On this beautiful day in June, the English ship The Endeavor ran aground near the east coast of Australia and almost got wrecked. “Sad enough,” an unsophisticated reader will say unhappily. Let us comfort him: it was James Cook who was navigating The Endeavor on his first voyage around the world that year, and the shallow ground which he so carelessly ran into was not really a shallow ground, but the Great Barrier Reef, which he literally discovered firsthand. It ended pretty well: most of the ship's provisions and equipment were quickly removed and The Endeavor was brought ashore. And while the ship was being repaired, Cook spent two months exploring the largest concentration of coral in the world.