Description
Artist Statement:
When the Yuin people first saw Captain Cooks Boat they thought it was a Pelican and had come to take their children. The Pelicans in Yuin culture are known as the thief.
The first voyage of James Cook was a combined Royal Navy and Royal Society expedition to the South Pacific Ocean aboard HMS Endeavour, from 1768 to 1771. It was the first of three Pacific voyages of which Cook was the commander. The aims of this first expedition were to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun (3–4 of June that year), and to seek evidence of the postulated “undiscovered southern land”.
The voyage was commissioned by King George 111 and commanded by Lieutenant James Cook, a junior naval officer with good skills in cartography and mathematics. Departing from Plymouth Dockyard in August 1768, the expedition crossed the Atlantic stopping in Hawaii and New Zealand before in April 1770 they became the first known Europeans to reach the east coast of Australia, making landfall near present-day Point Hicks, and then proceeding north to Botany Bay.
Captain Cook announced Terra Nullius; this is a Latin expression meaning “nobody’s land”. It was a principle sometimes used in international law to justify claims that territory may be acquired by a state’s occupation of it.
Size: 76cmDeep x 102cm Wide