Cook · 1770
Botany Bay, first contact
On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of April 1770, HMS *Endeavour* under Lieutenant James Cook RN brought up off the south-east coast of New Holland in a wide bay he would within the week call Sting-Ray Harbour and within the month re-name Botany Bay for the unprecedented haul of new plant specimens his botanist Joseph Banks took up its tidal flats. As he came ashore on the south side of the bay in the pinnace with Banks, Solander and a marine guard, two Gweagal warriors of the Dharawal nation stood up on the beach and showed they would not let the boat land. Cook called to them. They did not understand. He fired a musket-ball over their heads. They threw a spear at the boat. He fired small-shot at the leg of the elder warrior, who threw a second spear. The two retreated to the trees. The British landed in deserted shallows. Cook spent eight days in the bay. He went round the bay to the encampments and left presents in them. The encampments stayed empty as long as he was on the coast. The first British landfall on the eastern coast of Australia began with two spear-casts and two musket-shots and an empty beach.
It is a little after two in the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of April 1770, in the pinnace of His Majesty's Bark Endeavour, two cables off the south shore of a wide bay he is calling, on the chart drawn that morning, Sting-Ray Harbour for the rays of the shoals, and which he will, by the eleventh day, rename Botany Bay for the haul Mr Banks is taking out of it. He is forty-one years old. He is Lieutenant James Cook RN, of Marton in Cleveland, in his eleventh year as a commissioned officer, on his first command. He is at the tiller of the boat with the marine sergeant Edgcumbe at the bow with a Brown Bess loaded, Mr Banks the gentleman botanist amidships in his customary good-quality coat, Dr Solander, six oarsmen, the sailmaster Mr Molyneux at the sheet.
On the beach, twenty yards ahead, two men are standing. They are not the first natives the Endeavour's people have seen on this coast. They are the first who have shown they intend to oppose a landing. They are stripped to the waist. They are armed with what Cook will write in the journal as long, dark wooden spears, four-pointed, perhaps eight or nine feet. They have stood up out of a low rise behind the beach and they have walked down to the water's edge.
Cook is, by his journal entry made that night, calm and concerned. He has read Dampier and Tasman. He has been told by Banks during the run up the coast that he should expect, on the southerly part of New Holland, a black people without iron, without towns, without crops. He had not expected them to oppose a boat. By his own remark in the cabin to Banks at breakfast: I had thought we might find them shy, not warlike.
He has the boat hold its way at twenty yards. He calls to the men on the beach: we are not enemies. We will give you cloth and beads. Will you let us land?
The men on the beach do not understand a word of his speech. He throws a few brass nails into the water at the surf line as a token. They do not move toward the nails. The elder of the two raises his spear.
He thinks: I have not come ashore on this coast to fire on people from a boat.
He thinks: if we go in among them with the spear raised one of us in the boat is killed.
He thinks: I will fire the musket over their heads and see what they do.
He has Edgcumbe fire over their heads. The shot is loud at thirty yards. The men on the beach do not move. The elder of the two throws his spear. It falls short of the boat by ten feet. He fires himself, the second barrel small-shot, at the elder's leg. The elder yelps and lifts the leg. The younger throws a spear that lands between Banks and Solander on the bottom-boards. Banks reaches down and picks it up. The two men on the beach turn and walk, not run, up the rise to the trees behind the beach. They do not come back into sight.
Cook lands the boat in the next ten minutes on the empty shallows. He goes up the rise to the small group of huts of bark behind the beach. The huts are empty; their occupants have gone, by the look of the cooking-fires, in some haste. He takes nothing out of the huts. He leaves, on a flat stone in the largest of them, a string of glass beads and four iron nails and a strip of red cloth. He goes back to the boat. He is on the Endeavour by sunset.
Eight days were spent in the bay. The huts at the south point of the bay remained empty for the entirety of the visit. Banks and Solander took down, by their own count, three hundred and thirty-eight new plant specimens, the haul that gave the bay its lasting name. The presents Cook left on the flat stone were, by his last visit to the hut on the day before they sailed, gone. He believed, on no evidence, that the people had taken them. The Dharawal oral tradition, recorded in the twentieth century, holds that the people of the south side of the bay watched the Endeavour every day from the trees and did not approach the British because they did not know what kind of beings they were and did not wish to find out at close quarters. The two men with the spears are remembered in Dharawal tradition as the elders of the Gweagal clan, defending the country at the only point of the Endeavour's visit at which it could be defended. The first European description of an Australian Aboriginal weapon, Banks's spear, with three barbed prongs and a broken-shell point, lies today in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. Cook left the bay on the sixth of May 1770. He sailed up the coast and did not return. The cession of the country to the British Crown, as nominal owner, was claimed by him at Possession Island in the Torres Strait on the twenty-second of August. The transcript of the Endeavour journal, in Cook's hand, is in the National Library of Australia. The two men on the beach are not named in it.