This chapter analyses colonial botanical collection to reveal the role of non-elite collectors and Indigenous interlocutors in providing knowledge that underpinned British science. The Endeavour brought the new taxonomy of Carl Linnaeus to the Southern Hemisphere. Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and Sydney Parkinson recorded findings and took over 30,000 plants back to London, many of them viewed for the first time by Europeans swept up in the rage for botany. Knowledge production after James Cook’s first voyage was exponential, and it had both scientific and territorial consequences. New kinds of scientific writing also emerged from the controversial publication of Parkinson’s journal, and scientific bodies used innovative magazines to broaden access to and public support of science in the service of empire. Reliable collectors in the settler colonies worked with Indigenous collaborators to identify novel plant and animal materials, and send them to Britain. These included George Caley who worked with the Eora youth Daniel Moowaatin. The history of colonial science was informed by diverse participants, interests and motivations, and it changed how field work was conceived and scientific authority was established.

There is a wealth of literature on Antarctic research. Many overviews on the nature of Antarctica, cartography, its geology and glaciation, inhabitants and visitors, and cultural perspectives have been published recently.1 The first history of polar exploration of Europeans was published in 1756.2 Since then, many more Western historical overviews have been published, and we also have a chronological list of expeditions to Antarctica as well as good coverage in encyclopedias.3 In addition to these publications, there are several studies of the significance of ice and the development of natural sciences in the understanding of the physical nature of Antarctica. There are also some important recents works on the history of science which have not been fully integrated with the histories of exploration and discovery.

This chapter traces the spectacular growth of Christianity in the Philippines, Polynesia (including New Zealand), contrasting with the extreme racist attitudes towards the Australian aborigines and the much slower growth in Melanesia.

The First Voyage of Captain Cook on the Endeavour is often seen as inaugurating a new kind of scientific expedition in which ships functioned both as the primary instrument for the production of global maps and as floating natural history laboratories in which information concerning indigenous people, plants, and animals extended across the globe. This chapter examines the intellectual links between these forms of colonial knowledge-making by discussing the manner in which they first came together in Canada in Moses Harris’s Porcupine Map (1750). The map provides the first published illustrations of Canadian insects; it is also one of the last maps to include representations of indigenous flora and fauna. The task of visualizing global natures would be taken up by the descriptive technologies of natural history. As Cook and Banks were renaming the landforms and biota of the South Pacific, the Hudson’s Bay Company was mapping places and animals, drawing on the knowledge and names provided by indigenous peoples. Although the indigenous understanding of places and animals underwent erasure, these early maps and natural histories are valuable for voicing both European conceptions of new and unfamiliar places and natures and those of indigenous peoples.

The stories of the Dreaming tell of beginnings that are both specific and general. They narrate particular events that occurred in particular places, but those events are not fixed chronologically since they span the past and the present to carry an enduring meaning. By contrast, the story of the second settlement is known in minute particularity. It began with a voyage of eleven vessels that embarked with a cargo of 582 male prisoners, 193 females and fourteen children, the first of 681 ships that transported 163,000 convicts over eighty years. The First Fleet landed in Botany Bay in January 1788 then sailed to a cove of Port Jackson, now central Sydney. Here the British flag was hoisted as the commander, Captain Arthur Phillip, took formal possession of the new colony. We do not have the direct testimony of those Aborigines who dealt with the first European newcomers, and cannot recapture how they understood their usurpation. We can only infer how they interpreted the violation of sacred sites, destruction of habitat, the inroads of disease, and their growing realisation that the intruders meant to stay. This encounter could only be traumatic

How and when did Australia begin? One version of the country’s origins – a version taught to generations of school children and set down in literature and art, memorials and anniversaries – would have it that Australian history commenced at the end of the eighteenth century. By the end of the twentieth century it was no longer possible to maintain the fiction of Australia as terra nullius, a land that until its settlement in 1788 lacked human habitation, law, government or history. The growing recognition of this vastly extended Australian history spoke to late-twentieth-century sensibility. It revealed social organisation, ecological practices, languages, art forms and spiritual beliefs of great antiquity and richness. The second version of Australian history, the one that begins not at 1788 in the Western calendar but 50,000 years or more before the present, is at once more controversial, more rapidly changing and more compelling.

I argue that imperial agents treated legal concepts as a resource rather than a script for claiming possession of overseas territories, and did so in order to make vague claims to legitimacy vis-à-vis their imperial rivals rather than make strictly legal claims. I have found no evidence to suggest that James Cook claimed possession of New Holland on the grounds of terra nullius, res nullius or occupation. It is more likely that Cook relied upon two other legal concepts: discovery and possessio. Cook’s claim-making was primarily done with a European audience in mind rather than a local one, that it was concerned with staking a preliminary claim, and that his claim-making did not determine how questions about sovereignty or title in land were to be treated later. We need to focus on the sequence of events that began with the encounters between Cook’s party and the Aboriginal people, and the perceptions that Cook and Banks subsequently formed of the natives. After the colony was planted, the British government never saw any need to negotiate with the local people for cession of sovereignty or the purchase of land because it was relatively well-armed and encountered no powerful rival sources of power.