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Arts, Books, History

Book Review: Endeavour

REVIEW

Endeavour

“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

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Asia, Books, Britain, China, History

Book Review: Imperial Twilight

DARK TRUTH OF THE OPIUM WARS

THE Opium War began in 1839 in which the British and Chinese faced one another. It was a one-sided affair: The Royal Navy was the most powerful military force in the world, while the Chinese possessed weaponry that was centuries out of date.

The Chinese were reduced to desperate measures. One commander hatched a plan to strap fireworks or pyrotechnics to the backs of monkeys and catapult the poor primates onto the British ships in the hope that they would blow up their powder magazines. In the event, nobody could get close enough to launch the monkey bombs at the enemy.

The war was the end result of a decades-long, often fractious relationship between China and Britain, characterised by misunderstandings and ignorance on both sides.

Eighty years earlier, in 1759, there was only one British national, James Flint, who knew how to speak and write in Chinese. His attempt to present a petition to the Chinese emperor on behalf of the East India Company ended with Flint imprisoned for three years and the man who had taught him Chinese decapitated.

In 1793, Lord Macartney arrived in Beijing, bearing gifts from King George III including telescopes, a planetarium and a hot air balloon. The Emperor announced that they were “good enough to amuse children”. Macartney left Beijing having achieved little.

It was trade that finally brought the two nations together, but there were, unfortunately, two kinds.

One consisted of legal commodities such as cotton, silks and tea. The other was in opium, which the East India Company smuggled from India into China, where demand was high.

The two countries had very different attitudes to opium. In Britain, the drug was legal and sold by apothecaries and tobacconists. There was even a tonic for teething babies called Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup.

But China’s growing addiction problem was devastating its cities. Opium was illegal and punishments for using it grew even harsher.

The war was precipitated by the Imperial commissioner Lin Zexu, who confiscated vast amounts of the drug and threw it in the sea. (He wrote a prayer to the god of the sea apologising for his defilement of the waters.)

Charles Elliot, the chief superintendent of the British in Canton, sent a furious dispatch to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, demanding military action. Some months later Elliot got what he wanted.

The Opium War was not the British Empire’s finest hour. The Times newspaper described it as “nothing less than an attempt, by open violence, to force upon a foreign country the purchase of a deadly poison”.

But the twilight of Stephen Platt’s title was not that of Britain’s empire. It was China that was in decline – and worse was to come. Now that China is once again one of the world’s great powers, knowing the history of its relationship with the West becomes ever more important. Platt’s book makes a scholarly, but enjoyable, contribution to that knowledge.

– Imperial Twilight by Stephen Platt is published by Atlantic for £25

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Arts, Books, Environment, Nature

Book Review: Buzz

NATURE

Buzz

Bees are brilliant and a much-needed species. And it’s thanks to wasps from which they evolved.

DO you know what Aristotle, George Washington, Leo Tolstoy, Sherlock Holmes and Scarlett Johansson have in common?

If you didn’t you might be surprised to hear that they were (or are) all beekeepers.

This lively, engaging book shows the human fascination with bees has deep roots. Stone Age art, from Africa to Europe and further afield to Australia, depicts honey-hunting expeditions. People kept bees before they tamed horses. The Hittites imposed fines on anyone caught stealing from hives. The Greeks had honey taxes.

Bees have long been central to our eating habits. “It’s often said,” Hanson remarks, “that every third bite of food in the human diet relies upon bees.”

He includes a table of 150 crops which either need or benefit from pollination by bees. They range from apricots to tomatoes and turnips.

Mead, brewed from honey, is one of mankind’s oldest tipples. People have been drinking it for at least 9,000 years. The ancient Chinese downed a version laced with rice and hawthorn berries; the Celts preferred theirs flavoured with hazelnuts.

The Mayans of Central America went one better and produced hallucinogenic varieties, spiked with narcotic roots.

Bee products have also proved invaluable in traditional healing. Of 1,000 prescriptions in a 12th-century volume entitled The Book Of Medicines, more than 350 made use of them. Honey was thought to be a remedy for everything from hiccups to a low sperm count. Beeswax could be used to treat loose teeth, aching testicles and sword wounds.

It’s little wonder that bees figure prominently in various mythologies. In some Greek myths, the god Zeus was raised by wild bees who fed him on nectar and honey. In cultures across the world, the buzzing of bees was interpreted as the voices of departed souls.

Bees are certainly remarkable creatures. They evolved from wasps. The first unequivocal bees appear in the fossil record about 70 million years ago. There are now around 20,000 different species around the globe.

Their antennae tune into chemicals which signal everything from potential meals to potential mates. Their wings can flap more than 200 times a second. One species of bumblebee can hover at elevations higher than the peak of Everest.

Bees, of course, evolved in tandem with the flowers on which they feed and which in turn depend on them to spread their pollen. In one sense, the colours of flowers reflect the nature of bees’ eyesight.

The prevalence of blues and golds in flowers is no chance matter. These shades fall right in the middle of a bee’s visual spectrum. On remote islands where there are few, if any bees, flowers are drab and colourless.

The development of scented flowers is also interwoven with bees’ ability to sense them. As Hanson puts it, “The fact that bees prefer odours we find worthy of poetry, counts as one of nature’s happier accidents.”

Plants need to attract bees to help them pollinate. They have devised any number of cunning strategies to do so. Some include caffeine in their nectar to get bees addicted to visiting them.

There are varieties of orchids which mimic the body shapes and scents of female bees to lure lustful male bees towards them.

The behaviour was recorded in the 19th century but prudish naturalists, including Charles Darwin, were puzzled. They thought the bees were attacking the orchids. They didn’t realise that they were actually trying to have sex with them.

 

BEES are now big business, particularly in the U.S. For a price, honeybees are sent by truck around the country, so farmers can improve bee-dependent crops. More than 10 million bees can be on a single truck.

Much publicity has been given in recent years to the alarming decline in bee numbers – so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Hanson acknowledges the concerns, but he is ultimately optimistic about the future. He is also a charmingly enthusiastic bee fanatic and his book is delightful to read.

– Buzz by Thor Hanson is published by Icon for £16.99

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