Sydney [antikvár]

Shades of the beginnings. A replica of the Bounty against the "sails" of the Opera House.SYDNEYHarbour city and the birthplace of a nationPHILLIP MATHEWSIT all began in 1770 when a small, bluff bowed, three-masted English barque approached the east coast of Aus-tralia. The Endeavour closed cautiously with the forbidding cliffs that characterise Sydney's rugged shoreline. The next day her commander, Captain James Cook, made a perfunctory entry in the ship's log: "At daybreak we discovered a Bay, and anchored under the south shore, about two miles within the entrance, in six fathoms of water, the south point bearing south east and the north point east " He was moored in Botany Bay, in the lee of the Kurnell Peninsula.The first European landing party that waded ashore foreshad-owed the greatest migration in history, a migration that built a splendid city, and a new nation.When Cook departed northward, he sailed past the imposing entrance to Sydney Harbour. His experienced nautical eye noted a likely protected haven, which he named Port Jackson.Back in Britain, the American War of Independence had curtailed Britain's transportation of convicts to her former colony. As a result her prisons had grown so dangerously overcrowded that Cook's voyage of discovery in southern latitudes offered a solution a remote and distant penal