Captain Cook and the Great Game, by Keith Windschuttle.
Author Margaret Cameron-Ash … confirms that Cook was not only a great man but a loyal English patriot who was not above preparing charts, log books and journals which, with the approval of the British Admiralty, provided misinformation to deceive the navigators of foreign powers. Cook was a player in what Rudyard Kipling later called the “Great Game” of spying and deception in the geopolitical rivalry among the European powers for maritime supremacy. …
Cameron-Ash demonstrates clearly how Cook discovered both Bass Strait and Foveaux Strait in New Zealand but deliberately misled readers by drawing maps that treated both Van Diemen’s Land and Stewart Island as peninsulas of the land to their north. His concern was that if these islands were known to be separated by straits from their adjacent mainlands, the French could repeat their previous tactics in the Atlantic at Newfoundland and the Falkland Islands and occupy them, thereby inhibiting British ambitions in the region. …
Her most dramatic claim is that, rather than barely noticing the existence of Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) on his way north from Botany Bay, recording in his journal that he sailed straight past its heads while two to three miles out to sea, Cook actually explored it closely over several days. He immediately recognised its strategic value and a magnificent prize for the British Empire. He kept its existence entirely to himself and the Admiralty. …
Cook had reason to distrust the loyalty and obedience of his crew to keep sensitive information confidential. Cameron-Ash says Richard Orton, Cook’s clerk and the very man who made copies of his journal for the Admiralty, later sold details of Cook’s voyage to East India Company captains. …
The biggest secret the Admiralty kept to itself, Cameron-Ash argues, was the naval value of Sydney Harbour, which she thinks Cook must have revealed in an interview with Admiralty Secretary Stephens after he returned home. She did not find this in any of Cook’s or Stephens’s papers but says the information was revealed by Arthur Phillip in letters to the Home Office before leaving Britain with the First Fleet in May 1787. Phillip said that if he found Botany Bay suitable he would locate his settlement there but, if not, he would “go to a Port a few Leagues to the Northward, where there appear’d to be a good Harbour, and several islands”.
Now, the only way anyone could know there were islands in Sydney Harbour was to either enter it by sea and go well inside, at least as far as Bradley’s Head, or else walk around the hills above its shoreline. None of its islands are visible outside the heads of the harbour, let alone from the Endeavour two or three miles out to sea, the sole vantage point given in Cook’s journal.
In a chapter she acknowledges is largely conjecture, Cameron-Ash argues that during the eight days he spent at Botany Bay, Cook’s journal is uncharacteristically vague about his own movements. She argues it would have been easy for him to walk several times along the six miles of Aboriginal tracks to Sydney Harbour. From high points on Bellevue Hill, Bondi Junction or Pyrmont Peninsula, he could have seen from the Heads to the Parramatta River.
Once he found what he wanted — better than even the famed harbour of Trincomalee in Ceylon — Cook set sail for home up the east coast of New Holland. He would definitely not show off his prize for his crew to see. Until Britain could protect it by planting a garrison on its shores, he would conceal it by omitting it from his charts. He never stopped to investigate any of the other fine harbours he later passed in the habitable temperate zone up the coast: Broken Bay, Newcastle, Port Stephens, Port Macquarie. “They surely required investigation after the shortcomings of Botany Bay,” Cameron-Ash says, but the Endeavour never entered any of them.
