Almost certainly, the Endeavour was already in Bass Strait when Lieutenant Hicks first sighted Australia on 21 April. The location of this landfall – Point Hicks Hill – is not precisely known, but it is believed to be a hill behind a promontory now known as Cape Everard.

  Cook moved along the coast, at first in an easterly then in a northerly direction, looking for a suitable harbour. They could see smoke at frequent intervals and from this they assumed that the area was inhabited although there were no people to be seen. After a week of sailing north they found what seemed an eminently suitable harbour and put into it. Here they met their first aborigines, nearly black in colour, quite different from the Polynesians and the Maoris. Some were hostile, but not nearly as hostile as the Maoris had been. Some were indifferent – Cook relates with astonishment that two canoe-loads of aborigines, busy fishing, paid no attention whatsoever as the Endeavour moved in but displayed total indifference, which one cannot regard as other than totally astonishing as it was quite impossible that they had ever seen such a ship in their lives before. None of the aborigines offered any kind of welcome. All of them, it was observed, carried ‘short scimitars’ – the famous boomerangs.

  Water was obtainable and the bay teemed with fish, to such an extent that Cook called the place Stingray Harbour, but there was no meat to be had, no fresh fruit and no vegetables – the aborigines knew nothing of the art of cultivation, which clearly made them a much more backward race than the Maoris of the Bay of Plenty, who had developed the art to a considerable degree. But one thing did abound in a profusion that delighted the hearts of Banks, Solander and the other scientists – plants. They found hundreds there that were totally unknown in Europe, so many in fact that Cook was constrained to change his mind about Stingray Harbour and give it instead that name that was to be the most famous – and with the introduction of the convict settlements, the most infamous – in early Australian history: Botany Bay.

  They sailed on 6 May. About nine miles to the north they passed the entrance to another harbour, which Cook called Port Jackson, hazarding the opinion that it might prove a safe anchorage. It is as well, perhaps, for Cook’s peace of mind that he died without knowing that he had just passed up the most magnificent harbour in the world: Sydney.

  For the next five weeks the Endeavour sailed up the coast in remarkably fine weather. Cook was in his element. He had his difficulties to cope with, of course, such as when someone cut off part of the ears of his clerk, Mr Orton, when he was in a drunken stupor (the culprit was never discovered) and, later, when coping with the mazy intricacies, the rocks and shoals and reefs too innumerable to count, of the Great Barrier Reef. But in the main he was doing what he best loved to, making a splendid series of charts and christening everything in sight – the numbers of isles, bays, sounds, heads and capes that Cook named is almost beyond belief. It is another facet of his character that he must have had a remarkably inventive mind: he never once seems to have been at a loss for a name.

  At 11 p.m. on the night of 11 June the Endeavour grounded on an underwater coral reef with an impact that shook every timber in the ship. She was held there, fast, immovable, and it was immediately apparent that the damage was of a very serious nature for great amounts of water at once started gushing into the stricken ship. To make matters worse, she had not only grounded on the top of the tide – a circumstance which ships’ captains dread above all others – but the heavy swell beyond the reef was breaking as it crossed the reef and was continually pounding the stranded vessel – not heavily, but severely enough to increase the risk of extending the damage already sustained to the bottom.

  The pumps were manned but could not cope with the inflow of water. As the tide receded the Endeavour developed a list, which put a further strain on the already damaged timbers. The more the tide went out, the greater the angle of list became. The mainland was twenty miles away. A sudden storm and the ship might be torn off the rocks tearing more timbers in the process, and founder: and there weren’t enough boats to carry the complement of the vessel to safety.

  It had all the makings of a desperate situation, but such are the situations that the Captain Cooks of this world are born for. He had the ship lightened as much as possible by throwing overboard about fifty tons of material – the boatswain’s and carpenter’s condemned stores, firewood, stone and iron ballast from the hold, even the guns – although those were carefully buoyed for later recovery. At the same time he had anchors put aboard the pinnace, and taken and dropped some distance from the Endeavour so that with the aid of capstan and windlass they could kedge the vessel into deeper water. One can imagine the sheer back-breaking labour involved in all this: the continuous pumping, the transport of the heavy anchors and, especially, the removal of the fifty tons of ballast from the hold. By eleven o’clock the following morning, the time of the next high tide, almost every man on board was in a state of exhaustion.

  The tide came and went and still she was stuck fast. Cook retained his remarkable calm. He knew that the night tides on that coast were considerably higher than the day tides. At the same time, he did question the wisdom of trying to get her off at all – for all they knew it was only the coral reef on which the Endeavour rested that prevented her from sinking like a stone. Cook decided to risk it. If she started to sink quickly, he would try to kedge her back on to the reef at once; if she got off and made water only comparatively slowly, he would try to sail her to the coast, beach her there, break her up and build a smaller boat from her timbers and sail in that to the East Indies. ‘Indomitable’ is hardly a word that one would apply to Captain Cook if one could find a better one.

  In the event, neither of those courses had to be followed. At high tide that night, with every possible hand on the windlasses attached to the anchor ropes – and most of the others at the pumps – the Endeavour was pulled clear. To the astonishment – and relief – of all, not only did she not sink, she now made even less water than she had done before. (What had happened, as they discovered later, was that a large chunk of coral had broken off as she’d been hauled free and had partially plugged the hole.)

  Cook decided to plug the hole some more – to fother it, as it was called. A rope was passed under the ship and attached to a sail which was covered with oakum and wool. This was pulled under the ship and when it came to the hole water pressure jammed it in position, an operation which reduced incoming water to a relative trickle, although the pumps still had to be manned.

  Cook dispatched boats to reconnoitre the coast to find a suitable spot where the Endeavour could be careened and the gash in the bottom repaired. And now luck had turned to Cook’s side, for a boat returned saying that it had found a suitable river estuary on the coast, some little way to the north. Cook took the Endeavour there and despite the fact that he had to wait three days, because of adverse winds, to enter the river, and even then grounded twice, eventually they found a perfect anchorage not more than twenty feet from the river-bank.

  Cook had the ship lightened of all stores and ballast to enable her to be warped as far as possible up the beach. The damage was serious enough – much of the underwater sheathing had been stripped off and four planks were gone, but there was nothing the resourceful carpenters and blacksmiths couldn’t cope with: their greatest difficulty was that they could work only at low tide when the timbers were exposed.

  Here, for the first time, they managed to establish a degree of rapport with the aborigines. They were, unlike the Polynesians, a shy, reserved, almost timorous people although they did share to a marked degree the Tahitians’ predilection for lifting things that didn’t belong to them. Materially, Cook reckoned, they were the poorest people on earth – they had almost literally nothing: but Cook was astute enough to suggest that they probably led happier and more carefree lives than Europeans did.

  This semi-tropical region – it must be remembered that Cook was now only fifteen degrees from the Equator – was a naturalist’s joy. It teemed with wild life and fish of all kinds. Mussels and turtles there were in abundance. There were scores of tropical varieties of birds. Here they saw their first crocodiles, their first flying foxes, their first dingoes, their first wallabies, their first kangeroos.

  The scientists would dearly have loved to remain there for an indefinite period but Cook would have none of it. Although the Endeavour had been well enough patched up, she was still in a basically unsatisfactory state and the nearest shipyard facilities were at Batavia, Java, in the Dutch East Indies – and Cook didn’t even know how to get there for there was as yet no proof that a passage existed between Northern Australia and New Guinea. Further, he had only three months provisions left. Worst of all, if he delayed too long, the south-east trades would change to the north-west trades and it would take the Endeavour for ever to battle her way to Batavia against a head wind. So Cook left on 6 August, having named their temporary port the Endeavour River. (The city that now stands on that site is called Cooktown.)

  They moved on north – but very circumspectly indeed. There were more shoals, reefs, rocks and islets than ever. It took Cook a whole week to get through a particularly bad section which he christened the Labyrinth. The dangers were so great that at nigh-time it was impossible to move at all. During the day, the pinnace, constantly sounding, went ahead of the Endeavour while on the ship Cook himself was at the mast-head, guiding and instructing all day long.

  Even after the Labyrinth had been safely traversed, Cook’s troubles with the Barrier Reef continued for over another week. At one point, thoroughly exasperated with the painfully slow progress they were making – it took them sixteen days to cover what a modern ship would easily do in one, although it has to be borne in mind of course that Cook was the first man ever to navigate through those infinitely treacherous seas – he took advantage of a gap in the Barrier Reef and broke through to the open ocean beyond.

  But the distance between the land and the Barrier Reef steadily began to widen – the Reef kept steadily north while the land was now tending west of north. Cook became acutely unhappy. Not only was he not now in a position to chart the course, but, much more seriously, if he stood too far out to sea and if there really was a strait between Australia and New Guinea he might miss it altogether and find himself sailing somewhere off the shores of New Guinea. Cook had no option. He turned and headed back in through the Great Barrier Reef – and in the process he almost lost the Endeavour on another coral reef.

  However, his troubles on those, the worst and most hazardous waters he had ever encountered or was to encounter, were almost over. He closed in on land and eventually it could be seen from the mast-head that the mainland on the left had become so narrow that the sea could be seen on the other side. A little longer and there was no land at all on the port side. Cook had reached the northernmost tip of Australia and through a strait which he now named the Endeavour Strait had found a passageway through to the East Indies.

  To this Cape he gave the name of Cape York: the same name has since been given to the entire peninsula. There was one last thing that Cook did not neglect to do before he left Australia, just as he hadn’t neglected to perform this duty in New Zealand and many Pacific islands: he took formal and ceremonial possession of it in the name of the crown. ‘New South Wales’ he called it and referred to the eastern part of the Australian continent: in effect, he was claiming it all. It is rather a staggering thought that in the space of a few short months one man should add both New Zealand and Australia to the British crown.

  Instead of heading directly for Batavia, Cook had to satisfy his insatiable curiosity and go and see for himself how far New Guinea lay to the north of Cape York – it had to be remembered that no one in the western world had known until then whether Australia and New Guinea were one or not. More accurately, it is believed that some knew that Torres had indeed found a strait between New Guinea and Australia but were keeping the knowledge to themselves. One of those was reported to be Alexander Dalrymple who had hoped to command the Endeavour himself and achieve fame by finding the Torres Strait. This information he had given to Banks who had passed it on to Cook who apparently distrusted the information as much as he distrusted Dalrymple. It is one of the more exquisite ironies of fate that it was to be Cook who, on his next and even greater voyage, was to demolish Dalrymple’s dream of the Great Southern Continent.

  Because of dangerous reefs, and waters so shallow that at times it was almost impossible to keep New Guinea in sight Cook, with his typical perseverance, finally succeeded in effecting a landing. The natives of the Gulf of Papua, however, turned out to be so uncompromisingly hostile that Cook pursued the matter no further. He headed the Endeavour east, traversed the lengths of the Arafura and Timor seas and stopped briefly at the island of Suva, at that time under the control of the Dutch East India Company. Here Cook was hospitably received, being permitted to buy quantities of fresh meat, fruit and vegetables. The Endeavour reached Java Head on 22 September, but so contrary were the winds and currents that she was unable to reach Batavia until 10 October, the first civilised town they had seen since leaving Rio de Janeiro almost two years previously.

  Cook had already collected all the journals and diaries of his officers and men and these, along with his own journals and the many charts he had drawn, he dispatched to the Admiralty in London by means of a Dutch ship, the Kronenburg. Cook’s covering letter makes rather astonishing reading. Although he had no illusions as to the value of his charts – ‘the latitude and longitude of few parts of the world are better settled than these’ – he is most extraordinarily deprecating about the importance of his discoveries. He seems almost apologetic about his failure to discover the Great Southern Continent and, as for his other activities, he says: ‘The discoveries made in this voyage are not great’, a quite remarkable statement from a man who had just annexed New Zealand and Australia for the British crown.

  Cook, in his letter, is most complimentary about all his officers and men and equally so about the scientists. In the nature of things there must have been some who were less than perfect but Cook makes no mention of them: it is a mark of the man’s fundamental generosity of nature. In all his letters Cook permitted himself the expression of only one small piece of self-satisfaction: ‘I have the satisfaction to say that I have not lost one man by sickness during the whole voyage’.

  That was true. If one does not include epilepsy and alcoholic poisoning under the normal definition of sickness, then his statement is accurate – the others who had died had been drowned or perished from exposure, compounded by the consumption of large quantities of rum, in the snows of Tierra del Fuego. But that ever so slightly self-satisfied statement must remain as the saddest sentence that Cook ever wrote. From the health point of view, his troubles were only then beginning: it is ironic to reflect that after this epic world-girdling voyage he arrived in Batavia, that first outpost of civilization, with all his crew in perfect health, and yet when the Endeavour sailed from there it did so in the condition of a hospital ship.

  Batavia (since the Dutch lost control of the East Indies after the Second World War the town has been known as Djakarta) was at that time almost certainly the most unhealthy place in the world. The Dutch had built it on a flat low-lying plain after the model of one of their cities in Holland – almost every main street had its own canal running alongside it. But what worked in the cool northern climes of Amsterdam did not work in the steamy, enervated air of the tropics. The canals were filthy beyond belief, full of every imaginable type of refuse and sewage and were quite stagnant. They were therefore the ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes, germs and viruses of a large – and largely lethal – number of tropical diseases. Malaria, naturally, was everywhere, but dysentery appears to have been the chief killer. Banks maintains – and we have no reason to disbelieve him, he had an accurate and scientific mind – that out of every hundred troops who came out from Holland for garrison duty fifty would be dead at the end of the year, twenty-five in hospital and not more than ten fully fit for duty. Such appalling figures seem quite incredible but no less a person than Cook himself bears him out: when he left Batavia, Dutch captains told him that he, Cook, could consider himself very lucky that half his crew were not dead.

  When, repairs completed, the Endeavour sailed from Batavia just after Christmas, she had already lost seven of her complement and over forty were so seriously ill that they were unable to help work the ship. And the rest of the crew, Cook wrote, were in poor condition. The seven who died were the surgeon himself, Tupia and his servant, the astronomer Green’s servant, and three seamen. Banks became critically ill and saved himself only by taking to the cooler and fresher air of the mountains and dosing himself with large quantities of quinine.

  When Cook left Batavia for Cooktown he must – one assumes – have done so with heartfelt relief, confident that the worst lay behind. But the horrifying worst was yet to come. The journals for that ten-week trip between Batavia and the Cape of Good Hope make appalling reading. Four weeks out from Batavia a marine died, and within the next week ten more had died also, including Green, the astronomer, and Parkinson, the natural history draughtsman. In the following month of February twelve more members of the crew died which meant that in that one – comparatively – brief voyage from the Indies to Africa one-quarter of the original ship’s company died. At one particularly desperate stage in that voyage there were only twelve people fit to work the ship and even they were in a poor state of health.

  Cook himself appears to have remained marvellously immune to sickness and this may well have been the case: he does appear to have been possessed of an iron constitution. Equally well, he too may have been ill, but neither shown it nor mentioned it: when he had his right hand almost blown off by a gun-powder flask when surveying the Newfoundland coast or, later, when he was critically ill with a gall-bladder infection, he does not at any time refer to his own sufferings.