In 1766 the Admiralty and the Royal Society jointly planned an expedition to the South Seas. If the Admiralty had territorial ambitions, and hoped to establish the existence of the mythical terra australis incognita, the continent that many Europeans thought existed as a counterweight to the Northern hemisphere's continental masses, what came across as the apparent aim of the exploration was the Royal Society's scientific mission to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, due on 3 June 1769.

Captain James Cook was appointed to command Her Majesty's Bark the Endeavour, and the expedition left Plymouth on 26 August 1768, with official instructions, both from the Admiralty and the Royal Society, underlining the importance of astronomical measurements and geographical exploration, as well as the necessity of establishing contact with the indigenous peoples. The island of Tahiti was both the place where the scientific calculation of the distance from the earth to the sun was to be carried out, and an opportunity for supposedly easy commerce with distant populations who had already been in contact with Europeans. The ship was then to sail further west and south, in search of the hoped-for continent, taking this opportunity to draw maps of New Zealand, at the risk of entering into contact with native tribes as yet unknown to European explorers.

Cook himself did not write the narrative through which his exploits came to be known in 1773. John Hawkesworth, a writer of miscellaneous essays, plays, stories and journalism, and a one-time friend of Dr Johnson, was commissioned by the Admiralty to edit the explorer's papers, a work for which Hawkesworth is said to have received the huge sum of £6,000. Hawkesworth's text was therefore the authorized edition of Cook's logbook. In this paper, references to Hawkes-worth's text will be made through dates of entry, as they appear on the ‘South Seas’ online edition of the 1773 official record held by the National Library of Australia and references to Cook's own logbook will be to Beaglehole's 1968 edition.