Cook: Lying for The Admiralty

How could Captain Cook, supposedly ‘the greatest navigator of his age’, have missed coastal features that even the dullest sailor would have discovered—features as obvious as Bass Strait? How could he have possibly sailed past Port Jackson? Surely that was a dereliction of duty when he had been specifically instructed to investigate such openings.

These ‘errors’ have marred Cook’s reputation as cartographer for 250 years. Re-examining Cook’s original journals and charts in forensic detail, Margaret Cameron-Ash makes the case that he didn’t miss these key coastal features at all. Rather, he obfuscated them, obeying secret orders from the Admiralty to hide discoveries of strategic importance from Britain’s rivals—in particular the French

About Lying for the Admiralty
After observing the transit of Venus in Tahiti, the Endeavour sails on through uncharted waters, racked by tension between Joseph Banks, who believes that a Southern Continent lies between South America and New Zealand, and Cook, who does not. Cook makes important discoveries in New Zealand and Australia, survives disaster on the Great Barrier Reef, and nurses his damaged ship to Batavia.

Throughout the voyage, obeying secret orders, Cook hides all his strategic discoveries. With a detective’s instinct, the forensic skill of a lawyer, and an eye for engaging detail, Cameron-Ash re-examines Cook’s original journals and charts with all their erasures, additions, omissions and fabrications. Richly illustrated with maps, portraits, ships, and landscapes, Lying for the Admiralty is a cartographical thriller that reveals Cook in a fresh light.

About Margaret Cameron-Ash
Margaret Cameron-Ash is a lawyer, a former visiting fellow at the University of NSW and the author of Supreme and District Courts Practice (1982, Law Book Co). After working and lecturing as a lawyer in Sydney and London, she widened her area of research to include early Australian history, with a special interest in cartography. She has published numerous papers about Captain Cook.