Cook's Endeavour voyage
 

James Cook's 1768-71 voyage to the Pacific on the Endeavour can be followed via the digitised Endeavour Journal on the National Library of Australia's website. Go to the Library's home page, select 'Find' - select 'Manuscripts' - and then 'Our online manuscripts', which has a link direct to the first sighting of the east coast of Australia - Part 223. Among other passages of interest in the Australian section of the voyage are (select from the drop down tab) Part 231 - the naming of Botany Bay (that final name probably added later in the voyage), Part 241 - the assault on Cook's clerk and removal of the latter's clothes and part of his ears, and Parts 254-255 - the running aground on the reef - 'I named... Cape Tribulation because here begun all our troubles'.

For those with the time and interest there are lots of good things on or accessible via the NLA site.

Vanessa Collingridge's four part series 'Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery' starts tonight, Oct 28, on Australian ABC TV. A mini review of the first episode said 'It is exceptionally well researched... If only Australian history could be taught like this at school.' Her book <i>Captain Cook: The Life, Death and Legacy of History's Greatest Explorer</i> was published in 2002.

I started to watch is documentary last night, especially interested as we'd just visited Captain Cook's monument (and demise) on the Island of Hawaii (Big Island) last month.

However, the introduction lost me and made me doubt the 'facts' ... Captain Cook was credited as 'the greatest explorer of all time' which many historians would dispute, and that he 'discovered Australia.' Mmmmm, well he did indeed discover <i>the east coast</i> of Australia, but certainly history documents other seafarers discovering Australia centuries earlier!

And that I remember from my primary school history lessons.

So unfortunately, as I sensed such a bias to making Cook a hero of mythical proportions, I tuned out.

Jackie

FurryTiles - later on in the program there was a map which showed the parts of the continent's coastline already 'discovered' before Cook.

And talking about 'discovery' and the leap to 'ownership', you and others may be interested in the 'Hints offered to the consideration' of Cook's expedition by the the Earl of Morton, President of the Royal Society, in which he cautioned that the natives are '... the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European Nation has the right to occupy any part of their country without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title...' -

http://tinyurl.com/35alt5

(From the Papers of Sir Joseph Banks, in the National Library of Australia)

That wasn't in the first episode of the program and doesn't usually get mentioned in the history books either.

Hi farrermog, sounds like I 'tuned out' too soon - good to hear that earlier discoverers were given due recognition.

Will have another look next Sunday; I'm fascinating by history accounts/documentaries, especially the 'revisionist' versions - somewhere between the two there could be something approaching objectivity/truth, ;)

Interesting snippet you posted about those early statements re indigenous populations - but of course, in the interests of any governments' expediency, these simply become, in today's politically-correct terms, &quot;collateral damage&quot;.

History belongs to the victors.

Bit like a quote by Leo Rosten ...
&quot;Language is a dialect that has an army and a navy.&quot;

;Jackie