January 18 in History

Captain James Cook's two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery, sighted the Hawaiian Islands on January 18, 1778, while sailing north from Tahiti toward the coast of North America in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Cook had not expected to find anything in this part of the Pacific. No European chart marked the islands. No previous expedition had reported them. The discovery of a populated archipelago in the middle of the world's largest ocean was entirely accidental. Cook named them the Sandwich Islands after his patron, the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty. He made landfall at Waimea on the island of Kauai, where his crew became the first Europeans to encounter Hawaiian civilization. The Hawaiians, a Polynesian people who had settled the islands roughly a thousand years earlier, had developed a complex society with a rigid social hierarchy, sophisticated agricultural systems, and navigational knowledge that had allowed their ancestors to cross thousands of miles of open ocean in outrigger canoes. The initial encounter was remarkably peaceful. Cook traded iron nails and other metal goods for fresh provisions, and the Hawaiians appeared fascinated by the ships and their occupants. Cook noted the cultural and linguistic similarities between Hawaiians and the Tahitians he had encountered previously, correctly intuiting that both peoples shared Polynesian origins. He spent several days at Kauai and the neighboring island of Niihau before continuing north toward the Pacific Northwest. Cook returned to Hawaii in November 1778 to winter his ships before a second attempt at the Northwest Passage. He spent weeks sailing along the coast of the Big Island before anchoring in Kealakekua Bay in January 1779. The arrival coincided with the Makahiki festival honoring the god Lono, and some historians believe the Hawaiians initially received Cook with divine honors. The relationship deteriorated rapidly when Cook attempted to leave and was forced back by storms. A dispute over a stolen boat escalated into violence, and Cook was killed on the beach at Kealakekua on February 14, 1779. The "discovery" Cook made was, of course, a discovery only from the European perspective. For Hawaiians, it was the beginning of a catastrophic transformation: disease, foreign exploitation, and cultural disruption that would reduce their population by more than 80 percent within a century.

Eleven ships carrying more than 1,000 people, roughly 750 of them convicts, dropped anchor at Botany Bay on January 18, 1788, after an eight-month voyage from Portsmouth, England. The First Fleet's arrival marked the beginning of European settlement in Australia and the start of a dispossession of Aboriginal peoples whose consequences continue to reverberate. The fleet existed because of the American Revolution. For decades, Britain had transported convicted criminals to its North American colonies, offloading roughly 50,000 prisoners between 1718 and 1775. When the United States won independence and refused to accept further convicts, Britain's overcrowded prisons became a crisis. Prison hulks, decommissioned ships moored in the Thames and other harbors, housed thousands of inmates in squalid conditions. The government needed a new dumping ground, and the remote continent that James Cook had charted in 1770 offered a solution 12,000 miles from London. Captain Arthur Phillip commanded the fleet and would serve as the first governor of New South Wales. He quickly determined that Botany Bay itself was unsuitable for settlement, lacking fresh water and adequate anchorage. On January 26, he moved the fleet north to Port Jackson, where he found one of the finest natural harbors in the world. The settlement was established at Sydney Cove. The convicts transported on the First Fleet had been sentenced for offenses ranging from theft and forgery to assault. Many were petty criminals from London's poorest neighborhoods. The youngest was a boy of nine. The oldest were in their sixties. Women made up roughly a quarter of the convict population. The marines who guarded them were only slightly better off, many having been pressured into service with promises of land grants that were slow to materialize. For the Aboriginal people who had inhabited the continent for more than 65,000 years, the arrival of the First Fleet began a process of dispossession, disease, and violence that would devastate their populations and cultures. Smallpox swept through Aboriginal communities around Sydney within eighteen months of settlement, killing an estimated half the indigenous population of the region. The colony that began as a dumping ground for petty criminals grew into a nation. Australia Day is still observed on January 26, the date Phillip raised the flag at Sydney Cove, though the holiday remains deeply contested by Aboriginal Australians who call it Invasion Day.

Robert Falcon Scott and four companions reached the South Pole on January 18, 1912, after a grueling two-month march across the Antarctic plateau, only to find a Norwegian flag already flying over the site. Roald Amundsen and his team had arrived thirty-four days earlier. Scott's diary entry that evening recorded the devastation: "The worst has happened. All the day dreams must go. Great God! This is an awful place." The race to the South Pole had been the defining contest of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Scott, a Royal Navy officer, had attempted the pole once before in 1902 and returned in 1910 with a meticulously planned expedition. Amundsen, a Norwegian polar veteran, had originally planned to attempt the North Pole but reversed course when he learned that both Frederick Cook and Robert Peary claimed to have reached it. He sailed south in secret, not informing Scott of his intentions until a terse telegram arrived in Melbourne: "Beg to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen." The two expeditions embodied fundamentally different approaches. Amundsen relied on dog sleds, fur clothing adapted from Inuit designs, and a route he had carefully calculated for efficiency. Scott used a combination of motor sledges that broke down early, ponies that proved unsuitable for Antarctic conditions, and man-hauling, the brutal practice of dragging heavy sledges on foot. Scott's five-man polar party was larger than planned, stretching his food depots beyond their margins. The return journey became a catastrophe. Edgar Evans died on February 17, likely from a head injury and exposure. Lawrence Oates, crippled by frostbite, walked out of the tent on March 16 with the famous words, "I am just going outside and may be some time." Scott, Edward Wilson, and Henry Bowers made it to within eleven miles of a supply depot before being trapped by a blizzard. They died in their tent around March 29. Their bodies and Scott's diaries were found by a search party eight months later. Scott's defeat was complete, but the narrative that followed turned tragedy into legend. His diaries, published posthumously, portrayed him as a noble victim of fate rather than a leader whose decisions contributed to the disaster. Amundsen, the winner, received far less adulation in the English-speaking world.

Seventy delegations representing twenty-seven nations gathered at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris on January 18, 1919, to redraw the map of the world after the most destructive war in human history. The Paris Peace Conference would produce five treaties, create new nations, dissolve empires, and establish the League of Nations. Nearly every decision it made would be contested, and several would contribute directly to the next world war. The conference was dominated by the "Big Four": U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Premier Georges Clemenceau, and Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando. Wilson arrived in Paris as the most popular figure in Europe, his Fourteen Points having inspired hope for a just and lasting peace. Clemenceau, whose country had suffered 1.4 million military dead and whose northern provinces had been devastated by four years of trench warfare, wanted security above all else. Lloyd George sought to balance punishing Germany with preserving European stability. Orlando cared primarily about Italy's territorial claims. The negotiations consumed six months and produced the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919. Germany was forced to accept sole responsibility for the war under the "war guilt" clause, pay reparations initially set at 132 billion gold marks, cede territory to France, Belgium, Poland, and Denmark, and accept severe limitations on its military. The Rhineland was demilitarized. The Saar coal mines were given to France. Germany's overseas colonies were redistributed as League of Nations mandates. The treaty's terms satisfied no one completely. Clemenceau thought they were too lenient. Wilson's League of Nations, his greatest achievement at the conference, was rejected by the U.S. Senate, leaving the new international body without its most powerful proposed member. The mandates that distributed Ottoman and German colonial territory to Britain, France, and Japan planted seeds of conflict across the Middle East, Africa, and the Pacific. German resentment of the treaty became the most potent political force in Weimar Germany, exploited ruthlessly by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. The peace that was supposed to end all wars created the conditions for an even greater one, twenty years later.