1770
Captain Cook’s globe
The great navigator
‘I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.’
– James Cook
This celestial globe took Cook further than even he anticipated – to the east coast of the land he called New South Wales. Made of stucco with lacquer-work applied by hand, and rings of brass, the globe portrays the heavens and their constellations and was a critical navigational tool. The beauty of this ball was not the gods drawn on it or the continents sketched, but the vast empty spaces that Cook filled in for future globes.
James Cook was the greatest of English sailors. During his career in the merchant navy and the Royal Navy he honed his skills as a cartographer and an astronomer, significant in securing him the captaincy of a joint venture between the Royal Society and the admiralty to explore the Pacific.
HMS Endeavour sailed from Plymouth on 25 August 1768 with Lieutenant James Cook in command and a botanist, Joseph Banks, as leader of the scientific party. They were bound for Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus, to enable better measurement of the distance from the earth to the sun.
Cook arrived in Tahiti on 10 April 1769. He carried secret orders that were to be opened once the transit of Venus had been recorded on 3 June. The orders were to discover the Great Southern Land and claim it for the King.
Cook arrived in New Zealand on 7 October and took possession of it for George III. A six-month circumnavigation of the country proved that it wasn’t the Great Southern Land. Cook mapped New Zealand and discovered the strait that separates the main islands (now known as Cook Strait). Unconvinced that there was a Great Southern Land, he turned for home. He sailed west and at 6 p.m. on 20 April 1770 Lieutenant Zachary Hickes saw land at what is now Port Hicks in Victoria.
The Endeavour continued northwards along the coastline, with Cook charting and naming landmarks as he went. On 29 April, the crew came across an extensive but shallow inlet, in which they took shelter. Cook named the bay Stingray Harbour. Some local men came to meet the boats but withdrew very quickly, and the English came ashore. Banks was enthralled by the new plants and animals he and his colleagues Daniel Solander and Herman Spöring came across. They spent a week gathering specimens, making drawings and exploring, and Stingray Harbour became Botany Bay.
Cook sailed north. The Endeavour was damaged by the coral of the Great Barrier Reef and made landfall at Endeavour River, where seven weeks of work went into repairing the ship. Banks again gorged himself on new discoveries. They met local people – the Guugu Yimithirr – and learned the word gangurru, which has been mispronounced ever since as kangaroo.
On 22 August 1770 Cook rounded Cape York and landed at Possession Island, where he claimed the entire coast he had just surveyed for the King and soon after named it New South Wales. Cook identified that the Torres Strait (discovered by Luis Váez de Torres in 1606) separated the mainland from New Guinea, and he followed it to Batavia (Java) where the Endeavour underwent much-needed repairs until Boxing Day.
After three years before the mast, the Endeavour reached home on 12 July 1771. Cook’s first voyage produced maps of 8000 kilometres of previously uncharted coastline – Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia – and he was promoted to commander. Banks brought back extraordinary animals and drawings of even more exotic things.
Cook’s second voyage left Sheerness on 13 July 1772 with two ships: Resolution, captained by Cook, and Adventure. This voyage went west to east, sailing first to the Cape of Good Hope and then south from New Zealand. Cook and the Resolution became the first Europeans to cross the Antarctic Circle, reaching 71°10’ before arriving back home in July 1775. By the end of his second voyage, Cook was a celebrity. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and awarded its Copley Gold Medal, and was described in the House of Lords as ‘the first navigator in Europe’.
In 1776 he started his third quest – to find the ‘north-west passage’ from the Pacific to the Atlantic ocean from the south. At Christmas time he observed an eclipse of the sun from an island that he named Christmas Island, and then he went north-east.
He was the first European to arrive on the Hawaiian Islands, landing at Kealakekua Bay. A first encounter with the Indigenous people went well. Cook sailed east and followed the American coast north until he was stopped by pack ice at 70°44’N, and turned back. Fatefully, he returned to Kealakekua Bay. A disagreement with the locals went badly and Cook was killed on 14 February 1779.
Most of the places Cook visited – including Australia – had been encountered by Europeans before. His great achievement came from his full complement of skills: he was a cartographer and lay scientist as well as a ship’s captain. More than anyone before or since, Cook made sense of where things were in the world and added to the understanding of the globe’s geography as we know it today.