The secret story of James Cook’s arrival in Cooktown
How a little-known story of an encounter between Captain Cook and an aboriginal elder marks the true birthplace of the Australian nation.
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HE IS KNOWN simply as Little Old Man. His eyes blaze like hot charcoal in the glowing embers of a fire. “My heart is pure,’’ says the Guugu Yimithirr elder, holding two parts of a broken-tipped spear of peace.
He takes his finger, puts it under his armpit, runs it through his mouth and blows into the air. Blows it into my face. He does it again. His fingers collect the sweat, he passes it into his puckered lips, and casts the potion like a spell, fingertips twinkling, eyes shining.
I’m stunned.
I must admit I did expect the usual pungent funk of a human armpit on a steamy tropical day. But this was an odourless jolt. “It’s called ‘ngaala ngundaamay’,” says Aboriginal man playing the role.
I’m standing with him on the windswept banks of the Endeavour River (Waalumbaal Birri) at Cooktown, 330km north of Cairns, backlit by the sunset.
Waymbuurr clan leader Fred Deeral is a direct descendant of the first and only Aboriginal leader to broker peace with the then-lieutenant James Cook.
In an act of reconciliation, the Little Old Man, his name Ngamu Yarrbarigu, an initiated elder chosen by the 32 clans of the Kuku Yalanji tribal nation, walked forward with his broken-tipped spear in 1770.
He performed the same ritual, blowing his sweat into the air, calling for protection and peace, at this very same site 250 years ago.
“Taking from under the armpit is giving you a safe feeling of being here,’’ Deeral, his body painted for the ancient ceremony, tells me.
“It makes anyone’s heart clear. It gives you a pure heart and mind.’’
I find it hard to explain how, whether magic, his intense eyes, or the primal ritualistic act, but it’s true, the gesture does gild the soul. Cook recognised it, too.
Unbeknown to the great English explorer and navigator, Cook could not have picked a safer place to beach his coral-struck ship Endeavour for repairs.
This site was neutral territory for the rival clans, a safe haven where they came to settle disputes; where ceremonies and initiations were performed; women came to give birth; and conflicts settled.
No blood was to be deliberately spilt here. He’d landed in the moral equivalent of Switzerland, a tiny patch of peace and love. Anywhere else and Cook’s legacy might have been skewered on the spot.
“This is where we had first contact with Bama, [the local indigenous word for] my people, and the Europeans,’’ says Deeral, 50, his hand waving over the river mouth.
Opalescent waters ripple out of the mighty river into the Coral Sea. To the north, the play of golden light spills over white sand dunes, beaches, and towering headlands.
“This was the site of the first act of reconciliation, initiated by our mob,” he says.
“It’s coming up to 250 years now. We’re very proud of our shared history.
“This is sacred ground for all Australians, a special place for whitefella and blackfella. It is a time of celebration.
No place, here, to protest. We don’t want that nonsense. This is neutral territory.
“Think of what Cook went through to get here.”
A reef such as he spoke of is scarcely known in Europe, it is a wall of coral rock rising almost perpendicular out of the unfathomable ocean.
“All the dangers we had escaped were little in comparison of being thrown upon this Reef where the Ship must be dashed to pieces in a Moment.”
– The journal of Captain James Cook.
*PLEASE NOTE: Original spellings from journal entries retained.
Cook was fuming, his crew mutinous.Cook’sclerk, attacked as he lay drunk in bed, had both his ears partly cut-off.
This “very extraordinary affair” was “the greatest insult that could be offer’d to my authority”, Cook wrote in his journal.
Joseph Banks blamed, in part, the “wrathful militia” of prickly caterpillars, biting ants, and bloodsucking “Musketos” they’d encountered.
“Here begun all our troubles,’’ wrote Cook, aged 42, on their way north after they had landed at Botany Bay in April 1770.
On a clear moonlit night, on 10 June 1770, the HMB Endeavour “Struck and stuck fast” on coral on the Great Barrier Reef, 15 miles offshore at a point he had earlier named Cape Tribulation on the far north Queensland coast.
“Its sharp points and grinding quality … cut through a ship’s bottom almost immediately,’’ wrote Banks, 27, a close friend of King George III, and the naturalist who funded the voyage’s scientific team at a cost of 10,000 pounds.
Unable to wrench the 30m ship off the coral by dropping anchors and winding them up with capstan and windless, Cook ordered the ship be lightened in the hope it might float off the reef on the high tide.
Fifty tonnes in all was dumped overboard – his men toiled through the night offloading six cannons and carriages, pig iron and stone ballast, water casks and food stores.
When the ship finally did spring free, Cook’s worst fears materialised as water flooded into the hold through the gashed hull.
“This was an alarming and I may say terrible Circumstance and threatened immidiate destruction to us as soon as the Ship was afloat,’’ Cook wrote.
*PLEASE NOTE: Original spellings from journal entries retained.
They manned the pumps and “not an oath was uttered” in a desperate bid to stay alive.
“Fear of death now stared us in the face,’’ Banks wrote.
“I intirely gave up the ship and packing up what I thought I might save prepard myself for the worst.”
Most aboard the Endeavour could not swim and, a long way from land, drowning seemed preferable to staying alive and trying to survive on the coast.
“We well knew that some, probably the most of us, must be drowned,’’ Banks wrote.
“A better fate maybe than those who should get ashore without arms to defend themselves from the Indians or provide themselves with food.
On a country where we had not the least reason to hope for subsistance.”
In a makeshift fix, the sinking ship was fothered by hauling a sail covered with a sticky mix of oakum, wool and sheep’s dung over the outside of the hull, to plug the damage. For two days, trapped in a cul-de-sac of coral-studded shoals, the leaking ship was battered by fierce winds and rough seas as Cook sought refuge.
“Nothing but a lock of Wool between us and destruction,’’ Banks wrote.
In a lucky break, Cook later discovered a huge chunk of coral had snapped off and corked a large hole. Without it, the ship may well have sunk.
But his biggest piece of good fortune was to come, a week later, when the Endeavour limped into a narrow river mouth, 65km north.
“I went myself and buoyed the channel which I found most suited to our needs and there was nowhere in our entire voyage that would have afforded us the same comforts,’’ Cook wrote.
He moored for repairs on the southern bank of Waalumbaal Birri, now Endeavour River, and the site of modern-day Cooktown.
Banks thanked the gods. “The meeting with so many natural advantages in a harbour so near us at the very time of our misfortune,” he wrote, “appeared almost providential.”
On June 17, 1770, the ship’s stores and livestock including chickens, ducks, pigs and the ship’s goat were offloaded, tents set up, military order kept, and four days later, the ship was hauled ashore.
It was to become home to Cook and his 85 crew for almost two months.
Skipper Fred Burnett, 57, fixing his mackerel boat the Saffron at almost exactly the same spot 250 years later, shakes his head in admiration.
“I’m amazed Cook made it this far,’’ says the Cooktown local, grinding away at the antifouling on his 30-foot steel-hulled vessel.
“Up here, the inner reef narrows into a bottleneck, it’s a minefield of coral and rocks. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, full of razor blades and rocks. To only have a prang once, in all of that epic voyage, is amazing.’’
The 30-year veteran of the fishing industry, who works solo for up to four months at a time in the waters between Cooktown and the Torres Strait, is in awe of Cook.
“No charts, no electronics, no GPS plotter,’’ says the skipper. “Just a sextant, and lead line soundings. I take my hat off to them fellas.’’
Nearby, the Cooktown markets are in full swing, with live music, tents selling bric-a-brac, jars of pickles and jam, and fake stuffed crocodile heads.
Out on the calm water of the inner harbour, a flotilla of live-aboard yachts, cruising catamarans and working fishing boats is anchored.
Within sight is a statue of Captain James Cook (1728 – 1779) commissioned by BP Australia as a Bicentennial gift to the people of Cooktown, unveiled on June 25, 1988.
It reads: “Commander, H.M.B ‘Endeavour’ which was beached and repaired near this site 17 June – 4 August, 1770. He left nothing unattempted.’’
Cooktown locals and historians argue it is here, not Kurnell in Sydney’s Botany Bay, where Cook landed in April 1770, that is the true birthplace of the modern Australian nation.
There’s no denying Cook is a divisive figure.
Australia Day marks the anniversary of the First Fleet arriving in Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788.
Australia Day has now been labelled “Invasion Day” by many, with calls by some indigenous leaders to change the date.
The 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival comes at a time when recognition of indigenous people in the Constitution is still being hotly debated.
John Maynard, an adjunct professor of history at Newcastle University and Worimi man from the eastern Port Stephens and Great Lakes regions of coastal NSW, says Cook “is still at the top of the heap of the historical bogeyman”.
In his essay, “I’m Captain Cooked”: Aboriginal perspectives on James Cook, 1770-2020, Maynard wrote how Cook unleashed “cataclysmic consequences” when he raised the British flag on Possession Island in the Torres Strait.
Cook is burned into Aboriginal consciousness as to blame for shooting people, raping their women and taking the land, he wrote.
“Whether he deserves this monster mantle is open to conjecture and challenge from wider non-indigenous Australia, but from an Aboriginal perspective Cook remains the scapegoat for white invasion.”
Historian Mark McKenna, a prize-winning author familiar with the story of the Little Old Man, says the Guugu Yimithirrs’ decision to reconcile with Cook transcends time and place.
“Both local and national in resonance, it transforms Cooktown from a frontier town to a place of community and national rebirth,’’ he says.
In a new book to be launched in April, East Coast Encounters 1770, reflections on a cultural clash, the Sydney University professor slams some of the 250th anniversary plans as a “stunt” and “ultimate insult to indigenous Australians”.
“All of this at a time when the Commonwealth government is yet to respond adequately to the Uluru Statement from the Heart and find a way forward on the issue of constitutional recognition,’’ McKenna writes.
“The shared telling of Cooktown’s founding moment is one guiding light.
As the ways of remembering Cook’s landings have changed over time, he has become much more than the embodiment of modernity, invasion and dispossession – he is also the promise of peace and reconciliation.
“Cook can be lionised, misrepresented and reviled but he can never be banished from Australia’s historical consciousness. We stand forever on the beach with him.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the member for the Sydney electorate of Cook, knew he was sailing into rough waters when he headed north to Cooktown this time last year to announce the almost $7 million plan to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage to Australia and the Pacific.
Morrison met with Fred Deeral and other clan members at Cooktown’s Reconciliation rocks to detail a “sensitive” 14-month circumnavigation of Australia by a replica of the Endeavour. The Australian National Maritime Museum’s replica sets sail from Sydney on February 24 and will make 39 stops around the country and host events including Cooktown’s beloved Discovery Festival on July 24-26.
It “would be managed sensitively, and will present both the view from the ship and the view from the shore of Cook’s historic voyage”, he said. “We can’t crab-walk away from our history.”
But he quickly had to reframe his words when it was pointed out Cook only sailed along the east coast of Australia and it was Matthew Flinders who was the first Brit to circumnavigate the continent in 1802.
Last year Morrison tweeted an Australia Day video saying “we must come together” on January 26 because on that day “Australia did change forever.”
In his video, Morrison acknowledged Australia’s indigenous past, explaining that we have a shared future.
“As the 250th anniversary nears we want to help Australians better understand Captain Cook’s historic voyage and its legacy for exploration, science and reconciliation,” he said.
“That voyage is the reason Australia is what it is today.”
Morrison suggested Cook was the “inspiration” for Star Trek’s Captain James Kirk, citing the narration at the start of the science fiction television series “to boldly go where no man has gone before”.
Cook’s journals show he wrote his own famous lines after a trip to Newfoundland: “Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for man to go”.
How did Cook, the master mariner, the navigator, explorer, cartographer, the first to accurately chart the east coast of Australia, become Cook, the invader?
Why has his visit become so reviled? Cooktown locals blame the spotlight of the “History Wars” – the ongoing debate over the interpretations of British colonisation – have shone on the indifference and hostility of local tribesmen in Cook’s brief encounters in Botany Bay.
“Warra Warra”, the words yelled at Cook and his men by the indigenous warriors of the Gwygal tribe, the British colonisers would later discover meant “go away”.
“Neither words nor action (could) prevail upon them to come near us,’’ Cook wrote in his journal.
“Alone and unarm’d” he followed 10 armed Aboriginal men along the shore, but even this gesture got no response. “All they seem’d to want, was for us to be gone.’’
Proud Guugu Yimithirr woman and Cooktown historian Alberta Hornsby says it was a very different story when Cook and his men encountered her mob on the banks of Waalumbaal Birri.
She wants the little-known story and lost opportunity of Cook’s rapprochement with a tiny Bama elder who offered him the broken-tipped spear of peace to loom large in our national conscience.
It is simply unfair to blame Cook for the brute hand of oppression and bloody violence that would put a chokehold on race relations in colonial Australia, she says.
“There are too many warts growing on Cook,’’ the Aboriginal elder says.
She’s sitting on a plastic chair in the boat shed, home to the Cooktown Re-enactment Association, on the main street of town with friend and fellow historian Loretta Sullivan. There’s a curio collection of spears, paintings, portraits and a model of the Endeavour in a glass-cabinet in the one-room weatherboard building.
“Cook was just a man, he had a job to do,” the 65-year-old elder, born in the Aboriginal mission of Hope Vale, north of Cooktown, says.
“His was a time of enlightenment and scientific discovery, it was a world of wars, supremacy of the seas, and a race of Empires.
What happened here should be a lesson to us all.’’
When she was growing up, the story of Cook and Botany Bay was taught at school.
But there was little connection made to the 48 days interacting with her ancestors, sharing 130 documented words, collecting flora and fauna on the Endeavour River.
“This was where our Bama initiated the first contact, the first of six encounters,’’ she says. “Kangaroo, called Gangurru in our language, was first sighted, shot, eaten, named and drawn right here. Flying fox, dingo, possum and crocodile, were also recorded here.
“I want justice too, and I want it acknowledged my people were not savages, or lesser people, but a law-abiding, hospitable people, rich in custom.”
Up at the James Cook Museum, opened in an ex-convent by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1970, indigenous project officer Harold Ludwick, 50, sits on a jettisoned cannon reclaimed from Endeavour Reef. Trouble started, he says, when Cook’s crew took a dozen big sea turtles to reprovision the patched-up Endeavour before again setting sail.
It was out-of-season for turtles and offended the Bama men, who encircled the onshore camp with a bushfire.
Cook took a musket and shot one Aborigine in the leg, non-fatally, as tribesmen with spears and marines with muskets squared off on the edge of the mangroves.
Tension was broken when the wiry little elder performed the conciliatory rite, “ngaala ngundaamay”.
Banks wrote: “A Little Old Man now came forward to us carrying a lance without a point.
“He halted several times and as he stood, employed himself by collecting moisture from under his armpits with his finger which every time [he] drew through his mouth.’’
Cook wrote how he handed back some collected spears “which reconciled everything”.
That night the hills all around were lit up in flames and the sky turned blood-red.
It was a spellbinding sight to behold.
“No Indians came near us at all but the hills about us for many miles were on fire and at night made the most beautiful appearance imaginable,’’ wrote Banks.
But, for the Bama, it was a spiritual cleansing of blood spilt on the sacred neutral ground.
“We believe this was the first recorded act of reconciliation in Australia’s history,’’ says Ludwick, a Guugu Yimithirr man.
Cook, more sensitive to his fellow man than some give credit, wrote of the Aborigines in one of his most extraordinary passages.
“They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition.
“The Earth and Sea furnishes them with all things necessary for life. They seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them. This in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life.”
When we finish our photo shoot with Deeral and two local men dressed as Cook and a marine with a musket, who will all appear at the Discovery Festival Re-enactment in July, I share a cold can of Coke with him and Hornsby.
“You could’ve got me a beer,’’ laughs Deeral.
They tell me the Dreamtime saga of the creatures that carved this riverscape.
How a black bird called Dyirimadhi threw a rock at the scrub python, Mungurru, and the giant snake wound down the hills to the sea, carving the serpentine path of the Endeavour River.
“You can still see the head of the snake,’’ says Hornsby, pointing out the feature.
“This Australia Day, 250 years on, we don’t want anyone to throw rocks at our shared history.
“It’s disrespectful. Our traditional owners will not let it happen.
“We as a community, black, white and yellow, are all trying to survive. We want our children to share it, enjoy it and work together. Our legacy is what we’ve all learnt about how to forgive and be at peace. How we can all move forward.”
Deeral gives a wave, and a wink, and is gone. Dusk settles into an endless, starlit sky.
*PLEASE NOTE: Original spellings from journal entries retained.
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