Other accounts of Cook’s character and his first encounters with Australia’s Aboriginal people give a different emphasis. Historian Maria Nugent notes that while Cook had hopes of speaking with the local people, ‘what we also see are some wrong and perplexing responses’ – particularly his quickness to resort to violence and behaviour that would to them have seemed rude and ignorant – that made such a meeting impossible:

"At no time in the week did it seem likely that a[n] … encounter would occur. There had been too many faux pas, too much violence, too much misunderstanding for that to happen.^1"

In his journal, Cook at the time records:

"I thought that they beckon’d us to come ashore; but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us upon which I fir’d a musquet between the two  … one of them took up the stone and threw it at us which caused my firing a second musquet load with a small shott, and altho’ some of the shott struck the man yet it had no effect other than to make him lay hold of a shield or target to defend himself, immediately after this we landed which we had no sooner done than they throw’d two darts at us which obliged me to fire a third shott …^2"

In her account of the ‘birthplace of Australia’, historian Daphne Salt refers to the oral histories passed down through generations of the Dharawal people of the Botany Bay:

"When they saw a big white bird sailing into the Bay, that’s what was handed down to me, they saw this big white bird coming, these two Aborigines went down as a warning party to let them get the children and hide them. They stood their ground and the others were in the bushes – a back up to protect the family groups. On the rock stood two warriors, and there were about 30 marines. Two against thirty!^3" 

_Footnotes

_{1. Maria Nugent, Contextual History of Botany Bay, 2005, pp 19–31}

_{2. Journal of James Cook, 29 April 1770}

_{3. Daphne Salt, Kurnell: birthplace of modern Australia, 2000, p 18}