Cook left in 1770 and the wider world more or less forgot the place for a century. Then, in 1873, prospectors struck gold on the Palmer River inland, and Cooktown exploded into being almost overnight as the port for the diggings. Grand stone buildings went up along Charlotte Street, a railway was pushed toward the goldfields, and ships crowded the wharves. It did not last. When the gold thinned and the shipping fell away, Cooktown slid into a long decline, repeatedly cut off by wet-season floods that washed out the gravel road. The town became, in the local phrase, a victim of its own isolation - until a sealed road finally reached it in the 1990s and tourism began, slowly, to bring it back.

Climb Grassy Hill on the edge of town and the whole story lays itself out below: the Endeavour River winding to the Coral Sea, the reef-flecked water Cook had to thread, the town clustered on the south bank. It is the same lookout Cook himself climbed to plot a way out through the maze of coral. Down in town, the James Cook Museum occupies a handsome 1888 building - originally a convent school run by Irish nuns - and holds everything from Cook's anchor to the Chinese relics of the gold-rush years. The Cooktown Botanic Gardens, established in 1878 and among Queensland's oldest, spill toward Cherry Tree Bay along a bushwalk that is the highlight of the local Scenic Rim track.

Every June, around the anniversary of Cook's arrival, the town fills for the Cooktown Discovery Festival. Its centrepiece is one of Australia's longest-running historical re-enactments - but this is no simple celebration of the navigator. The landing is now staged from two perspectives at once, Cook's and the Guugu Yimithirr's, including the moment a Guugu Yimithirr elder broke the tip from his spear to make peace. A cannon cast in Scotland in 1803, dragged here during an 1885 Russian-invasion scare, is fired once a year as part of the proceedings. It is history performed honestly, with both sides of the shore given voice.

Make no mistake about where you are. The brochures once advertised the beaches; the new ones don't, because saltwater crocodiles and marine stingers patrol Finch Bay, Cherry Tree Bay, and every creek around town. A river cruise up the Endeavour will likely show you a croc or two among the mangroves, along with snakes and a riot of birdlife. Inland, off a dirt road near Oakey Creek, stands a line of more than thirty mango trees said to be the oldest in Australia, planted in the gold-rush days. Cooktown is a base camp as much as a destination: north of here the Cape gets serious, and the top of the continent is still 900 kilometres of rough country away.