but the brilliancy of the great navigator's fame will lose nothing by the truth, and the truth is that he never even saw the site of the first settlement in the Antipodes. What the name of Columbus is to America, that should the name of Cook be to Australia, and although Phillip and his transports can scarcely be compared with the Pilgrim Fathers and the Mayflower, yet, as the pioneers of settlement in Australia, the officers of the First Fleet ought to be remembered as colonisers, with something of the same admiration we have for those sturdy Puritan adventurers.
Leaving out of the story the Portuguese and Dutch explorations on the western coast of Australia, something of the eastern coast was known (although not to Englishmen) a couple of hundred years before Cook's voyage. But Cook surveyed it and made it British territory; and the publication of the narrative of his voyage suggested schemes for its colonisation. One James Maria Matra in 1783, thirteen years after Cook's return from his Botany Bay voyage, submitted a proposal for colonising the new territory with American loyalists. Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist who accompanied Cook, was, however, the man who not only had most to do with the matter, but until the day of his death in 1820 took the keenest interest in the colony's progress. Banks gave evidence before a Committee of the House of Commons which had been appointed in
