The year is 1770. The ship H M Bark Endeavour has struck a reef. Her captain James Cook and his eighty-five companions are castaways on the shores of an unknown world. They are about to meet the locals, the Guugu Yimithirr people. This is the story of those seven extraordinary weeks in the words of the explorers themselves…. the story of the first breath in the birth of a nation.

The tour of the Cooktown Botanic Garden that follows takes you on a journey in which you will see the living specimens of the plants collected in 1770 by the naturalists on board Endeavour, Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander.