Captain Cook Statue - Hyde Park South - Unveiled 25th February 1879 - Sydney - New South Wales

 

The Captain Cook Statue - Hyde Park - Sydney - NSW

The Captain Cook Statue Is In The South Of Hyde Park 
The Sculpture Stands On A Moruya Granite Pedestool. 
This Work Was Commissioned On The 26th September 1874 & Was unveiled To The Public On The 25th February 1879 
It Was Made By Thomas Woolner (1825 - 1892). He Was Born In Hadleigh, Suffolk, & Studied At The Royal Academy. He Travelled To Australia in 1852, & Went On To Have Limited Success On The Voctorian Goldfields. 
The Day Of The Sculpture's Unveilling Was Declared A Public Holiday In Honour Of Cook & The Monument. It Was Estimated That 12,000 Joined The Procession To Hyde Park & 60,000 People Attended. 

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954), Tuesday 25 February 1879, page 7

Captain James Cook RN - Birth - Wednesday October 27th 1728

 

Captain James Cook RN

Wednesday, October 27, 1728. :   Captain James Cook, who charted Australia's eastern coastline, is born. 

     James Cook was born at Marton in North Yorkshire, on 27 October 1728. He was the son of a farm labourer, and held no great ambitions, being apprenticed in a grocer/haberdashery when he was 16. Lack of aptitude in the trade led his employer to introduce Cook to local shipowners, who took him on as a merchant navy apprentice. Here he was educated in algebra, trigonometry, navigation, and astronomy, which later set Cook up to command his own ship.

After working his way up to positions of greater responsibility and experience, Cook was hired in 1766 by the Royal Society to travel to the Pacific Ocean to observe and record the transit of Venus across the Sun. Following this, Cook's next orders were to search the south Pacific for Terra Australis Incognita, the great southern continent that many believed must extend around the southern pole. He came across New Zealand, which Abel Tasman had discovered in 1642, and spent some months there, charting the coastline. Nearly a year later, Cook set sail west for New Holland, which was later to become Australia

Refloating The HMS Endeavour Off A Coral Reef - 1770

Refloating The HMS Endeavour Off A Coral Reef On The Great Barrier Reef 

1770