REVIEW

“Endeavour” by Peter Moore is a factual historical insight into the ship’s discovery of the New World. The ship was led by Captain James Cook.

THERE are many books about Captain James Cook and his circumnavigation of the globe whilst aboard HMS Endeavour. Cook’s biographer, JC Beaglehole, wrote: “Really, that voyage makes most of the other Great Occasions of the 18th century seem pretty silly.”

Peter Moore is the first to concentrate on the ship itself, which set sail 250 years ago this week, having begun life as the Earl of Pembroke, a Whitby-built collier: flat-bottomed, round and sturdy, with a broad and voluminous hull, launched in 1764 to ship coal from Newcastle to London.

Moore’s approach is lavishly digressive, and he is inclined to foreground his subject’s background. So, he gives a detailed account of Whitby’s development from a fishing village, and of the career of the master shipbuilder Thomas Fishburn. Nor does he neglect the oak trees used for the Earl of Pembroke’s floors, futtocks and so forth, beginning with their growth from acorns to oaklings, “capped with a pair of helicopter leaves that tilt and turn and thrill to the sun”. After rather a lot of this, Moore turns to the transformation of an “utterly ordinary” ship into a “completely extraordinary” one, and his story takes wing.

IN 1766, the Royal Society resolved to send astronomers to North America, Norway and the South Seas to observe the Transit of Venus across the face of the sun, on June 3, 1769. To lead the South Seas mission it chose Alexander Dalrymple, a thrusting young Scot determined to discover the rumoured southern continent of Terra Australis.

However, in March 1768, the Society’s clerk and collector absconded with all its money. It appealed for funds to the King, who provided £4,000. That meant that the voyage would be a joint venture between the Society and the Navy, under the direction of the Admiralty, which vetoed the civilian command of a king’s ship. Dalrymple was ousted in favour of James Cook, a seasoned naval commander, joined by the 25-year-old Joseph Banks, “a remarkable botanist and intrepid man of science”.

The Earl of Pembroke was not an elegant ship, and had no great cabin for officers, but she was strong, and her massive hold was suitable for the storage of necessary provisions. She was duly acquired and refitted at Deptford with a new internal deck and cabins, including a great one. As “a hybrid of a transport and a sloop”, it was given the more dashing name of Endeavour, and stock with great quantities of bread, salt beef and pork, oil and sugar, beer and spirits and, to remedy scurvy, “a proper quantity of Sour Kraut”.

In 1767, Samuel Wallis, commanding HMS Dolphin in search of the elusive Terra Australis, had claimed Otaheite (Tahiti) for Britain as King George’s Island, to which the Endeavour set off on August 25, 1768. When it landed the next April, Cook set about building Fort Venus, with an observatory, telescopes, clocks and astronomical quadrant.

During its three months on the island, the expedition met the formidable Purea, known to them as “Queen Oboreah”, and her lover, Tupaia, who became their fixer and prepared them a dinner of roast dog to celebrate King George’s birthday. Tupaia insisted on accompanying them on their departure, and guided them through the 250-mile archipelago that Cook named the Society Islands, and onwards to New Zealand.

Initial contracts with the Maoris were violent, and Cook shot four of them, but after Tupaia addressed them in his own language, and was understood, Cook and a Maori “saluted by touching noses”, which Moore inevitably calls “an iconic first encounter”. With great accuracy, Cook then charted the 2,400 miles of New Zealand’s coastline. In April 1770, the expedition had its first view of the eastern coastline of New Holland, failing to realise that it had found Terra Australis, and landed at what would be called Botany Bay, where the natives seemed indifferent to the Endeavour and its proffered trinkets.

Cook decided not to explore the bay to the north, so missing what became Sydney Harbour, and Endeavour set off on her return voyage. On the night of June 10, she crashed into the Great Barrier Reef and was badly holed. It put in for repairs at what would become the Endeavour River, in what is now Queensland, where many of the ship’s company died, Tupaia among them. Before they left, they sighted a strange new creature, “as large as a grey hound, of a mouse colour and very swift.” The natives called it a kanguru.

The Endeavour’s return to London in July 1771 was met with general acclamation, but Samuel Johnson was unimpressed. “They have found very little, only one new animal, I think,” he told James Boswell, who recalled his imitation of it: “He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room.”

In 1776, after three voyages to the Falkland Islands, the by now rather decrepit Endeavour was patched and plugged and renamed the Lord Sandwich, and carried Hessian mercenaries to defeat Washington’s army in New York. The next year she became a prison ship at Newport, Rhode Island, and in August 1778, to obstruct the French fleet that had come to the aid of the Americans in the Battle of Rhode Island, she was scuttled. In 1971, a fragment of her travelled to the moon on Apollo 15.

Much of the story of Cook’s ship is familiar, and Moore’s telling of it makes for quite heavy going, but it is, undeniably, a rollicking yarn.

– Endeavour, by Peter Moore, is published by Chatto & Windus for £20, EBook £9.99