It was an ill wind, a gale-force one, which brought the discovery and made the mythical place reality. James Cook shouldn’t really have been there – a Scottish geographer was the first choice. It was a series of fortuitous happenstances, but on this day, almost two years after he had set out from Plymouth, at 6 in the morning, a distant outline emerged from the sea. It was Terra Australis, the “unknown southern land”.

Cook, just 41 years old on April 19, 1770, a mere lieutenant captaining the Endeavour and 92 crew, didn’t immediately land, instead sailing northwards, mapping and naming as he went for just over a week until he moored in what he called Stingray Bay, later to become Botany Bay.

He may have “discovered” Australia but the inhabitants weren’t too keen to be discovered. They, the Aborigines, had been there for at least 60,000 years and although they weren’t too hostile to begin with, it all took a rum turn. Two men, a younger and older one, emerged from a group of huts. Cook offered gifts, which were spurned, a musket was fired over their heads, slightly wounding the older men, the couple ran off, rousted other locals who began chucking spears. Musket fire chased them off, Cook and his men went into the huts, discovered women and children, left them beads – the road to colonisation and expropriation had begun.

Cook’s expedition was a joint one by the Royal Society and the Royal Navy. The Society wanted the voyage to be commanded by the Scotsman Alexander Dalrymple, who believed that there were 50 million inhabitants Down Under ripe for exploitation. Or, as he put it, it had “at present no trade from Europe thither, though the scraps from this table would be sufficient to maintain the power, dominion, and sovereignty of Britain, by employing all its manufacturers and ships”.

The First Lord of the Admiralty, however, wasn’t having a landlubber and a Jock in command and after some to-ing a fro-ing the compromise was Cook, who was a junior naval officer with a background in mathematics and cartography. He was immediately commissioned as a lieutenant and made captain.

It was bad climatic conditions, the severe gales, which brought the successful outcome. Cook had been intending to hit Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania, which Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted on his way to discovering New Zealand more than a century before. However, he was forced to take a more northerly course to avoid the prevailing gales. And on Thursday, April 19, he unveiled the New World and wrote his name into history.

It wasn’t to end too well for the brave captain, who in 1778 became the first European to visit Hawaii. At first he was welcomed, his men traded nails for sex with the natives (women it’s perhaps incorrectly assumed) and they were treated as gods. But when one of the crew died the natives realised they were mere mortals, if a tad strange looking and opportunistic.

On a return visit on Valentine’s Day – February 14, 1779 – Cook and crew were greeted with rocks, shots were fired, a chief was killed, and Cook was peremptorily killed by a charging mob.

Britain didn’t seem to know what to do with Australia after that. It was so far away and took months to reach under sail, so someone decided it was the perfect place to export the country’s problems and, in 1788, the first fleet of 11 boats arrived in Botany Bay to set up a penal colony. In time, more than 162,000 convicts were packed off to the New World.

It took until the 1850s for Australia to become a desirable place to live when gold was discovered, which kickstarted the economy, and immigrants, many from China, began to arrive. In 1901, the separate states in the country got together and created the Commonwealth of Australia.

Which inevitably led to bush hats with dangling corks, sheep, rugby, Sir Les Patterson and Dame Edna Everage, Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, and cans of Foster's.

It was five years to the day after Cook first saw Australia, on April 19, 1775, that “the shot heard round the world” began the Revolutionary War in another continent which led to independence from Britain and, through a series of mishaps, misdeeds and pure madness, to Donald John Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America.

For more than a decade before hostilities broke out between the New World colonists and the British overlords, tensions had been rising. The conquest of more territories by the Brits led to more punitive taxes to pay for them, like the Stamp Act and the Tea Act, which led to the Boston Tea Party – about which Alex Harvey composed a song – where chests of tea on British ships were hurled into the harbour, and later to the Tea Party, which helped propel Trump to power.

Paying taxes but without parliamentary representation had only one outcome – violence and revolt. On the night of April 18, hundreds of British soldiers were marching on Concord, New Hampshire (later to produce the first stagecoach) to seize an arms cache. Paul Revere and other riders sounded the alarm, and colonial militiamen began mobilising to intercept the Redcoats. Next day the militiamen clashed with British soldiers and the Revolutionary War was under way.

In due course this was to lead to the Second Amendment to the US Constitution: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Just how that rationalises more guns than people in the country is difficult to work out.

Although initially the rebels were defeated, the popularity of their cause and independence from Britain grew. On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted. It had been drafted by a five-man committee including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams but written mainly by Thomas Jefferson. Its second sentence is one of the most famous and inspiring ever written, although successive governments have often failed live up to it. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Finally, after eight years of battles, often won by the Brits but at fearsome cost, with France and latterly Spain also aiding the rebels, on September 3, 1783, Great Britain was forced to concede defeat and formally recognise the independence of the United States in the Treaty of Paris.

The world’s then greatest power was, over two centuries, to pass the bloody trophy, or have it torn from its hands, by the young Americans – who bastardised our language, rewarded us with jazz, rock ’n’ roll, Presley, baseball caps, Bob Dylan, Springsteen, ice-cold beer and Hollywood. A fair recompense.

If the US and Britain are separated by a common language, so, too, are we from those other New Worlders Down Under. But what unites them, apart from freeing themselves from Britain? Well, there’s the fine wines they’ve created and with which we can toast them. They qualify, in this time of coronavirus, as shopping essentials.