After Dampier’s discoveries, something like sixty years elapsed before Cook appeared upon the scene, and it was not until his return to England that practical results seemed likely to accrue to any nation from the far-off land.  I shall not recapitulate Cook’s voyages; the first fitted out by the British Government was made in 1768, but Cook did not touch upon Australia’s coast until two years later, when, voyaging northwards along the eastern coast, he anchored at a spot he called Botany Bay, from the brightness and abundance of the beautiful wild flowers he found growing there.  Here two natives attempted to prevent his landing, although the boats were manned with forty men.  The natives threw stones and spears at the invaders, but nobody was killed.  At this remote and previously unvisited spot one of the crew named Forby Sutherland, who had died on board the Endeavour, was buried, his being the first white man’s grave ever dug upon Australia’s shore; at least the first authenticated one—­for might not the remaining one of the two unfortunate convicts left by Pelsart have dug a grave for his companion who was the first to die, no man remaining to bury the survivor?  Cook’s route on this voyage was along the eastern coast from Cape Howe in south latitude 37 degrees 30’ to Cape York in Torres Straits in latitude 10 degrees 40’.  He called the country New South Wales, from its fancied resemblance to that older land, and he took possession of the whole in the name of George III as England’s territory.

Cook reported so favourably of the regions he had discovered that the British Government decided to establish a colony there; the spot finally selected was at Port Jackson, and the settlement was called Sydney in 1788.  After Cook came the Frenchman Du Fresne and his unfortunate countryman, La Perouse.  Then Vancouver, Blyth, and the French General and Admiral, D’Entre-Casteaux, who went in search of the missing La Perouse.  In 1826, Captain Dillon, an English navigator, found the stranded remains of La Perouse’s ships at two of the Charlotte Islands group.  We now come to another great English navigator, Matthew Flinders, who was the first to circumnavigate Australia; to him belongs the honour of having given to this great island continent the name it now bears.  In 1798, Flinders and Bass, sailing in an open boat from Sydney, discovered that Australia and Van Diemen’s Land were separate; the dividing straits between were then named after Bass.  In 1802, during his second voyage in the Investigator, a vessel about the size of a modern ship’s launch, Flinders had with him as a midshipman John Franklin, afterwards the celebrated Arctic navigator.  On his return to England, Flinders, touching at the Isle of France, was made prisoner by the French governor and detained for nearly seven years, during which time a French navigator Nicolas Baudin, with whom came Perron and Lacepede the naturalists, and whom Flinders had met at a part of the southern coast which he called Encounter Bay in reference to that meeting, claimed and reaped the honour and reward of a great portion of the unfortunate prisoner’s work.  Alas for human hopes and aspirations, this gallant sailor died before his merits could be acknowledged or rewarded, and I believe one or two of his sisters were, until very lately, living in the very poorest circumstances.