Friday 22 August 2014

Aug 22 1770 - Cook Claims Useless Land For Britain

A post taking real life incidents from this day in history and my view of them as if they were happening today and what my honest view would have been then on that day ignoring hindsight or knowledge of how it ended.

After two years of sailing, Captain James Cook has landed in Australia, in a place he has named Botany Bay where he has stuck a flag in the soil and claimed it for Britain.
What the natives, who Cook described as 'very dark or black colour' thought as they watched some strange white man babbling away in a foreign language is anyone guess but i can imagine what King George III is thinking 'great, what we gonna do with a country half a world and 2 years away'?
In my mind when explorers discover new lands, they bring back riches and useful things like tobacco and potatoes, Cook has claimed a land halfway around the globe where the most outstanding feature is a bunch of very dark people.
All the religious people went off to set up colonies in New World so we can't send all them over there so thanks to Captain Cook we are lumbered with another piece of worthless land thousands of miles away that most travellers will die of scurvy getting to.
Cheers Jim.

1 comment:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...
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