@coracle Thank you for your research! I hope you enjoyed learning about NZ

You're welcome and thank you for that valuable link which showed clearly how united the Māori people were in asking for this Declaration of Independence. It also confirms to me that though Captain James Cook did carefully circumnavigate New Zealand, to clear up Abel Tasman's Staten Landt mystery, and discovered the strait which still bears his name, he probably didn't claim New Zealand for Great Britain. I think, myself, people take far too much of what Captain Cook did do for granted.

According to The Encyclopedia of New Zealand which I consulted & linked to, Abel Tasman named the places he discovered Staten Landt, thinking it was part of South America. There is a chart attached to the article, which features Farewell Spit, wherever that is, but I won't reproduce it here, obeying the instructions beneath the chart. If you follow the links, you can see the chart & article, yourselves. Tasman's two ships were, of course, the Heemskerk and the Zeehaen.

Ever since 2023 it seems that Captain Cook gets blamed for a good many things, when he wasn't even the first Englishman to set foot on the territory which Abel Tasman called New Holland. That would be William Dampier and his buccaneer mates on board the Swan, in 1688. He came back later, in 1699, in the Roebuck to take another look at now Western Australia, & it seems, reached Shark Bay, or the Houtman Abrolhos, complaining in his diaries about the lack of water there. Both Captain Cook's cottage in Fitzroy Gardens, and the Hyde Park Statue in Sydney have been vandalised, just before 24/6/2024, and another one was vandalised in the Eastern Suburbs at the beginning of last year I think it was. 

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

Both Captain Cook's cottage in Fitzroy Gardens, and the Hyde Park Statue in Sydney have been vandalised

The massive irony about Cooks' Cottage (as it's now officially known) is that it never belonged to Captain James Cook at all, but to his parents — and it was built when their son was already an adult and well into his naval and exploring career, so he almost certainly never lived there himself, but presumably just visited his parents there sometimes.  

Yes, you are right. Captain James Cook was born in Marton in North Riding in Yorkshire. He was the second of eight children of a farm labourer. In 1736, his family moved to Airey Holme farm at Great Ayton, where his father's employer, Thomas Skottowe, paid for Cook to attend a school run by a charitable foundation. In 1741, after five years of schooling, he began work for his father who had been promoted to farm manager. In 1745, when he was 16, Cook moved 20 miles (32 km) to the fishing village of Staithes to be apprenticed as a shopboy to grocer and haberdasher William Sanderson. After 18 months, Cook, proving not suited for shop work, travelled to the nearby port town of Whitby and was introduced to Sanderson's friends John and Henry Walker.

The Walkers were prominent local ship-owners in the coal trade. From then on, his career was set. But when he had been a shopboy for a grocer, maybe that is how he got to take bottles of sauerkraut with him on his travels to New South Wales. I've linked to his Wikipedia biography, which tells us that on 21 December 1762, Cook married Elizabeth Batts at St Margaret's Church, Barking, Essex. She was the daughter of Samuel Batts, keeper of the Bell Inn in Wapping and one of Cook's mentors. When not at sea, Cook lived in the East End of London and attended St Paul's Church, Shadwell.

I found it interesting that Captain James Cook helped to seize the French Louisbourg fort in Nova Scotia, in 1758, whilst on the opposite side at Louisbourg, Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse, born on 23 August 1741 near Albi, France to a family which was  ennobled in 1558, participated in a supply expedition to the fort of Louisbourg in New France. La Pérouse also took part in a second supply expedition in 1758 to Louisbourg, but as it was in the early years of the Seven Years' War the fort was under siege and the expedition was forced to make a circuitous route around Newfoundland to avoid British patrols.

La Pérouse and Cook were to be connected in other ways, when La Pérouse was appointed in 1785 by Louis XVI and by the Secretary of State of the Navy, the Marquis de Castries, to lead an expedition around the world. Many countries were initiating voyages of scientific explorations at that time. The expedition's aims were to complete the Pacific discoveries of James Cook (whom La Pérouse greatly admired). But by that time, Captain Cook had died on 14th February, 1779. 

I've linked this post to Wikipedia entries for both Captain James Cook & La Pérouse, with a picture of when the latter was commissioned when I also need to correct the date from 1783 to 1785, as below:

Louis XVI, seated at right, giving Lapérouse his instructions on 29 June 1785. Louis XVI Giving His Instructions to La Pérouse by Nicolas-André Monsiau (1817). (Château de Versailles)

@waggawerewolf27
Thank you.
During my various times living in England I've stayed in Whitby, been quite amazed at the number of tributes or memorials to Cook (starting with a big painting on the wall of the dining room at the Youth Hostel where I stayed), and had a visit to Great Ayton (it was a very wet winter day, so my friends took me there briefly to get a few photos and a hot drink!) - saw the statue of young Cook, and his old school. 

At my own schools, by the way, we learned about Cook in Social Studies at both primary school and high school. One of our delights was to look at the facsimile of Cook's map of New Zealand inside the back cover of our primary school Atlas, laughing that he had mistaken Banks Peninsula (near our city) for an island, and Stewart Island for a peninsula. Considering that those are the only mistakes, Cook did very well.
At high school we celebrated the 200 years since Cook's first voyage to NZ, and learned more details about "Cook's Bicentenary". 

@coracle At high school, we celebrated the 200 years since Cook's first voyage to NZ and learned more details about "Cook's Bicentenary".

I should take a closer look at the other two voyages Cook made to the Pacific. What other visits did Cook make to New Zealand, other than that initial 1769 to 1770 circumnavigation? 

When I was in UK in 2009, we did visit the Maritime Museum at Greenwich, where there is a great memorial to General Wolfe in Canada, but at the time in the museum, itself, there was less mention than I expected of even Cook there, let alone Matthew Flinders, who gave Australia its current name. Perhaps they were just setting up the place at the time. Even in Buckingham Palace where we went as tourists, the thrones seemed more like glorified kitchen chairs, which in our 2012 visit, I accidently found stacked in a cupboard, when I got lost without the tourist's map in Kensington Palace. And when we got to the isle of Mull, in 1997, I wished we could have visited Governor Lachlan Macquarie's grave, there, but we had to make sure that we could catch the ferry to get back to the mainland for the rest of our visit. Unfortunately, in 3 visits, I never reached as far as Whitby, which I would have loved to see, not only because of Captain Cook, but also because of the old abbey at Jarrow, where the Venerable Bede, who determined Easter & BC to AD, was stationed until his 26/5/735 death.

Captain Cook did get to Tasmania on his 3rd voyage, but though he did explore further, it was mainly to pay a needed stopover to get water & wood, in 1777. Again, I don't think he claimed Van Diemen's Land, itself, for UK. I compiled some time ago, a list of visitors to southern Tasmania from Dufresne's 1772 visit to Lieutenant John Bowen's small August 1803 Risdon Cove settlement as below:

List of visitors to Van Diemen’s Land after Abel Tasman’s 1642 voyage

1. In 1642, Abel Tasman discovered the western side of the island & named it on behalf of the Dutch Republic. He sailed around the south to the east, landing at Blackman Bay and assumed it was part of the Australian mainland.
2. Between 1772 (Mark Joseph Dufresne, a French Privateer) and 1798, recorded European visits were only to the southeastern portion of the island and it was not officially known to be an island until Matthew Flinders and George Bass circumnavigated it in the sloop Norfolk in 1798–1799.
3. In 1773, Tobias Furneaux, in HMS Adventure, explored a great part of the south and east coasts of Van Diemen's Land and made the earliest British chart of the island. He discovered the opening to D'Entrecasteaux Channel and, at Bruny Island, named Adventure Bay for his ship.
4. In 1777, James Cook took on water and wood in Tasmania and became cursorily acquainted with some indigenous peoples on his third voyage of discovery. Cook named the Furneaux Group of islands at the eastern entrance to Bass Strait and the group now known as the Low Archipelago
5. In January 1793, a French expedition under the command of Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteauxanchored in Recherche Bay and a period of five weeks was spent in that area, carrying out explorations into both natural history and geography.
6. A few months later, British East India Company Captain John Hayes, with the ships Duke of Clarence and Duchess, resupplied with wood and water at Adventure Bay and explored and named the Derwent River and many surrounding features
7. From at least the settlement of New South Wales, sealers and whalers operated in the surrounding waters and explored parts of the Bass Strait area.
8. In 1802 and 1803, the French expedition commanded by Nicolas Baudin explored D'Entrecasteaux Channel and Maria Island and carried out charting of Bass Strait. Baudin had been associated, like Peyroux, with the resettlement of the Acadians from French Canada -- mostly from what is now called the New Brunswick–Nova Scotia area -- to Louisiana.  

NICHOLAS BAUDIN:

Around 1784–1785, Henri Peyroux de la Coudrenière, a serial entrepreneur in colonial schemes, wrote a "memoir on the advantages to be gained for the Spanish crown by the settlement of Van Diemen's Land" After receiving no response from the Spanish government, Peyroux proposed it to the French government, as "Mémoire sur les avantages qui résulteraient d'une colonie puissante à la terre de Van Diémen" but nothing came of his scheme.

In August 1803, New South Wales Governor Philip King sent Lieutenant John Bowen to establish a small military outpost on the eastern shore of the Derwent River to forestall any claims to the island arising from the activities of the French explorers.

I've removed some of the links I made for myself, so as not to overload the NarniaWeb site. Usually, I find it easier to do a subject search, when looking for information, but the links I have retained made it easier to retrace my steps as needed.