Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 47

After observing the transit of Venus in Tahiti, Cook sailed south and then west expectantly, but what he found was just more Pacific Ocean. Charting New Zealand, he sailed further again, finding nothing until encountering the bottom south-east corner of what was known as New Holland — where Victoria and New South Wales meet each other today. This was disappointing, all things considered, but at least there was a nice lot of charting to do. Just as he’d done in New Zealand, Tahiti, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Cook set about surveying the coastline he was passing. Banks, meanwhile, gathered new and previously unknown zoological specimens everywhere they stopped, surely feeling a lot like a kid who’d just been let loose in a completely untouched (to European eyes, at least) lolly shop.

Banks didn’t think much of the land, though. He’d later change his tune significantly, but at the time he said it was without doubt ‘in every respect the most barren country I have seen’. The soil was sandy, the grass thin and the water scarce. Although he’d had the time of his life catching and picking specimens, he didn’t think the place was particularly good to settle in or trade with. The most he could allow was that, perhaps, if they were lucky, a group of people ‘who should have the misfortune of being shipwreckd [sic]’ might be able to support themselves.

Cook, having sailed up the Pacific coast of Australia in the Endeavour, reached the top of the east coast in August 1770. He claimed possession of the entire coast and planted the flag on the rather unimaginatively titled Possession Island (at the top of modern-day Cape York in far-north Queensland). Later on, noting it down in his journal, he racked his brain for a good name for the coast he’d just claimed (without asking any of the Indigenous Australians he’d encountered along the way what they thought of the idea, obviously). He first tried New Wales and then must have said to himself at last, ‘Here’s just the thing’, and wrote down New South Wales.

On Cook’s return to Britain from this first great voyage (he would go on two more before his voyaging ended abruptly in Hawaii) he was promoted to captain.