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continent. It would be another thirty years before Banks’s protégé Matthew Flinders managed to circumnavigate what came to be called Australia, thereby demolishing the ancient myth of an enormous landmass covering the South Pole which had lain behind Cook’s secret orders.* Joseph Banks’s first impressions of the new continent were odd. He thought ‘the countrey … resembled in my imagination the back of a lean Cow, covered in general with long hair’. But his ideas about the place improved after Captain Cook put into a bay where the crew caught a lot of stingrays and Banks could go ashore, foraging for specimens. He returned with such an abundance of previously unrecorded leaves and flowers that Cook named the anchorage Botanist Harbour, which later became Botany Bay. Nine years later, when called before a parliamentary committee grappling with what was to be done about the bursting state of Britain’s prisons, Banks advised that the continent’s fertile soil, mild climate and absence of fierce wild animals made it ripe for use as a penal colony.

It was the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 which had brought the prisons issue to a head. The American colonies had long been a dumping ground for British criminals – selling offenders as labourers for the term of their sentence was a great deal cheaper than paying to accommodate them in prisons. When the colonies refused to accept any more convicts, the government simply locked them up on derelict ships moored in the Thames or off the English south coast. The hulks were clearly not a long-term solution, yet the drift of population into the growing cities and the rising cost of food ensured a steady stream of new inmates. When gangs of soldiers discharged from the army after the American war turned to crime, the need to find some alternative became urgent. There was talk of a penal colony in Africa* – a new cargo for the first leg of the triangular trade. New Zealand was ruled out because the Maoris were said to be too fierce. Canada did not want riff-raff. Pilot-schemes for Honduras and Newfoundland failed. New South Wales, on the other hand, offered the advantage of being a very, very long way away and, as for the indigenous people, they were nomadic and would soon wander off somewhere else.

In January 1788, the first consignment of over five hundred male and nearly two hundred female felons arrived in Australia, aboard eleven vessels. The scenes that occurred when the previously segregated men and women came together after the best part of a year at sea may be imagined: on the first Sunday, the mission’s commander, Captain Arthur Phillip, preached a sermon in which he heartily extolled the benefits of marriage. Many of the first white settlers took his advice. Over the following eighty years a further 161,000 convicts arrived in Australia.

Because he was born in the county, Captain Cook is generally included in most lists of famous Yorkshiremen. Yet his father was not English, and Cook might almost as easily stand for the new nation which was stamping itself upon the world. The British Empire was the creation of ‘Britain’. But much of it was made by Scots.

A century earlier, as they watched the English accrue wealth and status from their overseas possessions, the Scots had begun to chafe at the unfairness of it all. The far edges of the Atlantic already nourished a New England. New France stretched from Canada towards the Gulf of Mexico. New Spain was governed by a viceroy in Mexico. Where was the New Scotland? Nova Scotia had not been a roaring success, King James only persuading socially ambitious Scotsmen that it was a worthwhile destination by the age-old expedient of promising honours – baronetcies in this case – for those who would export a few settlers there. Scotland – or the Edinburgh Establishment – yearned for more.

Cometh the hour, cometh William Paterson, who in 1696 persuaded the worthies of Scotland that he had just what they needed, in a plan for a ‘New Caledonia’ at Darien, on the thin strip of land between North and South America: from here, he