Captain James Cook first went ashore on the Australian continent at Botany Bay (in today’s Sydney region) on 29 April 1770.

Quick Scoop

  • Cook’s ship, the Endeavour , sighted the east coast of Australia around 19–20 April 1770, after sailing west across the Pacific.
  • The crew then followed the coastline north until they found a suitable anchorage at what Cook named Botany Bay, where they made landfall on 29 April 1770.
  • Later in the voyage, on 22 August 1770, Cook claimed the entire east coast for Britain as “New South Wales” from Possession Island in the Torres Strait.

Extra context and forum-style angle

In many casual discussions and older school texts, people loosely say “Cook discovered Australia,” but this ignores that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had lived across the continent for tens of thousands of years before 1770. Modern historians and Australian commentators increasingly emphasise that Cook’s 1770 landing marked the beginning of intensive British mapping and later colonisation of the east coast, rather than any true “discovery” of the land.

In forum threads, you will often see users correcting each other: Cook’s first landing was in 1770 at Botany Bay , while the later 26 January date relates instead to Governor Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, not to Cook at all.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.