Cook's Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef in June 1770 and limped to the mouth of the river he would name the Endeavour, on the site of present-day Cooktown. His crew spent nearly seven weeks here, careening the ship, repairing the gashed hull, and tending the sick. While they waited for repairs and a safe wind, the naturalists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander gathered more than two hundred plant species, and the expedition recorded the first European sighting of a kangaroo near this very rise. Cook himself returned again and again to the summit to study the reefs and the tides. Long before any lighthouse, this was already a place defined by the act of looking out to sea and trying to read it.

More than a century passed before the hill earned a permanent light. Cooktown was founded in October 1873 as the port for the Palmer River gold rush, and through the 1880s it boomed with prospectors and cargo. A signal staff went up on Grassy Hill in 1874 to flag incoming ships, and a temporary light appeared by 1882. George Poynter Heath, the Portmaster of Queensland, pressed parliament for something better, and in 1886 the permanent lighthouse was finally built. It was a thrifty colonial design: a hardwood frame clad in corrugated iron on a concrete base, fitted with a fourth-order Chance Brothers lens and a kerosene lamp. Heath personally supervised the installation that September. Painted white with a red dome, it looked less like a grand sea tower than a sturdy garden shed that happened to glow at night.

For decades a keeper lived in a cottage beside the tower, tending the flame and working the signal staff that announced each ship. A new cottage went up in 1900, and a wireless station followed in 1913. In 1927 the light was automated and switched to an acetylene burner, and the station was demanned; the keeper's house and signal staff were pulled down soon after. During World War II, from 1942 to 1945, the 56 Radar Unit of the RAAF operated a radar station beside the lighthouse, complete with a fake keeper's cottage built purely for camouflage. After the war the military structures were cleared away, leaving the little tower alone again on the windy summit.

The lighthouse still works, flashing twice white every six seconds, though the beam is deliberately narrow, visible only across the western sector toward the reef channels and obscured elsewhere. In 1993 it was converted to solar power, and local volunteers now help maintain it under the Cook Shire Council. A sandstone cairn placed nearby in 1970 marks the bicentenary of Cook's survey from this spot. The tower itself is closed to the public, but that hardly matters: people come for the same reason Cook did. From the summit the view sweeps over the rooftops of Cooktown, the wide silver mouth of the Endeavour River, and the Coral Sea breaking white over the reefs beyond, exactly the puzzle a worried navigator once stood here to solve.