Captain James Cook

I am indeed grateful to have your audience once again.

I shall get straight to the point. Because I am nothing if not precise. In fact, that is exactly why the admiralty selected me for the most important voyage of the 18th century - because I was meticulous in the extreme - which you can see from the detail of my maps and in the way I ran my ship.

And for my efforts I have been given the great honour of being immortalised in statue all throughout the empire. You’ll see that this one is now sporting a faint red x. I can’t tell you how it irks me - both because I am tidy by nature (I made my crew scrub the decks with vinegar daily to protect from germs) and because I feel I have been unfairly coloured as the villain of colonisation.

So if you could spare me a moment, there are a few things I’d really like to set straight. Firstly - the mission I signed up for was not to do with colonisation or discover - those orders were kept secret and only opened after the advertised mission (observing the transit of Venus near Tahiti) was complete. And secondly, I’ll have you know that my journals were deviously edited by Mr Banks prior to their publication. I had long been stabbed and dismembered by the Hawaiians when Mr Banks took it upon him to nearly re-write my adventures. He was, by then, a strong advocate for   colonisation, using his influence in the government to push for the establishment of a penal colony in Australia. And when you review his edits carefully, as some have done, you’ll see they way his changes were designed to smooth the way for colonisation. In one such example you can see he  very clearly minimised the sophistication of indigenous society that I had carefully observed.

And it might spoil things a bit if we also wrote here that discovering and adventuring really wasn’t my thing at all. Ordering. Tidying. Classifying. Oh, and mapping. That was my thing. I was a scientist. With a boat.

In fact, did you know that searching for the great southern continent wasn’t even on my original to do list? I was given a secret set of instructions sealed and with orders to open only after we had observed the sun crossing Venus in the southern sky.

I’m still not quite sure why it was such a secret. Myself, I prefer everything to be very detailed up front. Which you could see from my journals - great detail - except that by the time these were published they had received a very thorough edit from none other than Joseph Banks, the wealthy naturalist who paid to join my voyages. Mr Banks was a great advocate for colonisation and he adapted my journals to suit these purposes.