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The uninhabited Lord Howe Island is discovered on February 17 by the brig HMS Supply, commanded by Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, who is on his way from Botany Bay to Norfolk Island with with a cargo of nine male and six female convicts to start a penal settlement there.

Lord Howe island is an irregularly crescent-shaped volcanic remnant in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, six hundred kilometers (three hundred and seventy miles) directly east of mainland Port Macquarie, and about nine hundred kilometers (five hundred and sixty miles) southwest of Norfolk Island, where they will arrive on March 6.

Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball observes Ball's Pyramid on the return journey of March 13, 1788, and sends a party ashore on Lord Howe Island to claim it as a British possession.

Numerous turtles and tame birds are captured and returned to Sydney.

Ball names Mount Lidgbird and Ball's Pyramid after himself and the main island after Richard Howe, First Earl Howe, who is First Lord of the Admiralty at this time.

Ball sends a party ashore on Lord Howe Island to claim it as a British possession.

Many names on Lord Howe Island date from this time, and also from May of the same year when the island is visited by four ships of the First Fleet, HMS Supply, Charlotte, Lady Penrhyn and Scarborough when much of the plant and animal life is first recorded in the journals and diaries of visitors like David Blackburn, Master of the Supply, and Arthur Bowes Smyth, surgeon of the Lady Penrhyn.

Watercolor sketches of native birds including the Lord Howe woodhen (Gallirallus sylvestris), white gallinule (Porphyrio albus), and Lord Howe pigeon (Columba vitiensis godmanae), are made by artists including George Raper and John Hunter.

As the latter two birds are soon hunted to extinction these paintings are their only remaining pictorial record