Charco Harbour

Godfrey Blunden

Regular price $34.95 Sale

Format: paperback
Edition: First published in 1968 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson
434 pages
ISBN: 9781920897024

Publication: 01 Dec 2003
Series: Classic Australian Works
Publisher: Sydney University Press

Charco Harbour is the story of Captain James Cook's first Pacific voyage in 1768, a journey into a world to which Europeans had never been and reported back before. A journey that leads to shipwreck at Charco (near what is now Cooktown in Queensland). At a time when Australia was still terra incognita, a man like Cook could be one of the world's great navigators, yet still full of human failings. This closely researched book is a warts and all portrait of the man who first mapped the great southern land.

Prologue to Discovery

On laying down a coast
On the psychology of ships
On the hazards of sailing
On the curse of shoal waters
On the consequences of being neaped
On a different sort of people
On the want of victuals
On the hand of providence