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

Joseph Banks – In Australia

were ready to sail with the first fair wind but

where to go? – windward was impossible,

to leeward was a labyrinth of shoals, so that

how soon might we have the ship to repair

again, or lose her, quite no one could tell.’

For the next week the Endeavour threaded

its way through the labyrinth of shoals with

the pinnace sounding the water depth ahead

of them. Eventually they reached Lizard

Island, where Cook could climb to the

highest point and observe what lay ahead:

I immediately went upon the highest hill on the

island where to my mortification I discovered

a reef of rocks lying at about 2 or 3 Leagues

without the island, extending in a line north-

west and south-east farther than I could see and

on which the sea broke very high.

They had in fact sailed into a trap. Fortunately, Cook could see a gap in the line of

breakers which might allow a way out through the Barrier Reef, he sent the pinnace

ahead to sound the narrow channel, which allowed the Endeavour pass through into

the open ocean. For the first time in three months they were now out of sight of land

and safe in deep water, free of all fears of shoals and running aground again. They

were now safe, or so they thought. Cook did not want to sail too far out to sea in case

he missed sighting the supposed passage between New Holland and New Guinea and

three days later an easterly swell was driving them back towards the reef and the line

of breakers they had just escaped. Banks describes the reef as:

a thing scarcely known in Europe or indeed any where but in these seas: it is a wall of Coral

rock rising almost perpendicularly out of the unfathomable ocean, always overflown at

high water commonly 7 or 8 feet, and generally bare at low water; the large waves of the

vast ocean meeting with so sudden a resistance make here a most terrible surf Breaking

mountain high, especially when as in our case the general trade wind blows directly upon it.

The crew of the Endeavour had no way of knowing the difficulties ahead, unless

they had read the description by the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville

who with his frigate Boudeuse had approached the reef directly from the east only a

few years earlier. The tremendous roar of the surf breaking across the reef gave him

Australian Aborigines, Sydney Parkinson, National
Library of Australia

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