Tahiti is a tiny, isolated dot in the middle of the South Pacific, and Cook steered right to it using lunar navigation. Simply getting to Tahiti exactly when he said he would was unprecedented at the time. But Cook nevertheless accomplished some amazing feats of navigation. Seeing as how there was already an indigenous population, the expedition hardly “discovered” Australia and New Zealand. Cook did successfully sail to this continent, mapping (and claiming) much of New Zealand and the East Coast of Australia in the name of the crown. Cook, however, also had secret orders to continue South and West to search for a predicted Southern Continent. ![]() ![]() The hope was to use the transit to determine the distance to the sun, but it did not work. The official mission was to join a global network of observers studying a passage of Venus across the face of the sun. ![]() Waters notes, then Lieutenant Cook and the crew of HMS Endeavour set sail for Tahiti on July 21st, 1768. HMS Endeavour carried Cook to some incredible accomplishments-and failures.Īs historian D. The discovery coincides with the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first major expedition from the United Kingdom to chart and explore the South Pacific, which included the first recorded European contact with Australia. After decades of searching, researchers think they’ve finally found the wreck of eighteenth-century explorer Captain James Cook’s famous ship HMS Endeavour off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island.
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