Captain Cook

Captain James Cook was born, 1728-1779, in Marton, Cleveland about 30 miles from the town of Whitby. An adventurer and navigator in the Royal Navy, Cook is best known as an explorer and most notably for reaching the south-eastern coast of the Australian continent on 19 April 1770 where his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered the Australian Eastern coastline.

Cook's early life and childhood was spent in the villages of Marton and later Great Ayton, as one of the five surviving children of a Scottish farm labourer, also named James Cook, and his Yorkshire born wife Grace Pace. The school at which the young Cook attended in Great Ayton is now a small museum. In 1741 Cook began to work for his father as a farm labourer but in 1745 at the age of 16 Cook moved to the coastal village of Staithes to work as an assistant in a grocery shop. This move gave Cook his first glimpse and experience of the sea which would prove to be so central to his future successes. The post did not last and his employer, aware of Cook's enthusiasm for life on the ocean and his determination to go to sea, took him to Whitby where he was introduced to the Walker family (Captain John & Captain Henry Walker - who independently owned ships); Quaker ship owners engaged in the coal trade between the North-East and London. Captain John Walker's ships traded between London and the North and it was on this route that Cook began his sailing career on board the Freelove carrying coal to London in 1747. He stayed with Captain John Walker, having positions on various ships and voyages from October 1746 to June 1755 (approximately 9 years later) when he was offered command of his own ship. By this point, however, Cook had decided to leave the relative safety of Whitby and at the beginning of The Seven Years War with France he volunteered with the Royal Navy on board HMS Eagle. After 2 years he joined HMS Pembroke where he first witnessed the ravaging effects of scurvy whilst crossing the Atlantic Ocean. In 1762, having risen to the rank of Master, Cook married Elizabeth Batts of Shadwell, 13 years his junior. He went on to be present at the captures of Louisburg and of Quebec, and, after the Seven Years War was over, he charted the coasts of Newfoundland. He was shuttling across the Atlantic every year, and that is when he insisted on best navy practice with regard to diet and the prevention of scurvy.








The routes of Captain James Cook's voyages. The first voyage is shown in red, second voyage in green, and third voyage in blue. The route of Cook's crew following his death is shown as a dashed blue line



Cooks' skills, dedication and intellectual reputation eventually brought him to the notice of the Royal Society which led to his appointment to lead HM Bark Endeavour in her epic voyage to the Pacific. Her mission was to carry Admiralty and members of the Royal Society to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti and to explore the possibility of the existence of a Great Southern Continent. As a Whitby-built collier, solid and flat-bottomed and thus easy to beach and repair, the Endeavour was familiar to Cook and he took command, as lieutenant, on what was to carve the way for a two further monumental voyages. Each voyage not only furthered Cook's impressive career but were also pivotal in furthering scientific understanding and exploration. 

The first voyage (during which Cook circumnavigated and charted New Zealand) with HMS Endeavour and second and third on board HMS Resolution HMS Resolution saw Cook become the first man to circumnavigate the globe in both directions, from east to west then west to east respectively, and the publication of his personal journals gained him higher reputation still within the scientific community. His first voyage established the charting of the east coast of Australia and the entire coast of New Zealand, and the second, dispelling the notion of a Great Southern Continent, sailed south to Antarctica, achieving the first Antarctic Circle crossing in 1773.

The third of Cook's voyages, this time on-board HMS Resolution, in search of the North West Passage through the Bering Straits, ultimately ended in Cook's demise during a fight with the local inhabitants on the island of Hawaii in 1779.

Aboriginal Massacres

Nailed to trees proclamation boards were designed to show that colonists and aboriginals were equal before the law, and incorrectly depicted a policy of friendship and equal justice which simply did not exist.

It has been estimated that at the time of first European contact, the absolute minimum pre-1788 population was 315,000, while recent archaeological finds suggest that a population of 750,000 could have been sustained, with some academics estimating a population of a million people was possible.

In the 19th century, smallpox was the principal cause of Aboriginal deaths. Smallpox is estimated to have killed up to 90% of the local Darug people in 1789.

The first massacre of Tasmanian Aboriginal people occurred at Risden Cove in 1804, when Lieutenant John Bowen and his troops fired on a group which included women and children. By 1806 clashes between Aboriginal people and settlers were common. The Tasmanians speared stock and shepards; in retaliation Europeans gave them poison flour, abducted their children to use as forced labour, and raped and tortured the women.


Mass killings of Tasmanian Aborigines were reported as having occurred as part of the Black War.
In combination with impacts of introduced infectious diseases, to which the Tasmanian Aborigines had no immunity, the conflict had such impact on the Tasmanian Aboriginal population that they were reported to have been exterminated..

In February 1830, the government offered a bounty of £5 per adult and £2 per child, for Aborigines captured alive.
By 1900 the recorded Indigenous population of Australia had declined to approximately 93,000.





Goulbolba Hill Massacre, Central Queensland a large massacre involving men, women and children. This was the result of settlers pushing Aboriginal people out of their hunting grounds and the Aboriginals being forced to hunt livestock for food. A party of Native Police, under Frederick Wheeler, who had a reputation for violent repressions, was sent to "disperse" this group of Aboriginals, who were 'resisting the invasion'. He had also mustered up a force of 100 local whites. Alerted of Wheeler's presence by a native stockman, the district's aborigines holed up in caves on Goulbolba hill. According to eyewitness testimony taken down from a local white in 1899, that day some 300 Aboriginals, including all the women and children, were shot dead or killed by being herded into the nearby lake for drowning.

In 1833 or 1834 tension turned into a full fledged conflict in a dispute over a beached whale. The Convincing Ground is located in Portland Bay southwest of Melbourne, near the coastal town of Portland in the Shire of Glenelg and is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Reports say up to 200 Aborigines were killed, including women and children

George Augustus Robinson visited the site of the massacre in 1841 and talked with local squatters and made the following official report:

Among the remarkable places on this coast, is the 'Convincing Ground', originating in a severe conflict which took place in a few years previous between the Aborigines and the Whalers on which occasion a large number of the former were slain. The circumstances are that a whale had come on shore and the Natives who fed on the carcass claimed it was their own. The whalers said they would 'convince them' and had recourse to firearms.

The reason for this uncertainty over casualties and the actual date of the massacre appears to stem from the fact that the incident was only reported and documented several years after its occurrence.





Gippsland squatter Henry Meyrick wrote in a letter home to his relatives in England in 1846

The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest was ever hunted down with such unsparing perseverance as they are. Men, women and children are shot whenever they can be met with ...

I have protested against it at every station I have been in Gippsland, in the strongest language, but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging.


 For myself, if I caught a black actually killing my sheep, I would shoot him with as little remorse as I would a wild dog, but no consideration on earth would induce me to ride into a camp and fire on them indiscriminately, as is the custom whenever the smoke is seen. They [the Aborigines] will very shortly be extinct. It is impossible to say how many have been shot, but I am convinced that not less than 450 have been murdered altogether..."