Cook beached the Endeavour on the river's south bank, at a place the Guugu Yimithirr call Gan-gaarr, in the lands of the Waymburr clan. What was meant to be a quick repair became the longest single stop of the entire Pacific voyage - forty-eight days, from 17 June to 4 August 1770. The carpenters found a hole in the hull that a chunk of coral had plugged like a cork; had it washed free at sea, the ship would have gone down with everyone aboard. While the vessel lay careened on the sand, the naturalists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander fanned out to collect plants, and the artist Sydney Parkinson drew the unfamiliar flora and fauna. It was here, by this river, that the wider world first set eyes on a kangaroo - and first wrote down an Aboriginal word for it.

The repair was not peaceful for long. In mid-July, Cook's men caught a dozen green turtles and refused to share them - a grave breach, since turtle was prized food meant first for the Elders. Guugu Yimithirr men came aboard to take what custom owed them; the sailors wrestled the turtles back. The men responded by setting fire to the dry grass around the camp, twice, before Cook wounded one with a musket. Then, on a rocky bar by the river, an older man stepped forward, snapped the tip from his spear, and laid the weapons down. It is remembered as the first recorded act of reconciliation between Aboriginal Australians and Europeans, and the place where it happened is now called Reconciliation Rocks.

Strip away the human drama and the Endeavour is still a striking piece of country. Three branches - North, South, and Right - gather runoff from the Henderson and Audaer Ranges and flow east off the Great Dividing Range toward the Coral Sea. The Right Branch alone falls 335 metres and runs 48 kilometres before joining the main channel. The basin remains largely unmodified and its water quality is rated good, though tilapia, an introduced species, have spread through the system and crowd the native fish. Mangroves line the estuary, and saltwater crocodiles patrol it, as they have since long before any ship arrived.

Nearly half a century later, in June 1819, the botanist Allan Cunningham arrived aboard a survey vessel captained by Philip Parker King and added his own collections to the record Banks and Solander had begun. The town of Cooktown - population around 2,700 today, one of the northernmost on Australia's east coast - grew up at the river mouth in 1873, not in memory of Cook but to serve the new Palmer River goldfields inland. Some of the least disturbed country near the mouth is now protected within Endeavour River National Park, a quiet coda to a river that carries, in a single name, both a ship's accident and a people's far older home.