As Lieutenant James Cook, commander of His Majesty's Ship Endeavour, began his voyage to Tahiti in 1768, the modern political technology of security – linking sovereignty, societal order, economic prosperity and geopolitics – was rapidly coming into its own. Although the Dutch were already firmly established at Batavia, and the British themselves in India, the Endeavour's voyage would initiate a far-reaching process in which a ‘geographic’ space incorporating Australasia and the broader South Pacific was transformed and incorporated into the ‘geopolitical’ space we associate with security.

Although commissioned by the Royal Society for the purpose of observing the sun's transit across the face of Venus on 3 June 1769, the expedition was dispatched with a larger, secret imperial purpose: to sail south from Tahiti to latitude 40°S in search of the southern continent previously encountered by William Dampier and Abel Tasman, and to claim it for the British Crown. The nature of the Endeavour's encounter with New Holland confirms Cook's narrow aim: despite the presence of the botanist Joseph Banks and the naturalist Daniel Solander, they landed only five times, the longest visit forced on them after the ship was holed on the Great Barrier Reef.