H.M.S. Endeavour

Cook's Endeavor was 106' in length with an extreme breadth of 29'2". She was built of wood and had a displacement of 370 tons. Her depth in the hold was 11'4". At the time the Navy purchased her for the voyage, Endeavour was 3 years old, having been built at Whitby in 1764 as the collier Earl of Pembroke by Thomas Fishburn. She had three spars and her mechanical advantage was limited; she was made to be pushed by the wind.
     Endeavour could at very most sail at 60° to the wind; speed was not the purpose behind her design, she was built to carry coal along England's coast. But it was depth of hold and reliability rather than speed that Cook wanted, which is why of all the ships that lay at his disposal in the river Thames, Cook chose Endeavour.

"No sea can hurt her..."
-- Captain James Cook referring to the H.M.S. Endeavour.

How Captain Cook Opened Up the Pacific
and Discovered the Northwestern Coast of America
Excerpted from G. Robinson's Ships That Have Made History, 1936 

Old seafaring books tells us that from time immemorial the coal trade on the east coast of England has been an excellent nursery for seamen. Those whose business has been in the North Sea will know why, while the others will gain an inkling by an examination of the chart of the waters 'twixt Tyne and Thames.
     From Newcastle to Flamborough Head is a jagged steep shore where soundings are of little help, and on a murky night a sharp lookout is the seaman's main guard, for otherwise he may easily find himself butt against unscalable cliffs between two casts of the lead. So you go for eighty miles, then a sudden change. South of Flamborough the coast lies low, no marks can be seen, and sandbanks stretch out afar. Here, in the days before lightvessels and high-powered lights ashore, the seaman had need to use his lead as the blind man uses his stick -- tap, tap, all the way to London town. Visibility being generally poor in the North Sea, the young seaman has always been well schooled in his "three L's" -- lookout, lead, and log. Small wonder that in the old days they were all good who came out of it; the others were drowned.
     James Cook, the seamen's seaman, was a survivor of this nursery. He was no come-by-chance hero. True, he came of poor parentage as the world reckons, but they were none so poor that they did not endow him with a stout heart, a good digestion, and a mind able for the storage of experience; that is inheritance enough. It is likely that this child of a moorland farm became weatherwise soon after he started crow-scaring which was not long after he had learned to walk. We may suppose that as assistant in the little general store at Staithes, where he weighed sugar by the pound and cut off tape by the yard for the fish wives, he laid the foundation of that quality of accuracy with which long after he measured up this old world of ours. Doubtless, the old ladies never had inch nor ounce more than what they had paid for; he was always exact, was Captain James Cook.
     We know that come green shutter time at the shop he was away down among the fishermen, lending a hand to haul the cables in and out at the Staith, learning that close intimacy with the way of a ship which can be acquired only by early practice in small craft. We may reckon that the first time young James was sent ashore at Wapping for stores for the collier Freelove, wherein he came to be bound, he brought the boat back alongside without waking the skipper in his bunk. Handiness in a boat was more thought of in those days than many school certificates.
     Old King Coal has never allowed the ships in his service much time in harbor, so that for nigh ten years we can picture young Cook in foul wind and fair, wet and shine, gathering experience as boy, man, and mate. As mate, doubtless he made his own corrections on the crude charts, and annotated the simple sailing directions of the day. Then, when he was in a fair way to become a master in the coal trade, suddenly, as it seemed, he stepped on board H.M.S. Eagle to volunteer as an able seaman. That was in 1755.
     The earlier biographers insist that he joined in a hurry to avoid being forced by the press gang, as they also insist that he had earlier run away to sea after helping himself to a shilling out of the till. None of this seems to fit into the pattern of the man's life and it is not surprising, therefore, that Kitson -- who went to some trouble -- found that none of these things happened. It is known that Sanderson, the grocer of Staithes, went with his assistant into Whitby to arrange his apprenticeship to the sea, and remained always on friendly terms. As to his entry into the Navy, there is evidence that it had been long in contemplation and that his friends the shipowners had been told of the intention some time before.
     He was seven and twenty, standing well over six feet, spare, but hard as nails -- his mother was of Cleveland where the iron comes from. A firm mouth and steady eye, he was of the sort that cannot be overlooked, and within six weeks of joining the Eagle he was made master's mate. As such he served for two years, gaining the regard of the master and Captain Palliser. Sir Hugh Palliser was to survive to raise a noble monument to this man who had entered the ship as an A.B.  In 1757 came his appointment to the Pembroke as master. In her he was engaged at Louisburg and, in 1759, when she went up the St. Lawrence, Cook was selected to carry out under fire the survey and buoyage of the channel whereby Wolfe went his way to victory and death at Quebec.
     This work was done under the eye of the Admiral and led to appointment as master of the flagship where he found time to study higher mathematics and the principles underlying practical surveying, thereby fitting himself for duties beyond those of an ordinary sailing master. Opportunity came quickly. When the war ceased, the Governor of Newfoundland asked for an obtained his services as "King's Surveyor" and the next four years were devoted to a complete survey of the island and its approaches. Considering the great difficulties under which the task was carried out, the charts are remarkable in their accuracy. In 1767, the man who but twelve years before had come in through the hawsepipes, who had already proved himself a man of iron resolution, had the pleasure of hearing that the results of some of his astronomical observations had been laid before the polite and learned Royal Society. A rare compound of a man was James Cook.
     About the time he was finishing the North American work, the Royal Society was asking the Admiralty to fit out a vessel with the intention of observing the transit of Venus at Tahiti. The Admiralty had sent two expeditions recently to the Pacific whose main purpose had been the discovery of a great southern continent always believed to exist for the purpose of holding this world of ours right end up. There being so much land in the Northern Hemisphere, it was argued that there must be corresponding land in the south -- an early example, perhaps, of belief in the efficacy of outside ballast. Commanded by gallant naval captains, the ships had returned with sadly reduced crews, the survivors weakened with scurvy, no news of the continent, and generally with meager scientific results. Lord Hawke at the Admiralty was pressed, in any new expedition, to give the command to a scientist, who was nominated. The First Lord agreed that a scientist was needed but insisted that he must be a seaman too. Hawke had his eye on one man -- James Cook. In those days the masters in the Navy held their posts by warrant; it was necessary, therefore, to give Cook a commission as lieutenant before he could take command. There was never a happier choice made.
     With good sense, the choice of vessels was left to the man who was to do the work and the one-time collier's boy chose a collier. When she was brought to dry-dock at Deptford, we may imagine she came as something of a shock to the government shipwrights. They were used to ships with cod's heads and mackerel's tails; Cook's fancy had a bow like a hammer-headed shark and a tail that did not begin much before it was time to leave off. Plainly, so far as mold went, she was in direct descent from the dugout. The modern designer looking at her lines finds it hard to believe that such a vessel could get 'round. She did get 'round, bringing with her documentary evidence of handiness, for Cook's charts show plainly that she was often in tight corners, to get out of which a ship had need to be handy. Obviously, she was slow; in a three-year voyage her best day's run was but 160 miles. She rolled; we know that her larger sister in the second voyage rolled 38° each way when running in a breeze. She was strong; the only time she was badly aground it was her strength which saved her. As for her looks, it will be seen from the image at right that she had need to comfort herself with the old saw, "Handsome is as handsome does."
     Apart from Cook's natural faith in the type in which he had spent his youth, the qualities which made the collier preferable to the alternative twenty-gun ship were a larger hold and a greater loftiness between decks where the men were to be berthed. Within the 97 feet which was her length between perpendiculars, he intended to stow eighteen months' provisions and to keep in health 94 people. Time out of mind that scourge of seamen, scurvy had brought to nought much endeavor at sea; in his Endeavour -- so they had named his ship -- he was determined that disease should be fought with all available forces. Fresh air, light and cleanliness below, fresh food whenever obtainable, otherwise the best known substitutes -- these were the weapons which the better medical brains of the day recommended to him for the fight, so that extra stowage for a barrel of lemon juice or a cask of sauerkraut, and an extra cubic foot of air space, seemed to him more than worth while. True, he did not originate these ideas, but he was the first man to put them into practice. "Friday, September 16th, 1768, punished Henry Stevens, seaman, and Thomas Dunster, marine, with 12 lashes each for refusing to take their allowance of fresh beef. Wind easterly." So runs an early entry in Cook's journal. While tender-hearted dietitians may consider their great fore-runner a heavy-handed practitioner, I suspect that they will secretly envy the power to give such peremptory treatment.
     The details of the Endeavour's voyage and the two succeeding voyages in the Resolution have been told over and over again; here it would be useless to attempt anything more than a brief summary. Briefly, then, the Endeavour was to make first for Tahiti, by way of Cape Horn, for the astronomical work. This done, she was to search for the continent with that gaudy name -- Terra Australis Incognita. You can see how of necessity a country with such a lengthy appellation would have need to appear large on the maps. On the old globes it sprawled right 'round and poked up as near the equator as 30° S, while New Zealand, which old Tasman had sighted in 1642 and none had seen since, was reckoned a spur of it. If he drew a blank in the hunt south from Tahiti, Cook was to make for New Zealand. As a matter of fact, he was convinced by deduction when he had penetrated 600 leagues into the Pacific that there was no land of consequence to the southward; nevertheless, he struck south before standing to the westward in a pursuance of orders and out of politeness, we may suppose, for other people's theories.
     New Zealand was sighted about halfway up the east coast of North Island. After making a short hitch south to a headland he called Cap Turnagain, he stood to the northward, charting and landing where he could. Battling 'round Cape Maria van Diemen, in weather which he admitted was as bad as any he had ever experienced, he yet fixed the Cape's position accurately before turning south along the west coast, where, in a succession of westerly gales, the little collier clawed along the dead lee shore. The chart is evidence of the Captain's daring, his journal makes clear how that daring was finely balanced with prudence. He and his men had been tried to the limit and it must have been a great relief when what appeared to be a great bay opened out to receive them.
     Landing, not long after the ship was made snug in a cove, and climbing a hill, Cook discovered they had fallen into the strait which now bears his name. Later, passing through, he stood north as far as Cape Turnagain, at sight of which he called all his officers on deck and pointed it out to them. Then, being assured that they recognized it and were satisfied that there had been complete circumnavigation, he turned away to sail around South Island without landing until he came again into the strait. Bad weather prevented him often from closing the land; he mistook Bank's Peninsula for an island and failed to separate Stewart Island, but he left in both chart and journal indication of all uncertainties. In all his work he modestly claimed no more than that it was the best he could do under the circumstances, warning seamen of possible errors. Yet, in spite of his having no chronometer on this first voyage, his longitudes are rarely more than a few miles out, and in the case of New Zealand the chart is a wonderful approximation.
     After New Zealand, the orders gave a free hand and Cook decided to pick up another of Tasman's loose ends. That great Dutch pioneer had sighted Tasmania on his passage east. Cook stood away west, therefore, sighting the north end of it and turning northerly to pick up the Australian coast at a point he named Cape Howe. Here began his second great survey; the 2000-mile coast which no white man had ever seen before was charted within four months.
     When one looks at the chart of the Queensland coast one is amazed that the little ship came through the tangle of reefs, passing where ships have never cared to navigate since. Cook prudently moved in daylight only, but one bright moonlight night, being tempted to carry on, he found himself hard and fast on a reef near the point feelingly named Cape Tribulation. The ship was badly holed; guns, ballast and stores were flung overboard, lightening her fifty tons, topmasts struck, and anchors laid out. Everything was done which a prime seaman with a fine ship's company working under him could do. For twenty-four hours all were striving; then, as the tide rose, the ship righted. The pumps were going, the leak was gaining on them. There was the chance of a change in the weather with the certainty of the ship breaking up if she remained; there was no certainty that she would float if she came off. The Endeavour was just a lone ship lying aground twenty miles from an unknown coast. "However, I resolved to risk all and heave her off--" so Cook writes in his simple account of the affair. With alternate hopes and fears, they covered the distance to the shore to find a haven where they beached her, and in six weeks she was repaired in a rough and ready manner. One more close call, this time outside the Barrier Reef, and then away she went through Torres Strait for Batavia.
     Hitherto, Monkhouse and Perry, the surgeons, with their captain always behind them, had kept the men in health; but now while the ship was hove down and repairing, the men, who were all living ashore, contracted dysentery. Many were buried in Batavia, Monkhouse among them; those who returned to carry the ship home were the ghosts of themselves and many passed away on the passage to the Cape. It was a sad disappointment to Cook, making him querulous and a little ungenerous to the memory of some who had served him well. Doubtless many of those who died had not been too careful of health at the first contact with civilization after so long an absence, but one could wish the fact had been left unnoted in the journal. Temperate himself, he could never understand the slightest divergence in others, could never forgive anything which checked "the service upon which they were engaged."
     The Endeavour's circumnavigation brought a full harvest. If the vision of Terra Australis Incognita had faded out for most sensible people, New Holland and New Zealand had been raised clear of the mist and became realities. Many new islands had been discovered in the Pacific and all had been well charted. Cook summarized in his journal the work yet to be done and a paraphrase of this summary became his orders for another voyage. He was to make a complete circumnavigation in high southern latitudes.
     On this second voyage eastabout, he sailed in the Resolution, with the Adventure, a smaller collier, for company; his peril on the Australian coast had taught him the value of a consort. Nevertheless, when the two ships lost company and the Adventure went home, Cook was not diverted from his resolution to probe and probe into the Antarctic as far south as ever the icefields would allow the ship to go. Alone in the fog and snow -- snow so thick that often they shook the Resolution up into the wind to get the snow out of her topsails. So they struggled on until, as he wrote, "even my spirit was broken." Between times the crew recuperated and made merry at Tahiti, while the tireless and austere navigator checked over his work and thought of home.
     Three years and eighteen days after her departure the Resolution returned with the loss of a single man due to sickness out of a crew of 118. That alone was an unheard of accomplishment and the beginning of a new era in naval hygiene. The geographical results were mainly negative. Terra Australis Incognita, that land capable of supporting fifty million people, as it had been supposed, had been finally wiped off the map. It had been proved that whatever land there might be was close around the Pole and useless for colonization. The Southern Hemisphere ceased to be a land and sea of make believe, and outside the Antarctic Circle it remains today, in the main, as Cook charted it.
     In 1775, when he returned, Cook was 47 and he would have been wise perhaps had he devoted the rest of his life to science ashore. But a call came in the following year and he went to sea again in the Resolution, this time with the Discovery as consort. His orders were to attempt the discovery, from the Pacific side, of navigable ways north, about Asia and America -- both age-old problems. The two ships proceeded by way of the Cape of Good Hope to the old haunts, the Southern Pacific Islands. Then, at the latter end of 1777, they stood away north to discover, on Christmas Eve, the island which bears that happy name. Then, steering north, on the 18th of January, 1778, the lookouts descried snow-capped mountainous land as a cloud dead ahead. That was the white man's first view, after an interval of two hundred years, of what we now know as the Hawaiian Islands. He realized the outstanding importance to Pacific navigation of the group but stayed only a short time, knowing that he must strike at the Arctic at the right season. The American coast was made at Vancouver Island. Though he failed to separate the isle from the main, it may be claimed that he opened the western gate of Canada; as we have seen, he had already lent a hand in the opening of the eastern gate. Bad weather persisting, he was driven much off the land to come in again and again, searching for an opening, laying down on the chart all he saw. On through Bering Strait to the ice, far enough north to be convinced and to record that there was no useful way north about America. Then came the return to Hawaii for the winter season and here it was that the great navigator came to Journey's End.
     Clerke, who succeeded to the command, was then a dying man but, with a magnificent spirit, he returned to the north. He carried on long after the people knew there could be no navigable channel, probably long after he, too, realized there was no way, but, lest his weakness might seem to influence a decision to turn, this fine fellow persisted. At last, to the great relief of all, he ordered the ships about, and died a few weeks afterwards off the Kamchatka coast. Years before, he had joined the old Endeavour as an able seaman, to return home in her as an acting lieutenant; he had served again in the second voyage. A right worthy follower was Captain Charles Clerke.
     Such is a brief record of the achievement of Captain James Cook, leaving out all concerning the manners and customs of the natives, the wonders of natural history, and the astronomical data gathered and brought to book by the devoted workers under his command. Previous navigators had gone round the world, more as children seeking adventure -- often, it must be said, as greedy children robbing orchards on the way. Cook had no time for orchard robbing, and adventure was just an incidental nuisance; in his journal he testily remarks that people often write "as if the whole merit of the voyage consisted in the dangers and hardships they underwent." It was a grown man who sailed in the Endeavour, out for knowledge, out for the giving of fair measure, out to make the paths straight for all seamen, all ships.
     That the man himself had failings, that contacts with some temperaments sometimes brought his temper to hurricane force, and that at its full his natural upstanding sense of justice momentarily bent before it, we can accept, without upstanding sense of justice momentarily bent before it, we can accept, without believing for one moment that he was generally unjust, savage and unbearable. The presence in the last voyage of Charles Clerke and of that other old Endeavour Captain, John Gore, to whom was to fall the honor of bringing the ships home is sufficient answer to such a charge. He would have been too good to be true had he been admired by all the company with whom he sailed, but it is remarkable that he held the respect of two such diversities as Sir Joseph Banks and Master William Bligh.
     Old Admiral Isaac Smith told one story to the end of his days. When, at the first landing, the keel of the Endeavour's boat grated on the beach of New South Wales and all stood waiting for the famous navigator to step ceremoniously ashore, he turned to young Smith, then a midshipman, with a cheery "Jump out, Isaac." Perhaps to those who set great store on the vanities of Church and State, Cook's behavior will appear undignified and altogether too homely for such a great occasion; others will see in it a gentleness and a kindliness unexpected from one usually so stern and unbending.
     Certain it is that Cook does not figure here as one of the heroes of antiquity, nor as a man sent out primarily to conquer new lands, but none ever supposed that such was the intent until a few years ago when we were asked to accept that in the first voyage science was but a cloak to hide an expedition of British acquisitiveness. Significance was attached to the fact that the Endeavour's secret orders remained unpublished until recent times and that among them was an order to take possession of any new lands discovered. Further, it was suggested that the news of a Spanish military occupation of Juan Fernandez, brought home by Carteret in the Swallow, was the immediate inspiration of this particular paragraph and we were twitted with being altogether too simple-minded if we believed that the British Admiralty had any real interest in scientific research.
     As there is an identical paragraph in the Resolution's orders for the third voyage, at which time the King of France, who warred with England, gave order to his Navy to let Cook go his way in peace, and Franklin asked Congress that a like courtesy might be extended by America, it would follow that these two countries were being fooled; it would follow that an act of chivalry so rare in history was being flung away on a nation unworthy. Were it not that the occasion when this new estimate was brought forward was the bicentenary celebration held by the Royal Geographical Society, it might well be passed over in silence, but since time and circumstance may give it some credit among those who have little faith in humanity, it would be as well, perhaps, to hold formal inquest before interment.
     As measure of the recklessness of this new estimate, it may be stated at once that when the Endeavour sailed in August, 1768, the Swallow had not been heard of for years. She was believed lost and eventually limped into Plymouth months afterwards. Anything, therefore, the gallant Carteret knew could have had no influence on Cook's orders. As to there being any significance in the non-publication of the Endeavour's orders, we know that those of the Resolution, with a similar paragraph, were broadcast before peace was declared. We may infer by their actions that Byron, Wallis and Carteret each sailed under a like instruction and that the same applies to the explorers of the day of whatever nationality. In fact, it has been common to all orders given before or since.
     As to the incredulity with which we are asked to treat the genuineness of the British Admiralty's interest in science, it is to be noted that of those who signed Cook's orders, two were seamen who might be expected to take keen interest in the construction of accurate charts and in any matter which advanced nautical astronomy; even the third, Lord Spencer, who understood better the points of a horse than the lines of a ship, might have guessed that there was some use in these things. But if this were not so, and to their minds the prime objects of the voyage were military and real estate, what possessed them, one wonders, to take a man of non-military rank, a known hydrographer, and place him in command, cluttering up his ship with botanists, naturalists, astronomers and, of all people, artists! What were they all doing in a war galley?
     And when Cook came home after these long years and admitted he had spent most of the time laboriously sounding and charting, even his claim that he had planted flags in New Zealand and New South Wales would not have saved him from the censure of his sword-clanking acquisitive masters. But he was not court-martialed. Instead, they promoted him and sent him out to do the same thing over again. The politicians of the Eighteenth Century may have had a hard casing of materialism, but underneath was something more impressionable. They realized surely, that by helping on the work of their servant they were winning larger and more lasting honor for their country than ever could be won by territorial aggrandizement.
     Beyond question, in the mind and heart of James Cook scientific work ever stood first; and although he was happy in the thought that his own people would one day inhabit those spacious countries lying beneath the Southern Cross, as he sailed along their shores his vision was of a peaceful land with corn growing and sheep grazing tended by a contented people. There was never in him th4e spirit of an aggressive imperialism.
     He had been south looking for Terra Australis Incognita, to find instead a waste of waters possessed by boisterous seas which swung unchecked right around the world. There he may have minded a line of Shakespeare's -- "What care these roarers for the name of King." He had been star gazing, too, in Tahiti, gaining thereby a glimmering of the extent of the universe, a sense of the larger proportions in time and space -- it was not likely that in his mind empire would be confused with eternity. Such men can never be held within narrow political boundaries; they are out to serve mankind. There is hope for a world wherein such men are honored.