ON THIS DAY

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April 19, 1770:

Captain Cook sights Australia

On this day in 1770 British explorer Captain James Cook first sights Australia. Writes in his log book that “what we have as yet seen of this land appears rather low, and not very hilly, the face of the Country green and Woody, but the Sea shore is all a white Sand.”

The first European record of setting foot in Australia was Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606 — his was the first of 29 Dutch voyages to Australia in the 17th century. Cook wasn't even the first Englishman to arrive here — William Dampier set foot on the peninsula that now bears his name, north of Broome, in 1688.

Cook named the land he encountered New South Wales in an effort to counter any Dutch interest in what they had long called New Holland. The name Australia was popularised by Matthew Flinders following his circumnavigation of the continent in 1803.

The main reason for Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific was to observe Venus moving across the face of the Sun from Tahiti, part of a European effort to work out the size of the solar system. In Tahiti he opened an envelope with secret orders to search for an unknown continent, to try and discover the existence of Terra Australis Incognita — the 'great unknown southern land'."

After mapping the complete coastline of New Zealand, making only some minor errors. Cook voyaged west, reaching the southeastern coast of Australia near today's Point Hicks on 19 April 1770. In doing so his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline.

Endeavour continued northwards along the coastline, keeping the land in sight with Cook charting and naming landmarks as he went. On 29 April, Cook and crew made their first landfall on the continent at a beach now known as Silver Beach on Botany Bay. Two Gweagal men of the Dharawal / Eora nation opposed their landing and in the confrontation one of them was shot and wounded, setting in motion white / indigenous relations for the next 250 years,

Cook landing at Botany Bay

Cook claims the entire coastline that he had explored as British territory.

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