HOW THE GREAT NAVIGATOR MISSED BASS STRAIT– LOOKING BACK AT JAMES COOK

Margaret Cameron-Ash is the author of Lying for the Admiralty: Captain Cook’s Endeavour Voyage. In her book, she mounts a strong circumstantial case that Cook both discovered Bass Strait and actually gazed upon Sydney Harbour. Her proposition is that Cook and some of his party walked overland from Botany Bay to the Harbour. Her case is based on documentary and circumstantial evidence gleaned after meticulous research. On Tuesday 28 May 2019, Margaret Cameron-Ash addressed The Sydney Institute to explain her thesis.

HOW THE GREAT NAVIGATOR MISSED BASS STRAIT– LOOKING BACK AT JAMES COOK

MARGARET CAMERON-ASH

Firstly, I would like to thank Anne and Gerard Henderson for the opportunity to talk to this most distinguished audience about my favourite topic – James Cook.

We’re about a quarter of the way through the great Sestercentennial – commemorating Cook’s three-year voyage through the Pacific. I’m delighted to see our president of the Captain Cook Society, Mal Nicholson, here tonight. In a couple of days, he flies to Tahiti to join the international celebrations for the Transit of Venus, on 3 June 1769. Bon Voyage, Mal!

But tonight, we’re not looking at Cook’s Astronomy, or indeed at the scientific program on the Endeavour. Instead, we turn to Cook’s political program – his cloak and dagger activities for Britain’s Secret Service.

Tonight, I’m going to look at three of Cook’s secrets – namely the concealment of Bass Strait; the concealment of Sydney Harbour; and the Possession Ceremony that didn’t happen.

 But first I should explain how such a professional and meticulous cartographer as Cook, got involved with fake maps.

The reason was the political climate of the eighteenth century. The backdrop to Cook’s whole life was Britain’s Cold war – sometimes a shooting war – with France. Anglo-French rivalry had loomed over the English Channel for centuries. It started with the Norman Conquest – and continued into the nineteenth century. On the eve of his planned invasion of England (which was cancelled), Napoleon rallied the troops by declaiming: “We have six centuries of insults to avenge.”

Cook started life as a farm boy in Yorkshire, where he would run to the summit of Roseberry Topping, the thousand-foot-high crag near his home. Here he spent hours surveying the panorama of mountains and valleys, gazing across to the North Sea coast with the easterly breeze in his face.

At seventeen, he went to sea and began a 30-year career that would change direction each decade, roughly speaking. The first decade he spent in the Merchant Navy; the second in North America with the Royal Navy; and the third decade in the Pacific.

The Merchant Navy served Cook well. But after nine years of transporting freight around the North Sea, the drums of war started rumbling once more. Cook switched across to the King’s navy at the ripe old age of 26, just in time to fight the French in the Seven Years War – which Britain won.

France was humiliated, mainly because she lost the whole of her North American empire. This was intolerable, so at the Peace negotiations in Paris, the French insisted that they be given two tiny islands off the coast of Newfoundland, so that their fishermen had a beach where they could dry their catch.

Now the British Cabinet had the usual mix of hawks and doves, and the hawks were furious at this suggestion. Lord Chatham declared that he would rather lose the use of his right hand than allow France back onto this doorstep of North America. However, the hawks lost and the doves won. Britain agreed to give the little islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon to France – if they promised not to build any fortifications.

Of course, that was too optimistic and the governor of Newfoundland asked the Admiralty to send James Cook over to survey the coasts where the pesky French were causing trouble. Cook did this for the next five summers and, in the winters, he returned to London and reported to the Admiralty secretary, Philip Stephens.

As the Permanent Secretary of a government department, Stephens may have shared some of the foibles of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister, but Stephens had a much larger remit. He ran the Admiralty and, therefore, he was one of the most powerful men in England. He was also head of Naval Intelligence – the spymaster – the “C” of M.I.6, or the “M” of the James Bond stories.

Many of us here can remember life with the backdrop of a Cold War – with its simple, binary certainty, blowing in and out of our lives. But when I speak to school students who haven’t grown up with this, I find that Ian Fleming and John Le Carre provide an easy shorthand for conveying the climate in which Captain Cook operated.

Stephens was the spymaster and he personally selected James Cook as his 007.

The analogy continues. Both Cook and Bond were patriotic and loyal. Both were naval officers, and, for both, their modus operandi was to do whatever it takes. Perhaps the main difference between them was that James Cook didn’t have a girl in every port.

In any event, being a spymaster, Philip Stephens had no problem with fake maps when it came to fooling the French. Cook quickly came to share this view when he learnt that instead of returning to the North Atlantic, he was being offered the South Pacific. Philip Stephens had a Special Mission for Captain Cook in this new theatre of Anglo-French rivalry.

After losing most of their northern empire in the Seven Years War, the French turned their attention to the Southern Hemisphere. Their first move was to seize the Falkland Islands and plant a French colony there in 1764. It was an audacious manoeuvre and a frightening wake-up call for the British Admiralty. From now on, Phillip Stephens was on High Alert.

Initially, the main game was the race for the legendary Great South Land – the fabulous Terra Australis Incognita.

 Spain and the Netherlands had searched for the mythical continent in previous centuries, but those empires were now in decline and the competition had narrowed to two – France and Britain.

Incidentally, in eighteenth century terminology, this Southern Continent was the imagined South Polar Continent – a giant Antarctica, that stretched much further north into the warm, habitable latitudes. They were not talking about New Holland (as Australia was then known). They already knew that New Holland was not joined to the South Polar continent, because Abel Tasman had sailed underneath it a hundred years earlier.

When the Royal Society asked for a navy ship to transport astronomers to the Pacific for the Transit, Stephens seized the opportunity to do some British exploration on the return journey and he nominated Cook to lead it.

Cook was politically astute. He understood that the purpose of a voyage of discovery was the advancement of human knowledge. He knew that most of his discoveries would be published by the Admiralty on his return. This would enhance Britain’s prestige, boost the government’s popularity and encourage taxpayer support for future expeditions.

But Cook also knew that he would make strategic discoveries that were too valuable to publicise. These included new sea lanes, shortcuts, offshore islands and deep harbours. All of these were vital for wartime battle and peacetime trade. Basically, this was Britain’s intellectual property and it had to be protected.

The only way to protect a valuable feature, short of occupation, was to use the age-old practice of cartographic secrecy.

The navigator had to conceal the strategic feature either by omitting it from his map, or by falsifying the coastline. In this way, he hoped to deflect foreign interest and buy some time, until his government could afford to garrison the place.

The Endeavor set off in 1768 and here I should quickly introduce Cook’s paying passenger – the rich, young, man-about-town, Joseph Banks – because he is my independent witness. Like Cook, Banks wrote a detailed and fascinating journal. But, unlike Cook, he wrote quite openly, free of the self-censorship acquired through age, and experience and naval discipline. Where Cook’s journal is silent on a matter, it is often Banks’s journal that supplies the crucial evidence that points to Cook’s deliberate error or falsification.

After seven months at sea, they arrived at Tahiti in good time to observe the transit of Venus. After that, the Admiralty ordered Cook to sail directly south to discover the Southern Continent. Cook knew he wouldn’t find the Polar Continent within the 40 degree limit he’d been given, but he obeyed anyway, because that’s what he did,

unlike most other navigators of the period. As expected, they only found mountainous seas and piercing gales and poor Banks was horribly seasick.

Next, Cook was ordered to turn west to New Zealand and sail round it – thereby proving that it wasn’t joined to Antarctica. Now Cook had completed his list of instructions and, after a year and a half at sea, everyone was ready to go home. Cook decided that, on the way, he would survey the east coast of New Holland.

Now we come to the problem of Bass Strait.

Many years ago, after a day’s sailing, a veteran of the Sydney to Hobart Race told me that he couldn’t understand how the great Captain Cook had missed Bass Strait when he was in it in 1770. In fact, he said Cook was probably a bit of a fool and poured us both another drink. The old sailor had a point. Either the great navigator was a bit of a fool, or he had fiddled his charts. Both possibilities amounted to heresy, but I decided to investigate.

Cook had done his homework before he left England and I think he guessed, from Tasman’s records, that Van Diemen’s Land was in fact an island. If so, it presented a problem. His experience in Newfoundland with the French, had taught him the danger of offshore islands. They could be used by your enemy to make trouble. So, if there was a strait here, Cook would conceal it by suggesting the island was a peninsula when he came to drawing his chart.

 He had already done this a month earlier in New Zealand, when he concealed Foveaux Strait and joined Stewart Island to the mainland.

The Endeavour sailed across the Tasman Sea, and Zachary Hicks sighted land at six o’clock in the morning in April 1770. Hicks had seen some unspecified hill in the hinterland behind Victoria’s south coast. In due course, he would receive his spotter’s prize of a gallon of rum, plus the honour of having some important landmark named after him.

Meanwhile, Cook thought he was in a strait, but he had to be sure and so he continued sailing west for two hours. By 8 am he was certain, so he quickly turned the ship around and headed back to Cape Howe and the east coast. He didn’t want to advertise the strait to the crew for any longer than was absolutely necessary. Sailors were poorly paid in those days and were known to sell information to foreigners.

Cook had resolved the question of the insularity of Van Diemen’s Land, and he would report this to the Admiralty on his return.

 But in the meantime, he had to conceal it in his documentary records. So, in his Journal, rather than write an outright lie, he told a riddle. He wrote that anyone who wants to know whether Van Diemen’s Land is joined to New Holland, should compare his journal with Tasman’s Journal and then make their own judgement! This was unusual waffle from the plain-speaking Yorkshireman. Still, it worked.

But Cook’s manipulation of his chart was even more ingenious. First, he invented a fictitious promontory of land extending twelve miles into the sea, and named it Point Hicks. He positioned it on Parallel of Latitude 38°S exactly, which also served as the bottom edge of his map. He then drew a false coastline from this fictitious Point Hicks, to Ram Head and on to Cape Howe, thereby drawing a curtain across any hint of a strait.

The result is a curiously unbalanced chart of Australia’s East Coast. At the top, it is rich with geographical context to the north and west of Cape York. But at the bottom, all the geographic context below Victoria’s south coast has been chopped off.

But again, it worked. It kept Tasmania safe from the French for 30 years.

This brings us to Cook’s next secret, Sydney Harbour. We are told that Cook barely noticed Port Jackson as he sailed past Sydney Heads after leaving Botany Bay. But this too was a coverup.

When Cook arrived at Botany Bay, he quickly realised that it was hopelessly inadequate for a naval port – too shallow, too exposed. Nonetheless, he anchored the ship off the southern shore of the Bay for the entire week of his visit and travelled about by rowboat and on foot.

At some point, he rowed across to the north shore of the Bay and walked the well-worn Aboriginal track along the coast, north to Bellevue Hill.

This was the same track used eighteen years later for social calls between the English officers of the First Fleet, and the visiting Frenchmen on Laperouse’s ships. It’s still called Frenchmens Road in Randwick – the oldest European-named road in Australia

From Bellevue Hill, Cook walked west along present day Oxford Street so that he could fully comprehend the vast waterway of Sydney Harbour. He immediately recognised its strategic value as a magnificent prize for the British empire. It had to be kept secret for the time being, so he didn’t record it.

Consequently, Cook’s overland walk can only be speculation, but there are several layers of evidence to show that it happened.

 The best documentary evidence is a memorandum written by Arthur Phillip before he left England with the Fleet in 1787. Here Phillip indicates that he already knows about the many islands in the Main Harbour, none of which can be seen from outside the Heads.

Then there is the Sherlock Holmes rule of evidence, used by lawyers:  Why didn’t the dog bark? If Cook had seen nothing better than Botany Bay, then why didn’t he investigate the other fine harbours that he passed as he sailed up the coast – Broken Bay, Newcastle, Port Stephens and Port Macquarie. As a naval officer on an unknown coast, he had a duty to do so. But Cook never entered any of them. He didn’t need to. He already had the prize he wanted and now he was going home.

His trip north was interrupted when the Endeavour hit the Great Barrier Reef. It was all hands to the pumps, including Joseph Banks, but he couldn’t keep it up, writing: “myself unused to labour, was much fatigued, and laid down to take a little rest”. Even so, they miraculously got back out to sea and eventually reached to top of Australia.

Note that at no point, when he was on the east coast, did Cook claim possession.

He had ample opportunity to do so: seven days at Botany Bay; seven weeks at Cooktown in Queensland. But the Admiralty’s instructions did not authorise him to annex New Holland, so he didn’t.

When he got to the top, he merely recorded that: “the Northernmost Promontory of this country I have named York Cape”, but he didn’t stop the ship, or plant a flag, or raise a glass, or otherwise celebrate. They all just wanted to get back home to some roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

And so, we come to the phantom possession claim.

The ship was heading west through Torres Strait, then veered southwards into the Gulf, to avoid some rocks. Cook was now using the old Dutch maps, festooned with Dutch place names, including the coast of Carpentaria, named after a governor-general of Batavia, Pieter de Carpentier. In the Eurocentric world of his day, Cook knew he was sailing through the domain of the Dutch East Indies.

The maze of islands obstructed any view of a clear passage ahead. So, Cook looked about for high ground and noticed a steep hill on a nearby island. He ordered the marines to row him across to it and invited the gentlemen – as he called them – to join him. Joseph Banks and his Swedish friend, Daniel Solander, always welcomed a chance to leave the ship so they could botanise.

After rowing to the island, the marines stayed down on the beach, while Cook, Banks and Solander climbed the hill. From the top, they were delighted to see a clear passage through to the “Indian Seas”. Down in the ship the crew were watching anxiously, hoping desperately that they wouldn’t have to back out and sail north around New Guinea, which would cost them many weeks. To allay their fears, Cook relayed the good news down to them by raising his small flag and firing his gun. The men recognised the signal and cheered long and loudly. Cook named this signal station “Passage Island”, returned to the ship and sailed on to Batavia – the big, cosmopolitan Dutch port at Jakarta.

It was here that Cook and Banks got the shock of their lives.

 They were told that the French explorer, Louis Bougainville, had crossed the Pacific a year ahead of them and made lots of discoveries. He had been near the east coast of Australia and may indeed have landed there. This was a political emergency for Cook, calling for swift, decisive action. He had to forestall a French claim.

Cook took a fresh piece of paper and drafted a new entry for 22 August, which was the day when he was on top of that hill in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where he had very few witnesses within earshot. He turned that signalling drill into a possession ceremony, writing unusually long and high-sounding prose, claiming the east coast “in the Name of his Majesty King George the Third”. Cook also changed the name of “Passage Island” to “Possession Island”. Next, he inserted the replacement page into a copy of his journal, bundled this up and sent it to Phillip Stephens in London on the next departing Dutch ship.

It was pure genius and it worked like a charm. No-one minded that our independent witness, Joseph Banks, who was standing beside Cook on that hill, did not record a single moment of any possession ceremony.

Instead, Cook’s fairy-tale became one of the great moments of the voyage. For 250 years, the French, and the English, have believed that James Cook claimed Australia.

Lying for the Admiralty is not an assault on Captain Cook, notwithstanding its arresting title. On the contrary, it is a tribute to the great navigator. It unpicks his maps and manuscripts, delving deep for the evidence that his so-called errors were in fact subterfuges, made in the national interest.

In the end, this book is about the race for Australia – and it was a close-run thing. Some historians have written that the French navigators were not interested in empire building; that they sought only scientific enlightenment for the greater good of mankind.

But that’s not true. Louis Bougainville did some pretty muscular empire building when he seized the Falkland Islands for France, using French-Canadian refugees as colonists.

. He had stolen George Anson’s idea of using the Falklands as a supply gateway to more ambitious ventures in the Pacific.

Someone was always going to seize this continent of New Holland and, for a while, it looked like the French – Bougainville preceded Cook; Laperouse arrived within days of the First Fleet; Napoleon sent Nicolas Baudin over here as soon as the news of the “official” discovery of Bass Strait reached Europe; Baudin’s cartographer produced a beautiful map of Australia, festooned with French place names, including a large swathe of country – stretching from Melbourne to Adelaide – labelled “Terre Napoleon”.

If France had got a foothold here, we may have had tastier croissants much earlier than we did.

But we would also have suffered that great Anglo-French carve-up which is still causing grief in parts of Africa and the Middle East and, occasionally, in Canada.

We are all luckier without that.