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The James Cook Heritage Trail

Cape Byron

Grade 4: While Cape Byron does not enjoy the same natural surroundings as some of Cook’s other landmarks, it provides commanding views of the coast and to Cook’s Mount Warning.

Situation: Byron Bay, New South Wales

Coordinates (decimal): 28.63 S 153.63 E

Endeavour Journal – 15 May 1770:

At Noon we were by observation in the latitude of 28.39 S and Longitude 206.27. Course and distance saild sence yesterday noon, North 6.45 East 104 Miles [this was an exceptional day’s sailing, more than twice the 50 miles usually covered]. A tolerable high point of land bore NwbW distant 3 Miles – this point I named Cape Byron (Latitude 28.37.30 S, Longde 206.30 West). It may be known by a remarkable sharp peaked Mountain [Cook’s Mount Warning] lying inland NWbW from it. From this point the land trends N 13 W.

Cape Byron is Australia’s most easterly point, follow the brown signs to the lighthouse as you enter Byron Bay. The lighthouse and the Cape attract many visitors who flock to this tourist town. There are great views along the coast, and fine walks in this area, including the 4km Cape Byron Walking Track. Looking into the jumble of hills to the north west, the improbable Mount Warning is the dominant feature.

Coastal views of Mount Warning and Cape Byron, Charles Praval, copied from a lost original probably by Sydney Parkinson, May 1770.

It was named after Commodore the Hon. John Byron (grandfather of the poet Lord Byron), the captain of Dolphin which completed a round the world voyage in 1764-6. An experienced and aristocratic naval officer, he was sent by the Admiralty to look for the Great South Land, believed to be in the Pacific Ocean, and to find the North West Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. He returned within 23 months, the fastest circumnavigation to date, having found almost nothing new in the Pacific and having ignored his instructions in both the far north and the far south.

Why would Cook commemorate such a man alongside the several other more senior and accomplished men with Admiralty connections that he had already named features for on this coast? Probably to acknowledge an earlier seeker of the Great South Land. Cook’s was the third of three voyages to the Pacific by the British Navy in the 1760s. Within one month of Byron’s return, Dolphin sailed again, with much the same brief, under the command of Samuel Wallis, son of a Cornish landowner. Wallis was also to disappoint the Admiralty. He returned on 20 May 1768, a few weeks before Cook’s Endeavour voyage departure, having found no Great South Land or NW Passage, though he did find Tahiti, which was chosen as the site for the Transit of Venus observations. By this stage of his voyage Cook would have realised that his own accomplishments to date would far eclipse the achievements of both Byron and Wallis; and that the Admiralty’s choice of him to lead the third expedition, a man of humbler birth and with far less command experience than either of them, and who was not even a naval officer when chosen, had been vindicated.