Incognita Unknown land. It is supposed that Australia s native inhabitants, the Aborigines, arrived in Australia at least 40,000 years ago. The first Europeans visited the shores of Australia in 1606. The Spanish ship of Luis Vaes de Torres sailed through the strait which now bears his name and separates Australia and Papua New Guinea.
In the same year the Dutch ship Duyfken Little Dove sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Among later voyagers is Dirk Hartog 1616, who left an inscribed pewter plate Australia s most famous early European relic, now in Amsterdam in Western Australia. Abel Tasman, Dutch navigator, visited Tasmania, which he named Van Diemen s Land, in 1642. The first Englishman to visit the continent was a buccaneer, William Dampier, who landed near King Sound on the northwest coast in 1699. A second wave of immigration began in 1770, when Captain James Cook, of the British Navy, sighted the east coast of the continent.
Cook had been sent to Tahiti to make astronomical observations and when his mission was completed, he sailed south in Endeavour, circumnavigated New Zealand and headed due west. On April 20, 1770, Cook sighted land near Cape Everard, in the southeast corner of Australia. He turned north, charting the coastline as he went and, 9 days later, landed at Botany Bay, which he named for the variety of botanic specimen found there.
He raised the British flag and claimed New South Wales as a British Colony.