C APTAI N COOK. 



IRST among the names of the mariners whom England delights 

 to honour stands that of James Cook. His advent 

 upon the field of maritime discovery marks the era 

 of definite knowledge in regard to the Great Southern 

 Continent, of which, hitherto, only the haziest notions 

 had prevailed. Other navigators had landed on its 

 shores, but to him belongs the credit of first attract- 

 ing attention to its possible value for settlement, and 

 of navigating and charting its eastern coast-line. With 

 the exception of Tasman's solitary landing-place in 

 Storm Bay, all Australia that had hitherto been seen 

 was said to be bare and forbidding in the extreme. 

 Cook was not only the first to see, he was the first 

 also to describe some of its many beauties, the first 

 to grasp the national significance of the discovery, 

 and the first to claim it as a British possession. 



For nearly seventy years from the beginning of 



the eighteenth century the world's available knowledge of Australia may be said to have 

 been limited to the information contained in the " Relation " of De Ouiros, the published 

 accounts of the voyages of Dampier, the Dutch official reports, and some speculative 

 references to the unexplored mysteries of the Southern Ocean in the writings of certain 

 old geographers. The collections of voyages published by Harris, Callander, De Brosses 

 and Dalrymple embody the greater part of this information up to about the period of 

 the revival of British interest in the subject. Dampier came again in 1710, and the 

 French navigators, De Bougainville and De Surville, were in Australian waters in the 

 years 1768 and 1769. The name "Australia" had not yet been' definitely applied to 

 the territory which the Dutch had named New Holland, and the unknown lands about 

 the South Pole were still designated by the name of Terra Anstralis Incognita, or, as 

 in the map of Descelliers, La Terra Australlc. Nearly the whole of the eastern coast 

 had been left unexplored, but the time had now come when almost by an accident the 

 Continent was to be thrown open to scientific exploration and to settlement by the enter- 

 prise of a British navigator, in a manner at once decisive and final. 



Fnglish interest in the work of South Pacific exploration revived after the peace of 

 1 763, and the voyages of Wallis and Carteret were the first fruits of the re-awakening. 

 These navigators had not yet returned when the Royal Society began to move in the 

 matter of having an expedition fitted out to observe a transit of Venus which had been 

 calculated for the year 1 769, and which could be best observed from some station in 

 the South Pacific. On Wallis's return he reported that the island of Otaheite was the 



