dind to day upon the stingray and his tripe: the fish itself was not quite so good as a scate nor was it much inferior, the tripe every body thought excellent.’⁶⁸ Banks had it served with the boiled leaves of Tetragonia cornuta – Botany Bay spinach, the seeds of which he planned to cultivate in England. His servant James Roberts, eating with the crew, said the ray meat was ‘very strong and made a great many of the Company sick’.⁶⁹

Travelling north-east, Cook named Broken Bay,⁷⁰ saw Nobby Head off present-day Newcastle, and named Port Stephens and Cape Hawke, ⁷¹ honouring Philip Stephens and Edward Hawke from the Admiralty. Banks worked Parkinson hard, and just six days after leaving Botany Bay the young Scotsman had finished drawing the new plants, which had been kept fresh inside wet cloths held in tin chests. In fourteen days, he had made ninety-four sketch drawings of New Holland flora, ‘so quick a hand has he acquird by use’.⁷²

The Endeavour continued to track north-east until Cook named Point Byron in honour of the Dolphin’s skipper and realised it was an eastern extremity of the coastline. He now turned slightly north-west.

Banks watched about twenty Aboriginal people on the distant shore carrying bundles on their backs that he ‘conjecturd to be palm leaves for covering their houses’. None of them stopped to look towards the ship but ‘pursued their way in all appearance intirely unmovd by the neighbourhood of so remarkable an object as a ship must necessarily be to people who have never seen one’.⁷³ The land was ‘well wooded and lookd beautifull as well as fertile’, and as the thermometer registered a cool sixty degrees Fahrenheit and breakers suggested imminent danger, the sun set on a ‘remarkable peakd hill’ that Cook named Mount Warning⁷⁴ because of the dangerous reefs nearby. The next day he named Point Danger, now on the border dividing New South Wales and Queensland.

On 17 May, Banks recorded: ‘about 10 we were abreast of a large bay the bottom of which was out of sight. The sea in this place suddenly changd from its usual transparency to a dirty clay colour . . . from whence I was led to conclude that the bottom of the bay might open into a large river. About it were many smoaks especialy on the Northern side near some remarkable conical hills.’ Cook called the body of water Morton’s Bay after the President of the Royal Society, without realising he had died two years earlier. It would be known as Moreton Bay, with the ‘e’ added after a misspelling in the first published account of the voyage.⁷⁵

Cook named Point Lookout, on what is now called North Stradbroke Island, but did not sail into the south passage of the bay where what is now known as the Brisbane and Pine rivers meet the sea. He named the ‘remarkable conical hills’, which Banks had noted, the Glass House Mountains after the glass-producing furnaces in Yorkshire.

The Endeavour then passed Double Island Point, which Cook named for its shape, crossing out the name ‘Fiddle Head’, his first choice, in his journal. Banks noted that the land was ‘very sandy’ and ‘great patches of many acres each were moveable’. Two water snakes swam by ‘in all respects like land snakes and beautifully spotted except that they had broad flat tails which probably serve them instead of fins in swimming’.⁷⁶

On 19 May the ship sailed along a hundred-kilometre beach on the world’s largest sand island, Fraser Island. Cook named ‘a black bluff head or point of land, on which a number of the Natives were Assembled’ Indian Head and called the northern-most point of the island Sandy Cape.

Then he had his first battle with a great barrier: a reef stretching for more than two thousand kilometres to the north. A chain of surf was hitting it, and Cook called the maritime trap Break Sea Spit. Banks noted:

Our usual good fortune now again assisted us, for we discoverd breakers which we had certainly ran upon had the ship in the night saild 2 or 3 leagues farther than she did. This shoal extended a long way out from the land for we ran along it till 2 O’Clock and then passed over the tail of it in seven fathom water; the Sea was so clear that we could distinctly see the bottom and indeed when it was 12 and 14 fathom deep the colour of the sand might be seen from the mast head at a large distance. While we were upon the shoal innumerable large fish, Sharks, Dolphins etc. and one large Turtle were seen . . .⁷⁷

The Endeavour sailed west, away from the reef, and Cook named a large bay⁷⁸ after Augustus John Hervey,⁷⁹ the First Naval Lord.⁸⁰ The next day they anchored just to the north of present-day Bundaberg.

Tensions on board were building. With the men piled up against each other, hostility boiled over in a stew of booze. Cook’s clerk, Richard Orton, had been drinking in the evening, and according to the skipper, ‘some Malicious person or persons in the Ship took Advantage of his being Drunk, and cut off all the Cloaths from off his back . . . they some time after went into his Cabin and cut off a part of both his Ears as he lay a Sleep in his Bed’.⁸¹ Cook learnt that the chief suspect, James Matra, ‘had once or twice before this in their drunken Frolicks cut off his cloaths, and had been heard to say . . . that if it was not for the Law he would Murder him’.⁸² Cook suspended Matra, but he restored him to duty three weeks later when the charge against him could not be proved. He regarded Matra as one of those men who would not be missed if they had stayed home.⁸³ He also demoted midshipman Patrick Saunders to able seaman over the incident.

Banks was preoccupied with his new surrounds. In his journal he rarely mentioned Parkinson, who was wearing his long, skinny fingers to the bone, and only occasionally referenced his good friend Solander. But Banks was popular on board, and in later years many of the ship’s officers corresponded with him, while six of the deckhands and two of the marines wrote to him for assistance. For now he was mainly concerned with new sights and new things to study.

On 23 May he recorded that the Endeavour ‘landed near the mouth of a large lagoon’ and that the tropical vegetation was ‘a sure mark that we were upon the point of leaving the Southern temperate Zone’.⁸⁴ He waded through mangroves where big green ants waited in ambush and when annoyed ‘revenged themselves . . . very sufficiently upon their disturbers, biting sharper than any I have felt in Europe’. There were caterpillars too, ‘green and beset with many hairs . . . these sat upon the leaves . . . like soldiers drawn up, 20 or 30 perhaps upon one leaf . . . like a wrathful militia’; their hairs stung like nettles.⁸⁵

The sea abounded in fish, but on the first haul the men tore their net to pieces. In the mud under the mangrove trees were innumerable oysters, including those that created pearls. Pelicans flocked to the shoals and sand dunes, and Banks carefully studied a bustard, a bird with a long, slightly curved white neck and a black-capped head; the span of its orange-brown wings was impressive. The men shot one weighing eight kilograms,⁸⁶ which was cooked for dinner, and Banks declared he had eaten no bird to equal its taste since leaving England. Cook named the place Bustard Bay; the town that grew nearby is Seventeen Seventy.

The men who stayed on board saw through their spyglass telescopes about twenty Aboriginal people on the beach staring at the ship, but the men on shore saw none, though Cook and Tupaia found long pieces of bark that the skipper surmised were used as blankets on cold nights.

The following day, nearing where he calculated the Tropic of Capricorn, Cook named Cape Capricorn on what is now Curtis Island between Gladstone and Rockhampton.

On 26 May, the Endeavour stood in a shallow channel among the islands Cook named for Rear Admiral Augustus Keppel,⁸⁷ and Banks threw a fishing line out of the cabin window at the vast numbers of crabs, hauling in two sorts. One was ‘ornamented with the finest ultramarine blew conceivable with which all his claws and every Joint was deeply tingd; the under part of him was a lovely white, shining as if glazd and perfectly resembling the white of old China; the other had a little of the ultramarine on his Joints and toes and on his back 3 very remarkable brown spots’.⁸⁸ The crabs were delicious, but the multitude of islands and shoals made navigation difficult and progress slow.

Three days later, after having named Cape Townshend, surrounded by what would become the Northumberland Islands, Cook anchored to take on fresh water – but the place he named Thirsty Sound had none.

Wading through mud up to his knees, negotiating arched mangroves branches and ‘continualy stooping and often slipping off from their slimey roots’,⁸⁹ Banks found several plants he had not seen before, including a ‘troublesome’ grass with sharp seeds that stuck into his clothes and flesh as well as ‘Musketos that were likewise innumerable’ and ‘made walking almost intolerable’.⁹⁰ There were termite nests as tall as a man, and a hectare and a half full of butterflies, ‘crowded with them to a wonderfull degree’. He found a chrysalis ‘which shone almost all over as bright as if it had been silverd over with the most burnishd silver’ and the next day ‘came out into a butterfly of a velvet black changeable to blue, his wings both upper and under markd near the edges with many light brimstone colourd spots’.⁹¹

ON 1 JUNE, COOK REALISED he had to change direction to follow the coast, and he backtracked out of a large body of water he called Repulse Bay. Two days later he found what seemed a safe route through the treacherous waters. He called it ‘Whitsundays Passage, as it was discover’d on the day the Church commemorates that Festival’.⁹²

Tupaia had been suffering with swollen gums for two weeks, and Dr Munkhouse ordered him to take extract of lemons for scurvy.

Cook had other concerns: he was the first man to chart these spectacular islands for the British, and he found himself in a dangerous maze. He had spent the voyage taking the Endeavour where no Europeans had gone before, and soon he would need every bit of his seafaring knowledge to save his men and the ship.

Banks was about to face the greatest crisis of his life.