THE DISCOVERER OF AUSTRALIA.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2439, 2 March 1909, Page 7

THE DISCOVERER OF AUSTRALIA.

CAPTAIN COOK

There had been Portuguese, Spaniards, and Dutchmen who for' two hundred years had been wrecked upon Australia, but the man who discovered the greatest island in the world was undoubtedly Captain Cook, of the .Endeavour. For, as .a writer in the . Gornhill justly observes, the greatest the Spanish seamen, when he landeU on an island in the New Hebrides, ttuWht that he was on Australian soUn and Tasman, the great Dutch discoverer, thought that New Zealand was part of Australia. MATE ON A BALTIC TRADER. This writer goes on to give a sketch of the early clays of the. man of the world-famed Voyages, Avhom Besant has described as “tall ,thin, graye, even austere." Half Scottish and half Yorkshire, Cook came of a sound Northern stock, in spite of the fact V . that he was the son of a day labourer, and was born in 1728 in a mud cottage consisting of two rooms. “He learned the rudiments of spelling in a dame’s school in the intervals betwixt crow-tending. The sea, in a sense, was native to him. At twelve years of age he was a shop-boy in Staithes, a fishing-village squeezed into a narrow crevice in the cliffs, on which the mighty waves and fierce winds of -4re North Sea break. The little shop was within .actual sound of the sea; the encroaching .waters, as a matter of \ fact, have since washed away the on which it was built, and to-: 1 day the sea rolls where the counter once stood." Cook at the age of thirteen became a sea apprentice in a collier. By the time he was twentytwo he had risen to be mate of a Baltic trader.. THE TURNING-POINT. In 1755, on the eve of the Avar Avith France,Cook volunteered into the navy as an a ole seaman. Beiore. he was thirty he Avas on board the Pembroke, a_,trigate under orders for America, ter taking part in the siege oi X-~- XfOiiisburg, ami, later on, in 'Wolfe’s siege of qjuebec, Cook undertook the. dangerous task of navigating the !St. LaAA r rence. Five years later Avmletaking surroundings on the Neiv found lane coast, he. took a careful obesrvation of an eclipse of the sun. He Avrote a paper on the eclipse Avhich lvasafterAvards read before the Royal Society. This proved to be the. turning-point in the great seaman’s career, lor a transit of Venus avus due in Juno, 17(hi, and the Royal Society petitioned the King to despatch an expedition to a point south of the equator Avhicli Avould be favourable, for observing the event. It Avas decided to send out a staff of astronomers to Tahiti. The astronomers wished one of their OAvn party to- be in command of the vessel, but Lord HaA\ r ke protested. An astronomer, the great Halley, had been alloAved to command a vessel in 1698, with ill results from the standpoint of navigation. In the end Cook Avas given the command oi the Endeavour, in Avkich ship he made the Avonderful voyage that linked Australia to the knoAvn Avorld.