The Posthumous Adventures of Captain Cook Part 1

Ten things Cook did not do.

In the muddy waters off Rhode Island lies a wreck that might be the barque HMS Endeavour. Not much of her remains intact, so she is difficult to identify for certain. This could almost be a metaphor for a man who once captained her, Lieutenant James Cook.

In April 1770, Cook became the first European to map the east coast of New Holland (now Australia), from near the NSW-Victorian border to the Torres Strait. He made landfall twice, at Botany Bay and the Endeavour River, before claiming this stretch of coast for Britain on Possession Island.

So far as Australia goes, that was the extent of Cook’s involvement. He died in 1779. Despite this, he looms large in our history, illustrating the adage that the significance of events lies not so much in what happened as in what subsequent generations believe to have happened.

Throughout Australia’s modern history, we have retrofitted events to support the stories we wanted to hear and the national identity we sought to create. Cook, who died well before Australia was a thing, became a perfect canvas on which to project these visions. He has had attributed to him, for good and ill, deeds that were done by other people, most of them after he was dead.

Here are ten things Cook did NOT do:

1.     Discover Australia

First nations people had been here for thousands of years. They had been trading with the people of present-day Indonesia and Papua New Guinea for centuries.

As far as European visitors to our shores go, on a 2005 Department of the Environment and Heritage list, Cook comes in at number 43. The first recorded was Willem Janzoon in 1606. Abel Tasman mapped more than half the continent in 1642-44.

He wasn’t even the first Englishman. That was John Brooke in 1622, followed by John Daniel in 1681 and William Dampier in 1688 and 1699.

Cook himself didn’t think he’d discovered anything. Having circumnavigated New Zealand, he wrote in his journal he was heading to the east coast of New Holland, the land discovered by Tasman.

 2.    Claim Australia for Britain

All Cook claimed was the coastline he’d just sailed up, calling it New South Wales. He was eight years dead when in 1786 the British made their first substantial claim on the continent, as far inland as the 135th meridian and as far south as the tip of Van Diemen’s Land. In 1824, some 45 years after he died, Britain claimed up to the present WA border. Captains Lockyer and Fremantle claimed the rest of the continent for Britain in 1827/1829.

Nor was it only the British who made claims. The Dutch started it in 1642. The French made a claim at Shark Bay in 1772, two years after Cook. Prominent 17-18th century jurists from Grotius on took the view that European claims could only be the basis for sovereignty if they were accompanied by occupation. The British never considered this in Cook’s lifetime.

3.    Declare Terra Nullius

Cook’s formal instructions were to take possession of ‘convenient situations’ for Britain with the consent of the natives, or, if a country was uninhabited, to mark out a claim as ‘first discoverers’. Cook did not seek the consent of the inhabitants. Neither did any other European claimants.

Late 18th century European powers adopted ‘discovery’ claims to stake out spheres of influence in competition with each other. The claimant nation gained exclusive rights to attempt to acquire the territory. It was only if they decided to take this step that they had to justify it in relation to any possible inhabitants.

Terra Nullius was first implied by Sir Joseph Banks in 1786 when he assured the British government that the natives were too few and too disorganised to have any recognisable systems of sovereignty or land ownership, and would not be able to resist settlement of convicts in New South Wales.

After invasion the assumption of Terra Nullius came into full force to legitimize seizing First Nations land. It was first used in a legal setting in 1819 and was officially invoked in 1835 by NSW Governor Bourke, 56 years after Cook’s voyage.

 4.   Recommend that Australia be colonised

On the contrary. His view was ‘..the country itself so far as we know doth not produce any one thing that can become an Article in trade to invite Europeans to fix a settlement upon it….’.

It was Sir Joseph Banks, a wealthy and influential gentleman who sailed with the expedition as its naturalist, and fellow gentleman, midshipman James Matra, who took a fancy to settling Botany Bay. After the American colonies won independence in 1783 and no longer took British convicts, Banks lobbied the government to establish a convict colony there. Banks was ultimately successful and was at one stage dubbed ‘the father of the colony’. Cook remained dead.

5. Land in Botany Bay on 26 January 1788

Although 47% of respondents to a 2019 survey believed this, Cook was nowhere near Australia on 26 January, in 1788 or in any other year, even when he was still alive. It was Captain Arthur Phillip who commanded the convict fleet that relocated to Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788, launching the invasion of New South Wales.

6. Circumnavigate Australia

Covid saved us from the embarrassment of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s planned 250th anniversary re-enactment of this voyage that never happened. Cook being long dead, it was Matthew Flinders who circumnavigated and mapped the continent between 1801 and 1803.

 7. Name Australia

Cook called the coastline he claimed New South Wales. It was Matthew Flinders who, decades after Cook’s death, recommended that the continent of which it was part be named Australia. Britain adopted this name on its charts in 1824.

8. Prove Australia was not the fabled Great Southland

For centuries Europeans believed a great landmass existed in the South Pacific. Abel Tasman had already proved New Holland (Australia) was not part of it in 1642 when he mapped the west coast of New Zealand. Cook later proved it did not exist at all by crisscrossing the Pacific east of New Zealand on his second voyage in 1772-75.

9. Hold the rank of Captain

A naval lieutenant, Cook was addressed as Captain while in command of a ship, as was customary. He never held the official rank of Captain, being promoted above it in 1771.

 10. Live in Captain Cooks Cottage

He’d long left home when his parents built this Yorkshire farmhouse. And he neither claimed nor went anywhere near the place it’s been re-erected in, now Melbourne.

Cooking up a Story

Having done none of these things, James Cook’s role in Australia’s history was marginal. Yet he has been clothed in legend. What he actually did has long ceased to matter. He has become a symbol, a flashpoint for battles over competing versions of national identity and the history that created it.

How did this came about? Go to Part 2!