Enfilade

Rock Wallaby © Natural History Museum, London; Rainbow Lorrikeets © Natural History Museum; London, and Cook’s Map of Australia 1773

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From the museum:

Australian Encounters: Charting a Continent
Captain Cook Memorial Museum, Whitby, North Yorkshire, 1 March — 3 November 2014

Cook and his successors completed the chart of the continent’s coastline and marvelled at the strange new creatures they saw—’unlike anything encountered before!’ He and his crew navigated in unknown treacherous waters, where the ship was holed on a coral reef, and then had to be beached and repaired. The voyage, however, led to the choice of Botany Bay as the site of a new colony, starting a trail of immense change throughout Australasia. This year marks the bicentenary of the publication of the entire coastline, completed by Matthew Flinders in 1814.

The Captain Cook Memorial Museum is housed in an historic building on the harbourside: John Walker’s House. In 1746 James Cook, then a youth aged seventeen, came here to be apprenticed to Captain John Walker. A beautiful 17th-century house, this is the sole remaining building which can with certainty be connected to Cook.