Fortunate Discovery
Did Cook have prior knowledge?

It is with some wonderment that Captain James Cook headed straight for the safety of what is now known as Cooktown to beach the Barque Endeavour for urgent repairs. An area of the coast he supposedly had no prior knowledge of.

In his book, The Secret Discovery of Australia, Mr K. G. McIntyre takes the argument further. He says that when he 

wrenched his sinking ship from the coral and made for the coast. . . . Cook did not make straight for the closest point of the coast by the shortest route - due west. Admittedly, it was just as well that he did not, for his ship would again have foundered on the reefs around Cape Tribulation, but still, a shipwrecked sailor in an unknown sea does not have many options, and his chance of reaching the coast at all was at best a grim race against time. On the other hand, he did not proceed south-westerly, slightly backwards, making for some beach or cove that he had already seen. Instead, he made north-west, into the unknown, towards a coast which he could not see, towards land which might not even exist, which might turn out to be worse than anything experienced before - spot-on for the entrance of Cooktown Harbour, the only harbour in a thousand miles 11600 kilometres] of Queensland coast that was suitable for his purposes. He had a boat crew out, and when the beach of Weary Bay was reported Cook still pressed on, despite the weariness of the crew that is signified in the naming of the bay. It was a long, hard and nerve-wracking battle for two days, but at the end of it there showed up his providential harbour, so miraculously nosed out in the wilderness of sea.

If Cook, or any other sailor, were today in difficulties on the Endeavour Reef, with a modern Admiralty chart in his hand, he would undoubtedly run for Cooktown Harbour, as Cook did. And while Cook did not have a modern Admiralty chart, it is historically possible that he had the Portuguese chart. On the Desliens version of this, Cooktown Harbour, identifiably in its correct place, invitingly shows up as a snug, well-sheltered, land-locked harbour as close to a little piece of heaven as any shipwrecked mariner could desire. But the Desliens chart does contain one error: on it, Cooktown Harbour is round and spacious, larger than in reality. And it is significant that, as Cook entered the harbour, he 'found [the channel] very narrow, and the harbour much smaller than I had been told'. Of course, he might have been 'told' this by his lookout man, or by the boat crew, or by the man standing beside him on the deck. We do not know: but in the context it was a peculiar remark to make, so peculiar that Hawkesworth [one of Cook's editors] altered it to read 'smaller than I had expected'. And above all it seems strange that the one comment that Cook made about his life-saving harbour, the one adjective that he used to describe it, picks up the one point of difference - greater size - which one cannot but notice on looking at this harbour on Desliens' map.

On the other hand, another authority, Dr Howard Fry, says that this theory betrays an ignorance of the sailing qualities of a square-rigged ship: 

Cook's journal tells us that there were light airs at ESE, so his north-westerly heading was the obvious one for his damaged vessel. And the journal also states that the pinnace was out and came back to report a good harbour about two leagues to leeward, and he then made for this. It was from the boat's crew, not any map, that he knew of this harbour.

And so the 200-year-old argument continues. Although the possibility of coincidence exists - perhaps both the Portuguese and Cook used the same visual features as inspiration for names - it can be seen why the old maps have always supported doubts as to Cook being the actual discoverer of New South Wales.

The whole business began in this way. In 1789 Alexander Dalrymple, fellow of the Royal Society, distinguished hydrographer and map expert, announced that Cook's discovery of the east coast of New Holland "could not be described as a discovery at all". The evidence was in the Dauphin map. How, he argued, could Cook be the first man on a coast that had previously been mapped? It was a very powerful argument. And Dalrymple knew about maps. An advance copy of his 134-page octavo volume, An Account of the Discoveries made in the South Pacific Ocean Previous to 1764, was taken along on the voyage by Banks. There was an extensive library on the Endeavour which included such comprehensive works as Charles de Brosses' Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes in two quarto volumes, Thevenot's Relation de divers voyages, Harris's Navigantium atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca and so on. Also, in the journals of both Cook and Banks references are made to the original accounts of many of the principal explorers of the area. It was, in short, a scientific expedition carried out with as much preparation and planning as possible and it is unlikely that any available map which might have been useful would have been overlooked. This does not, of course, prove that the Dieppe maps were used. Some writers suggest that they'd been dismissed and forgotten about owing to, in particular, longitudinal discrepancies, generated by the cruder navigational techniques of the sixteenth century.

Torres Strait raises, in another way, the question of what maps Cook had with him, and his failure to fully acknowledge the help of past cartographers. As the Endeavour sailed the treacherous channel separating New Guinea from Prince of Wales Island (about twenty-five kilometres north of Cape York) Banks wrote '' - - so we began to look out for the Passage we expected to find between New Holland and New Guinea. . . ", while Cook claimed, after they'd found it, to have cleared up the ''doubtful point" of its existence. Now, while in the past it had often been disputed whether Torres had in fact sailed south of New Guinea (thus proving a strait existed), by this time it was fairly evident he'd done so. What then had Cook puzzled about? He had on board a map on which Torres' route was clearly marked through the strait. The map was included in Dalrymple's collection of Pacific voyages, of which, as I have noted, Banks had a copy.

Yet Cook at no stage acknowledged the invaluable help of Dalrymple's scholarly work, which, according to some, highlights the ruthless ambitiousness in the captain's nature. He knew that the journal he was writing was for official inspection and as he approached Torres Strait he built up the reader's anticipation, producing finally, on 23 August, 1770:

This gave me no small satisfaction, not only because the dangers and fatigues of the voyage were drawing near to an end, but by being able to prove that New Holland and New Guinea are two separate lands and islands.

It must be remembered here that Dalrymple had been the Royal Society's choice, before the Admiralty stepped in, to lead the expedition, and that a great personal animosity afterwards existed between him and Cook. This might explain Cook's reluctance to acknowledge any debt.

The French commentator Barbie du Bocage wrote, in 1807, of the Dauphin and Jean Rotz maps:

The English pretend that none of these charts were discovered till after the death of the celebrated Captain Cook, and that they had no knowledge of them when the navigator set sail. But their prior existence in well-known libraries in England may cause this assertion to be doubted ... We recognize on these Atlases the eastern and western coasts of New Holland. These coasts are bounded by the same latitudes as those indicated on recent maps; and, if they encroach more on longitude, it is because, at the time the discovery was made, there existed but small means of fixing the boundaries in that respect.

Dr Howard Fry, however, maintains that du Bocage is wrong. He says that the Dauphin map was in England but insists that it was not until 1782 that a study of it resulted in Alexander Dalrymple's belief that another European ship had been to that Australian coast before Cook. Similarly, the Rotz version cannot be proved to have been rediscovered until 1786, well after Cook's voyage.

Extracts from "The Captain Cook Myth" by Jillian Robertson. 1981
Published by Angus & Robertson Publishers

Reprinted with permission of the author.

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