Where Australia Collides with Asia The epic voyages of Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and the origin

Where Australia Collides with Asia

It was almost twenty years later, in 1787, that the now Sir Joseph Banks proposed

that an Admiralty vessel be sent to Tahiti to collect breadfruit seedlings and transport

them to the West Indies where they could be grown to feed the plantation slaves. This

was the object of the ill-fated expedition of HMS Bounty and its commander Captain

William Bligh. The ship’s great cabin had been converted to accommodate 1000

potted breadfruit plants. However, when they arrived in Tahiti in 1789 it was not the

correct season and it took five months before all the breadfruit seedlings were potted

and ready for transportation. Unfortunately, during this period, Venus the Goddess of

Love also visited the Bounty and it was Captain Bligh’s attempts to maintain discipline

during this long period that led to his problems with the crew and the resulting mutiny.

After the observation of the transit of Venus, Cook followed his instructions from

the Admiralty and the Endeavour sailed south towards latitude 40 degrees in search

of the land believed to lie there. After sailing into continuous gales, mountainous seas

and the increasing cold for 2000 kilometres without sighting any land, the Endeavour

eagerly turned west. Finally, in October 1769 they sighted land and expectations rose.

Could this be a northern promontory of the postulated ‘Great South Land’ they had

also been sent to discover? The crew of the Endeavour seemed to think it was, as

Joseph Banks writes:

At sunset all hands at the mast head, land still distant 7 or 8 leagues, appears larger than ever,

in many parts 3, 4 and 5 ranges of hills are seen over the other and a chain of Mountains

over all, some of which appear enormously high. Much difference of opinion and many

conjectures about islands, rivers, inlets etc., but all hands seem to agree that this is certainly

the Continent we are in search of.

Cook was more cautious because this could be the east coast of the land discovered

by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman many years before which he named New Zealand.

Tasman found the people of New Zealand to be exceedingly fierce and warlike. His

first contact with the Maori took place in 1642 at what he named Murderers’ Bay when

four of his crew were killed while passing between their boats. After this encounter,

Tasman sailed north without making any further attempts to land. In his journal Cook

describes their first serious encounter with the Maori:

I landed upon the Island accompanied by Mr Banks and Dr Solander ... Before we could

well look about us we were surrounded by two or three hundred people, and, notwithstanding

that they were all armed they came upon us in such a confused, straggling manner that we

hardly suspected that they meant us any harm, but in this we were soon undeceived ... they

next attempted to break in upon us, upon which I fired a Musquet loaded with small shot

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Where Australia Collides with Asia

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