European maritime exploration of Australia
Cook's first expedition carried botanist Joseph Banks, for whom a great many Australian geographical features and the genus Banksia and a number of plant species e.g. Grevillea banksii were named. The reports of Cook and Banks in conjunction with the loss of England's penal colonies in America after they gained independence and growing concern over French activity in the Pacific, encouraged the foundation by the British of a colony at Botany Bay. The First Fleet led by Captain Arthur Phillip left England on 13 May 1787 to found a penal colony in Australia. It reached Botany Bay in mid-January 1788. Phillip had decided to move the settlement to Sydney Cove in Port Jackson, but the British ships were unable to leave Botany Bay until 26 January because of a tremendous gale.
History of Australia
The first known landing in Australia by Europeans was by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606. Twenty-nine other Dutch navigators explored the western and southern coasts in the 17th century, and dubbed the continent New Holland. Macassan trepangers visited Australia's northern coasts after 1720, possibly earlier. Other European explorers followed and, in due course, navigator Lieutenant James Cook wrote that he claimed the east coast of Australia for Britain when on Possession Island in 1770, without conducting negotiations with the existing inhabitants, though before his departure, the President of the Royal Society, one of the voyage's sponsors, wrote that the people of any lands he might discover were
'the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit. No European Nation has a right to occupy any part of their country, or settle among them without their voluntary consent. Conquest over such people can give no just title: because they could never be the aggressors.'