On this day in 1774 the Resolution raised a long, dry-looking coast in the southwest Pacific and Cook named it New Caledonia. The sighting was the easy part. What followed was a reef, and reefs do not care whose name is on the chart.
So: boats away, lead line swinging, soundings called back to the ship before she moved. Joseph Gilbert, the master, and his mates spent days finding a passage in, and the Resolution felt her way to an anchorage off Balade on the northeast side. They stayed roughly a fortnight, watering, wooding, and going nowhere quickly. Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg botanised ashore, and argued with everyone about the tall narrow columns on the skyline — pines, or rock? Pines, as the photograph below shows.
The crew were hungry and the country was dry. The Kanak people of Balade, among them a chief the journals record as Teabooma, brought water, fish, yams and sugarcane from a land that had little spare, and Cook noted that nothing was taken from his people the whole time. Fourteen days of careful anchoring, and the ones who kept the ship fed were standing on the beach.
William Hodges was aboard on that voyage, painting the coast from the deck, and his New Caledonia pines come out looking like basalt columns — a hand trained on rock meeting a tree it had no vocabulary for. The Forsters' argument is right there in the paint, Inés.
Araucaria columnaris, and the Forsters can be forgiven the argument: the tree grows dead straight to about fifty metres with barely any taper, and the ones on the islets lean slightly toward the equator, whichever hemisphere they stand in. Nobody has fully explained the lean yet. They are still called Cook pines.