On This Day April 29, 1770

Captain James Cook discovers and names Botany Bay.

  James Cook was born at Marton in North Yorkshire, on 27 October 1728. As the son of a farm labourer, he held no great ambitions, being apprenticed in a grocer/haberdashery when he was 16. Lack of aptitude in the trade led his employer to introduce Cook to local shipowners, who took him on as a merchant navy apprentice. Here he was educated in algebra, trigonometry, navigation, and astronomy, which later set Cook up to command his own ship.

Cook was hired in 1766 by the Royal Society to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun. Following this, Cook's next orders were to search the south Pacific for Terra Australis Incognita, the great southern continent that many believed must extend around the southern pole. He came across New Zealand, which Abel Tasman had discovered in 1642, and spent some months there, charting the coastline.

Nearly a year later, Cook set sail west for New Holland, which was later to become Australia. On 29 April 1770 Cook's vessel, the Endeavour, sailed into Botany Bay, after first sighting the eastern coast of Australia ten days earlier. He described the bay as being "tolerably well sheltered", and initially named it Stingray Bay, after the large numbers of stingray he noted. The name was later changed to Botany Bay due to the vast numbers of new and unique botanical specimens noted by the ship's botanists, including Joseph Banks. Cook named Cape Solander and Cape Banks after Banks and Finnish botanist Daniel Solander. He then landed at Kurnell, allowing the cabin boy, Isaac Smith, to be the first known European to step foot on the soil of "New South Wales".