The Great Barrier Reef burst suddenly into European consciousness in 1773. In that year the sensational account of James Cook's amazing voyage and discovery was released to the public as part of a huge three volume edition entitled An account of the voyages undertaken by order of his present Majesty for making discoveries in the southern hemisphere. Two years earlier, when he returned to England on 13 August 1771 after a three year voyage around the world, Cook reported that he had discovered and traversed the eastern and northern shores of the mysterious Great South Land which for centuries had been a quest for navigators. What became a central feature of the voyage was his description of a reef that beggared belief at the time: ‘a wall of Coral Rock rising all most perpendicular out of the unfathomable Ocean … the large waves of the vast Ocean meeting with so sudden a resistance make a most terrible surf breaking mountains high’.

By Cook's time coral reefs had already become well known and had acquired an extensive folklore, but nothing in the literature equalled the account of his nightmare travel through dangerous waters unmatched anywhere else in the world. For two years his journals were embargoed by the Admiralty to preserve their sensitive commercial information, especially from the French who were anxious to beat the British in the race to create an overseas empire.