Just across the other side of Darling Harbour from our accommodation was the Australian National Maritime Museum. The Museum illustrates the earliest water craft such as canoes and the story of voyaging by Australia’s first peoples through to more modern vessels that are moored in the harbour outside of the Museum.
The Maritime Museum also covers the histories of the explorers who found and charted Australia such as the British Naval Officers Lieutenant Matthew Flinders and Lieutenant James Cook. It also covered the methods of how they navigated when calculating latitude (distance north and south) at sea which was relatively easy, but longitude (distance east and west) was much harder. This issue was so important that the British Government established a Board of Longitude in 1714 which offered large cash prizes for “such persons as shall discover the longitude”.
The longitude problem was widely recognised as an issue of keeping accurate time at sea. As the earth rotates through 15 degrees of longitude every hour, time comparison could be made with the time at a reference point. Greenwich in England was chosen as the reference location, but in the 1700s what clock could work accurately on a rolling sea? Clockmakers set to work and eventually John Harrison, who over his lifetime built five versions of marine chronometers (labelled H1 to H5), effectively won the Board of Longitude competition with the H4 version, a smaller sea watch. Lieutenant Cook used a copy of H4 on his second and third voyages to chart the southern Pacific Ocean and was full of praise for the watch.
There was a very interesting paper displayed in the Museum that set out Lieutenant Cook’s “secret instructions”.
In 1768, Lieutenant James Cook, who never actually got promoted to the rank of Captain although he is often call Captain Cook, commanded HMS Endeavour on a voyage to the Pacific. His mission was to go to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus. The British Admiralty also issued Cook with a second set of instructions which were to locate, chart and, if possible, claim possession of the southern continent that they believed was somewhere in the southern Pacific Ocean.
For this second part of his mission he did chart New Zealand and the east coast of Australia and, at the very end of Cook’s voyage along the east coast of Australia at Possession Island, he did claim possession of the continent for Britain despite his orders requiring the consent of any inhabitants, which presumably was not forthcoming.
After spending most of the day in the Maritime Museum, we returned to the other side of Darling Harbour to catch our boat for the Sydney Harbour evening dinner cruise.
The boat leaves Darling Harbour and goes under the Sydney Harbour bridge, past the Opera House, and makes a circuit over the next two to three hours so that, before and after dinner, one can enjoy the iconic views of Sydney.
The evening harbour cruise is definitely worth going on as it gives one a different perspective of the harbour, particularly after dark.
Copyright: Words and photos John Cruse 2025