South Seas

South Seas was created by myself and Chris Blackall. I guess it’s now a historical artefact - illustrative of what two historians could do with meagre funding at a time when senior figures in the Australian historical profession were disinterested in realising the educational potential of the web.

It offers the full text of the holograph manuscript of James Cook’s Endeavour Journal held by the National Library of Australia, together with the full texts of the journals kept by Joseph Banks and Sydney Parkinson on the voyage. You will also find the text of all three volumes of John Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages undertaken…in the Southern Hemisphere…(1773). Volumes two and three of this work are an account of the Endeavour voyage fashioned by Hawkesworth from Cook’s and Banks’s journals.

These various fascinating historical documents are presented so that you can easily compare and contrast how the many remarkable occurrences on the voyage were interpreted by Cook, Banks and Parkinson. The are also accompanied by explanatory commentaries, short articles and reflective essays in the South Companion.

In order to help explain the complexities of eighteenth century and navigation, we provided the complete text of the 1780 edition of William Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine.

The version of South Seas is not what we put online in 2004. It is a new version - still under construction - in which the voyage maps have been changed from Flash to HTML 5. We always new Flash was a risk, but at the time there was no viable alternative by which to create interactive maps. If you want to see the original version, you will find it archived by the National Library of Australia.

As with the original South Seas, the site enables the discovery of historical images and rare maps relating to eighteenth-century voyaging in Australian and Pacific seas held by the National Library of Australia’s collections.