Botany Bay
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Botany Bay. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a border water on the southeastern coast of New South Wales , Australia. It received its name in 1770 from Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist of Captain Cook's voyage of discovery, who collected a large number of new plants here. At this time Captain Cook took possession in the name of England. In 1788, the American colonies having asserted their independence, and being no longer available as a place of banishment for convicts, the British government founded a penal colony on Port Jackson, where Sydney now stands. It was the British policy for many years to banish thieves, forgers, housebreakers, rioters, and other troublesome characters to this colony, instead of imprisoning them. In some way the colony acquired the popular name of "Botany Bay," but, as a matter of fact, the convict establishment was on the other side of a peninsula some ten miles from Botany Bay. The custom was discontinued in 1840, because of the protest from the settlers, who by that time had become numerous and influential. See Australia
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a bay of New South Wales, Australia, 5 miles S. of Sydney. It was discovered by Captain Cook, on his first voyage, in 1770, and named by him from the great number of new plants found in its vicinity. In 1787 it received England's first penal colony in the East; and, though it was supplanted the very next year by Port Jackson, yet it long continued to be the popular designation, not merely of this penal settlement, but of the Australian convict settlements generally.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote in 1910 the bay was chiefly a historical curiosity, remembered as the misapplied nickname for the convict settlement ten miles away at Port Jackson. Today its shores are among the busiest industrial land in Australia: Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport sits on the northern side, with a third runway built out into the bay itself in the 1990s, while Port Botany on the southern shore handles most of the city's container freight. The Kurnell headland where Cook landed in 1770 is now protected as Kamay Botany Bay National Park, the dual name acknowledging the Dharawal word for the place. Aiton's also gives Banks the naming; Cook, who first called it Stingray Harbour, is credited with the change to Botany Bay in honour of the plants Banks and Solander gathered there.
Written for this edition, 2026.