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22 August 1770Reputable source · 2 sourcesDebated

James Cook charts the east coast and claims it for Britain, 1770

A possession ceremony on Possession Island that some historians doubt ever happened as described

On the timeline · around 22 August 1770 · European Contact and Cook's ClaimEuropean Contact and Cook's ClaimPenal Colony to FederationJames Cook charts the east coast and claims it for Britain, 17701725175017751800

Quick facts

Ship
HMB Endeavour
Location of claim
Possession Island, Torres Strait
Name given
New South Wales
Historiographical dispute
some historians doubt the possession ceremony occurred as Cook's journal describes it

What happened

Commanding HMB Endeavour, Lieutenant James Cook made landfall on Australia's east coast near Point Hicks in April 1770 and spent four months charting the coastline northward, including an eight-day stop at Botany Bay. On 22 August 1770, from the top of what he named Possession Island in the Torres Strait, Cook recorded in his journal that he hoisted English colours and, in the name of King George III, took possession of 'the whole Eastern Coast' from latitude 38 degrees south down to that point, naming it New South Wales. Some historians, including Margaret Cameron-Ash, have argued the ceremony as commonly described may be an embellishment added by Cook's editor John Hawkesworth, or a deliberate move to forestall a French claim; no Aboriginal account of the ceremony survives, and the claim was made without the consent, or apparent knowledge, of the people already living on the land.

Why it matters

The claim provided the legal basis the British used eighteen years later to found a colony at Sydney Cove, and Australian courts would treat the continent as terra nullius, land belonging to no one, until the High Court's 1992 Mabo decision overturned that doctrine. Aboriginal accounts recorded generations later directly dispute the passive picture painted in British journals: Kaurareg elder Waubin Richard Aken has said armed resistance, not surrender, was the community's actual response to the Endeavour's approach.

How we know

Cook's own journal entry for 22 August 1770 survives and is the primary source for the ceremony; the Australian Museum and other institutions have highlighted the gap between that account and Aboriginal oral history and the doubts subsequent historians have raised about whether the ceremony occurred as written.

Sources

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Part of a timelineHistory of Australia33 events · 65,000 years of the world's oldest living cultures, a penal colony's dispossession of them, and the reckoning still underwayView all →
James Cook charts the east coast and claims it for Britain, 1770 · History of Australia · SourcedStory