Grandpa Pencil On the day of the transit observation, Cook recorded:
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James Cook
(October 27, 1728 – February 14, 1779)
He made three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, in which its main shorelines were mapped.
Cook was also a map maker.
Cook was born in Marton in North Yorkshire, near what is today recognised as the town of Middlesbrough.
Cook was one of five children born to Grace and James, Sr., who worked as a day labourer on a farm.
When Cook was sixteen, he was apprenticed to a shopkeeper in the fishing village of Staithes.
According to tradition, it was during his time there that Cook first felt the lure of the sea while gazing out the shop window.
After about a year and half in Staithes, the shop owner brought Cook to the nearby port town of Whitby and introduced him to the shipbuilder John Walker, who employed him as an apprentice on a collier that distributed coal along the English coast.
While working for Walker, Cook began to study algebra, trigonometry, navigation, and astronomy, skills he would need one day to command his own ship.
Cook rose in the ranks of the merchant fleet but declined the command of his own collier in 1755 on the eve of the Seven Years War to start again at the lowest level in the British Royal Navy.
During the Seven Years' War, he participated in the siege of Quebec City before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759.
He showed a talent for surveying and cartography and was responsible for mapping much of the entrance to the Saint Lawrence River during the siege allowing General Wolfe to make his famous stealth attack on the Plains of Abraham.
Cook's surveying skills were put to good use in the 1760s mapping the jagged coast of Newfoundland, which brought him to the attention of the Royal Society.
Cook's huge achievements can be attributed to a combination of excellent seamanship, his superior surveying and cartographic skills, courage in exploring dangerous locations to confirm the facts (e.g. dipping into the Antarctic circle repeatedly and exploring around the Great Barrier Reef), ability to lead men in adverse conditions, and boldness both with regard to the extent of his explorations and going beyond the instructions given by the Admiralty.
In 1766, the Royal Society hired Cook (then a Lieutenant in the R.N.) to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record a transit of Venus across the Sun.
In command of HM Bark Endeavour, he sailed from England in 1768, rounded Cape Horn and continued westward across the Pacific to arrive at Tahiti on April 13, 1769, where the observations were to be made.
The transit was scheduled to occur on June 3, and in the meantime he commissioned the building of a small fort and observatory.
The primary purpose of the observation was to obtain measurements which could be used to more accurately calculate the distance of Venus from the Sun.
If this could be achieved, then the distances of the other known planets could be worked out based on their relative orbits.
"This day prov'd as favourable to our purpose as we could wish, not a Clowd was to be seen the whole day and the Air was perfectly clear so that we had every advantage we could desire in "Observing the whole of the passage of the Planet Venus over the Suns disk."
Green, Cook and Solander each made their own set of observational measurements.
However, lack of precision in their instrumentation and application lead to discrepancies, and when the results were later compared to other observations conducted elsewhere they were not as conclusive or accurate as had been hoped.
Once the observations were completed, Cook then departed in order to execute the secondary purpose of his voyage: namely, to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated southern continent of Terra Australis.
The Royal Society, and especially Alexander Dalrymple, believed that it must exist, however Cook had his own personal doubts on the subject.
With the help of a Tahitian named Tupaia, who had extensive knowledge of Pacific geography, Cook managed to reach New Zealand, becoming only the second European in history to do so (behind Abel Tasman over a century earlier, in 1642).
Cook mapped the complete New Zealand coastline, making only some minor errors (such as calling Banks Peninsula an island, and thinking Stewart Island/Rakiura was part of the South Island). He also discovered Cook Strait, which separates the North Island from the South Island, and which Tasman had not seen.
He then set course westwards, and sailed until land was sighted, which Cook named Point Hicks.
This was on the southeastern coast of the Australian continent, and in doing so his expedition became the first recorded Europeans to have encountered its eastern coastline.
In his journal, Cook recorded the event thus:
"The Southernmost point of land we had in sight, which bore from us West quarter South, I judged to lay in the Latitude of 38 degrees South and in the Long. of 211 degrees 7 minutes West from the Meridian of Greenwich.
I have named it Point Hicks, because Lieutenant Hicks was the first who discovered this Land".
The ship's log recorded the date as being Thursday April 19, 1770; however, Cook had not made the necessary adjustments when they had earlier crossed the 180th meridian of Longitude, and the actual calendar date was Friday, April 20.
The Endeavour continued northwards along the coastline, keeping the land in sight and Cook charting and naming landmarks as he went. A little over a week later, they came across an extensive but shallow inlet, and upon entering it moored off a low headland fronted by sand dunes.
It was here, on April 29 that Cook and crew made their first landfall on the continent, at a place now known as Kurnell.
At first Cook bestowed the name Stingaree (Stingray) Bay to the inlet after the many such creatures found there; this was later changed to Botanist Bay and finally Botany Bay after the unique specimens retrieved by Banks and Solander.
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