Posted by Toby A Inkster on 06/28/07 11:03

dorayme wrote:

> Yup, it is and it was the place Captain Cook first made land and
> saw native inhabitants of the continent.

It was named in honour of Sir Joseph Banks, the ship's lead scientist, who
specialised in botany, and collected and catalogued many thousands of
samples on the Endeavour voyage. It was, after all, supposed to be a
scientific expedition -- its primary aim was to observe the transit of
Venus from Tahiti.

The river flowing into Botany Bay is Cook River. It's a rubbishy little
stream.

Banks was also an amateur linguist and would try to learn bits of local
languages and help the Endeavour's crew to communicate with the native
population.

Banks was later President of the Royal Society and adviser to Kew Gardens.
He maintained a keen interest in Australia -- he was a great proponent of
the establishment of the British colony which grew to be New South
Wales[1], and kept correspondence with many of her governors; he received
deliveries of seeds and other specimens from every ship that returned from
the burgeoning colony; and he read with great interest the accounts of
early Australian explorers. He may well have returned to the continent,
but he was severely afflicted by gout for the last thirty years of his
life, and was wheelchair-bound for the last fifteen.

____
1. To this day, nobody knows whether NSW is supposed to be a new version
of South Wales, or a new southern version of Wales.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
[Geek of HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python/Apache/Linux]
[OS: Linux 2.6.12-12mdksmp, up 7 days, 14:09.]

Long-Awaited Zeldman Article
http://tobyinkster.co.uk/blog/2007/06/27/zeldman-in-time/

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