Botany Bay

How Botany Bay got its name.

In April 1770, ‘Endeavour’ put to sea,

And left behind New Zealand shores

To set fair weather westward course

For in command Lieutenant Cook had hopes of great discovery;

(A southern continent as large as Europe lay in wait);

So Cook sailed on, as dolphins made

Their leaping, wandering friendship known,

The albatross soared overhead,

And Joseph Banks looked out his gun

To take the lumbering giant home.

 

The sixteenth day a sparrow came to rest upon the deck.

A gannet held a westward course,

The weather broke, a sudden squall

Cut out the light from straining sight as on they ploughed

Through restless seas

Until Lieutenant Hicks cried out upon the nineteenth day:

‘Land lies ahead, thank God,’ he said,

And stood towards the distant shore

‘Til fifteen miles from land so green

They turned aside, and ran along

This virgin country… Nevermore!

 

The wind and rain kept up their bitter, miserable attack,

And waterspouts were seen to rise

To merge with grey and dismal skies,

But soon it cleared, the land endeared to all by fertile, sloping hills,

And through the trees a wisp of smoke was curling softly up.

Then in the glass, dark men were seen,

The owners of this green expanse,

But still ‘Endeavour’ headed north

To pass the white of chalky cliffs that nature set down to entrance.

 

In April, on the 28^th., an opening in the cliffs,

‘Endeavour’ headed in for shore

And Cook in his excitement saw

The natives pulling fish in from

Their strange canoes of weathered bark

And huts set down at random, as if put there by a painter’s art.

But when they tried to row ashore

The natives menaced with their spears,

And though the odds were all against

It took a shot from Cook to set them running for their wooden shields.

 

Stingrays in the Bay, to Cook, bethought him most appropriate,

But Banks was charmed with plants and trees

And things pertained to botany.

The ghostly gums and gnarled young saplings

Braced against the gentle breeze

Kept Parkinson, the artist, sketching likeness as they stood.

So Cook said: ‘Feast your English eyes

And hoist the Union Jack, you see,

Upon our great New Holland prize,

For this,’ cried Cook, ‘must surely be

A wondrous Bay of Botany.’

 

David Lewis Paget