At this point in the voyage, Cook…

Captain James Cook encounters another Polynesian population, the Maori of New Zealand, when he circumnavigates the two major islands in 1769-70. (Abel Tasman, the first European contact, had arrived off the coast of New Zealand in December 1642, had battled with a group of Maori on the South Island, and had left the area largely unexplored.)

Cook, in reporting on the suitability of New Zealand for colonization, also writes about the intelligence of the Maori.

Their traditional history describes their origins in terms of waves of migration beginning about CE 1150 and culminating in the arrival of a “great fleet” in the fourteenth century from Hawaiki, a mythical land usually identified as Tahiti.

There are supposedly ancient Maori traditions of a race who were in New Zealand when the Maoris arrived.

They were fair-skinned with blonde or red hair, and constructed stone circles and other monuments.

The Maoris would have killed and eaten them, of course, as was generally their custom until well into the nineteenth century.

Still, there were early reports of red-haired Maoris, so perhaps they didn't eat all the aboriginal inhabitants, or maybe there were natural redheads among the Maori.

The most current reliable evidence strongly indicates that initial settlement of New Zealand, by Polynesians from Eastern Polynesia, occurred around 1280 CE, the date of the earliest archaeological sites and the beginning of sustained, anthropogenic deforestation.

Cook and his crew have spent six months charting the New Zealand coast.

Mapping the complete New Zealand coastline, Cook makes only some minor errors (such as calling Banks Peninsula an island, and thinking Stewart Island/Rakiura is a peninsula of the South Island).

Cook also identifies Cook Strait, which separates the North Island from the South Island, and which Tasman had not seen.

The expedition resumes their voyage westward across open sea.

New Holland, the original European name for Australia, had first been applied to the island continent in 1644 by the Dutch seafarer Abel Tasman as Nova Hollandia, naming it after the Dutch province of Holland, and will remain in use for over one hundred and fifty years.

William Dampier's account of exploring the region in 1699 had used the name in his account.

Cook writes in his Journal on March 31, 1770 that the Endeavour's voyage "must be allowed to have set aside the most, if not all, the Arguments and proofs that have been advanced by different Authors to prove that there must be a Southern Continent; I mean to the Northward of 40 degrees South, for what may lie to the Southward of that Latitude I know not". (W.J.L. Wharton, Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World, London, 1893. See also J. C. Beaglehole and R. A. Skelton (eds.), The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, Vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavor, 1768-1771, Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1955, p.290.)

On the same day he records his decision to set a course to return home by way of the yet unknown east coast of New Holland (as Australia is called at this time).

A voyage to explore the east coast of New Holland, with a view to a British colonization of the country, had been recommended in John Campbell’s editions of John Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca, or Voyages and Travels (1744-1748, and 1764), a book which Cook has with him on the Endeavour.

Cook next sets course westwards, intending to strike for Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania, sighted by Tasman) to establish whether or not it forms part of the fabled southern continent.

However, the expedition is forced to maintain a more northerly course owing to prevailing gales, and sails onward until one afternoon when land is sighted, which Cook names Point Hicks.

Cook calculates that Van Diemen's Land ought to lie due south of their position, but having found the coastline trending to the southwest, records his doubt that this landmass is connected to it.

This point is on the southeastern coast of the Australian continent, and in doing so his expedition becomes the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline.

The landmark of this sighting is generally reckoned to be a point lying about halfway between the present-day towns of Orbost and Mallacoota on the southeastern coast of the state of Victoria.

A survey done in 1843 ignored or overlooked Cook's earlier naming of the point, giving it the name Cape Everard.

On the two hundreth anniversary of the sighting, the name was officially changed back to Point Hicks.

Endeavour continues northwards along the coastline, keeping the land in sight with Cook charting and naming landmarks as he travels.

A little over a week later, the explorers come across an extensive but shallow inlet, and upon entering it moor off a low headland fronted by sand dunes.

Cook and crew make their first landing on the continent, at a place now known as Botany Bay, on the Kurnell Peninsula, and make contact of a hostile nature with the Gweagal Aborigines, on April 29.

As the ships sail into the harbor, they notice Aborigines on both of the headlands.

At about 2 PM, they put the anchor down near a group of six to eight huts.

Two Aborigines, a younger and an older man, come down to the boat.

They ignore gifts from Cook.

A musket is fired over their heads, which wounds the older man slightly, and he runs towards the huts.

He comes back with other men and throws spears at Cook's men, although they do no harm.

They are chased off after two more rounds are fired.

The adults had left, but Cook finds several Aboriginal children in the huts, and leaves some beads with them as a gesture of friendship.

James Cook's landing marks the beginning of Britain's interest in Australia and in the eventual colonization of this new Southern continent.

The expedition's scientific members commence the first European scientific documentation of Australian fauna and flora.

At first, Cook had bestowed the name "Sting-Ray Harbour" to the inlet after the many such creatures found here; this was later changed to "Botanist Bay" and, finally, Botany Bay after the unique specimens retrieved by the botanists Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Herman Spörin.

Because the young botanist on board the ship, Joseph Banks, discovers thirty thousand specimens of plant life in the area, sixteen hundred of them unknown to European science, Cook names the place Botany Bay on May 7.

Cook continues northwards, charting along the coastline and stopping at Bustard Head on May 24, 1770; Cook and Banks and others had gone ashore.

A mishap occurs when Endeavour runs aground on a shoal of the Great Barrier Reef, on June 11, 1770.

The ship is seriously damaged and his voyage was delayed almost seven weeks while repairs were carried out on the beach (near the docks of modern Cooktown, at the mouth of the Endeavour River).

While here, Banks, Spöring and Solander make their first major collections of Australian flora.

The crew's encounters with the local Aboriginal people are mainly peaceable; from the group encountered here the name "kangaroo" enters the English language, coming from the local Guugu Yimidhirr word for a kind of Grey Kangaroo, gangurru.

Cook's voyage had continued once repairs were complete, eventually passing by the northernmost point of Cape York Peninsula and then sailing through Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, earlier navigated by Luis Váez de Torres in 1606.

Having rounded the Cape, Cook lands on Possession Island on August 22, where he claims the entire coastline he has just explored (later naming the region New South Wales) for the British Crown.

In negotiating the Torres Strait past Cape York, Cook also has put an end to the speculation that New Holland and New Guinea were part of the same land mass.

At the time of Cook’s claim of British sovereignty over Australia, the continent’s five hundred to one thousand tribes of approximately three hundred thousand aborigines live along the eastern and southern coasts and in Tasmania.

The Tasmanian languages belong (according to most linguists) to the Indo-Pacific family to which the Papuan New Guinean languages belong; the three hundred or so Australian languages are in a family of their own (to which no clear links to the Indo-Pacific family have yet been established).

British naval officer James Cook prepares to observe the solar eclipse of the planet Venus, having arrived sailing from Cape Horn to Tahiti on the ship HM Bark Endeavour on April 13, 1769, and commissioned the building of a small fort and observatory at what is now known as Point Venus.

The astronomer appointed to the task is Charles Green, assistant to the recently appointed Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne.

The primary purpose of the observation is to obtain measurements that can be used to calculate more accurately the distance of Venus from the Sun.

If this can be achieved, then the distances of the other planets can be worked out, based on their orbits.

The transit takes place on June 3.

Disappointingly, the separate measurements of Green, Cook and Solander vary by more than the anticipated margin of error.

Their instrumentation is adequate by the standards of the time, but the resolution still cannot eliminate the errors.

When their results are later compared to those of the other observations of the same event made elsewhere for the exercise, the net result is not as conclusive or accurate as had been hoped.

The difficulties are today thought to relate to the Black drop effect, an optical phenomenon that precludes accurate measurement—particularly with the instruments used by Cook, Green and Solander.

Once the observations are completed, Cook opens the sealed orders for the second part of his voyage: to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated rich southern continent of Terra Australis, acting on additional instructions from the Admiralty.

The Royal Society, and especially Alexander Dalrymple, believe that it must exist and that Britain's best chance of discovering it and claiming its fabled riches before any other rival European power manages to do so would be by using Cook's Transit of Venus mission (on an inconspicuous small ship such as the Endeavour) as a cover.

Cook, however, has his own personal doubts on the continent's existence.