30 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



to observe his instructions, he doubled on his course, and sailing close to the shore 

 examined anil named in succession Hawke, Poverty and Mercury Bays. Then carefully 

 threading his way through the wild volcanic islands of the Hauraki Gulf, he rounded 

 Cape Maria van Diemen, and directing his course again to the south, entered for the 

 first time that well-known passage since called Cook's Strait ; he then coasted the other 

 large island of New Zealand, and observed both so closely as to be able to make a fairly 

 correct chart of all the shores. 



Repeated efforts were made to land and cultivate friendly relations with the natives, 

 but the Maoris were found to be both suspicious and combative, their conduct leading 

 frequently to collisions, often accompanied with bloodshed. Having completed his examina- 

 tion of the shores of New Zealand in such a manner as to leave little work for future 

 discoverers, Cook left Cape Farewell on the 3ist of March, 1770, and held on his 

 course to the west. 



So far as the cruise of the Endeavour had now gone, as the narrative of this first 

 voyage points out, the vessel's track had demonstrated that the various points of land 

 seen or touched at by the earlier navigators were not portions of the Great Antarctic 

 Continent. This was one important negative result of the expedition. The direction in 

 which Cook was now steering was leading him to the solution of a more positive 

 question in the discovery of the east coast of New Holland the name given by the 

 Dutch to the Terra Australis Incognita of all the old geographers. On the igth of 

 April, and after a run of nearly three weeks from New Zealand, land was sighted, and 

 called Point Hicks after the first lieutenant of the Endeavour, but Cook must have been 

 deceived in some way by the sand-hills of the Ninety-mile Beach, for on that part of 

 the Victorian Coast there is no such point to be found. Then, steering to the north- 

 ward, he rounded and named the bare and sandy Cape Howe, now so well known as a 

 boundary mark between the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales. 



To the eyes of these weather-beaten navigators the shore-line must have appeared 

 very beautiful with its picturesque line of cliffs, broken here and there by small harbours 

 and beaches of dazzling sand; forming, too, so agreeable a contrast to the fringe of 

 arid desert which their own experience, and the reports of Dampier, had led them to 

 expect. Behind the curling breakers and the rocky escarpment of the coast rose ranges of 

 hills and mountains which, against the clear Australian sky of that Easter season, must 

 have loomed singularly soft and lovely, seamed as they were with deep gorges and 

 gullies densely tree-fledged, and purpled with the atmospheric damson -bloom that distance 

 lends to forest-mantled hills. Mount Dromedary, the Pigeon House, Point Upright, Cape 

 St. George and Red Point still bear evidence in the names then given them of the 

 minute attention this coast attracted and received. 



On the 2<Sth of April, the Endeavour, after lying becalmed for some hours about a 

 mile and a half off the shore, sailed between the sheltering points of a narrow opening 

 into the waters of a large bay. Here Cook landed for the first time on Australian 

 The mariners hoped to make friends of the natives, but from the first it was 

 evident they would receive opposition, for as the pinnace was rowed along by the beach 

 in search of a suitable anchorage, a string of savages, bearing their light spears and 

 their boomerangs in readiness to strike, paced the sands abreast of her. They were all 



