The depictions of Aboriginal people in the Endeavour voyage journal accounts and their subsequent appearance in John Hawkesworth's official voyage publication differ significantly from those of Māori in the same texts. This chapter analyses the crucial importance of skin colour to assessment of Aboriginal people and the impact of an ‘ethnology of absence’ on judgements about the potential of Australia as a site of future imperial activity. I also investigate the creation of a British discourse of ‘imperial possibility’ in the Tasman world created on the Endeavour voyage, as voyagers assessed the suitability of land they saw for British settlement and noted resources which could benefit the empire. The descriptions of James Cook and Joseph Banks were central to the decision to establish British settlement in Australia within the next twenty years and the initiation of an imperial connection with New Zealand. This chapter also examines depictions of Māori and Aboriginal people in printed texts generated out of Cook's second and third voyages, in an analysis which highlights the fluid and contingent nature of early accounts. Observers travelling on these three voyages and their editors in the metropole had a variety of racial images to draw on and apply to the particular encounters they engaged in. As more encounters took place, and different information came to light, those racial images were either reinforced or reworked.