or without owners. The peak Indigenous population in Queensland prior to European arrival is uncertain. The number may have been between 200,000 and 500,000 people. Numbers may have decreased at times of epidemics like smallpox. Rough calculations of the population can be made from the knowledge that Queensland supported 34.2 per cent of the total number of tribes in Australia and from the knowledge that 35 to 39 per cent of Australian indigenous people lived in Queensland. Queensland was the most densely populated region of the continent with two of the six to seven hundred Indigenous nations and at least ninety language groups. European exploration In 1606, the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon landed near the site of the modern-day town of Weipa on the western shore of Cape York. His arrival was the first recorded encounter between European and Australian Aboriginal people. In 1606, Luis Váez de Torres, a Spanish explorer may have sighted the Queensland coast at the tip of Cape York. In that year, he had sailed the Torres Strait, the body of water now named after him. In 1768, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville sailed west from the New Hebrides islands, getting to within a hundred miles of the Queensland coast. He did not reach the coast because he did not find a passage through the coral reefs, and turned back. Lieutenant James Cook wrote that he claimed the east coast for King George III of the Kingdom of Great Britain on 22 August 1770 when standing on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula, naming eastern Australia "New South Wales". This included the present Queensland. Cook charted the Australian east coast in his ship HM Barque Endeavour, naming Stradbroke and Morton (now Moreton Island) islands, the Glass House Mountains, Double Island Point, Wide Bay, Hervey Bay and the Great Sandy Cape, now called Fraser Island. His second landfall in Australia was at Round Hill Head, north of Brisbane. Endeavour was grounded on a coral reef near Cape Tribulation, on 11 June 1770 where he was delayed for almost seven weeks while they repaired the ship. This occurred where Cooktown now lies, on the Endeavour River, both places named after the incident. On 22 August Endeavour reached the northern tip of Queensland, which Cook named the Cape York Peninsula after the Duke of York. In 1799, in Norfolk, Matthew Flinders spent six