I read in Gold Gem and Treasure magazine, a story that goes something like this: Captain cook rowed ashore and claimed Australia as English soil at possession island. As he sunk the flag into the ground there was an amount of what he thought was pyrites in the ground they dug for the hole to raise the flag pole. Dismissing it, he went back to his ship. Had he have known that he had actually dug directly into gold and not pyrites, then Australia's history could be very different. For starters, gold would have been discovered much earlier than the mid 1800's and convicts may not have been the main source of labor and lastly Australia may very well have been populated from the top down. Keeping in mind possession island is located at the very top, tip of Australia and nowhere near Sydney, Melbourne or Tasmania.
Just a side note: Many years later, a miner was working this reef and a Japanese sub surfaced nearby only to have the captain and crew row ashore and take his rock that was due to be processed, as ballast for the sub.
All strange but apparently, all true.
I guess when we think about all the cock ups around the confusion between pyrites and gold then our old mate Captain Cook takes the cake.
