Endeavour’s life starts in an unrecorded time, in a subterranean space several inches deep. There, as summer fades into autumn, an oak tree begins life as an acorn.
An acorn is a capsule, protected by a waxy skin. Inside is stored a genetic code and enough nutrients, tannins and essential oils to sustain it during its fragile early weeks. In September, it begins to grow, slowly, until after a fortnight its shell bursts open. For the first time, the acorn’s insides can be seen. The ochre hue of the kernel contrasts sharply with the mahogany-brown of the shell, which cracks under the strain. A root dives downward, a tiny probe, seeking water and nutrients. By November, as the earth above gets a coating of frost, the husk of its shell has been pushed clear. In its place are the earliest signs of a stem, which ventures up, seeking light.
After four months the acorn’s shell is shattered and discarded and gone. The stem is now the central feature of the tiny plant. It continues to rise. At six months, as the April sun begins to strengthen, it breaks through the soil. It seems other-worldly, blanched, ethereal, like a skeletal arm in a clichéd horror film reaching from the grave. Within days this pallor subsides and a vibrant, joyous green over-spreads it. The acorn of the previous autumn is gone. In its place is a seedling oak, an oakling, two inches tall, capped with a pair of helicopter leaves that tilt and turn and thrill to the sun. The plant has no longer to rely on its inbuilt store of energy. Now it photosynthesises in the sunshine, the newest addition to a woodland floor, hidden among brambles, bluebells and wood anemone. More leaves appear and already for those who study it closest they display their familiar, lobed form. As summer progresses these leaves emit a golden glow. Soon the oakling stands out among the flowers, exposed to rabbits, voles, browsing cattle or deer, but otherwise filled with promise for the future.
No one can say for certain just where the oaks that made Endeavour grew. Thomas Fishburn, the Whitby shipwright in whose yard she was built in 1764, left no records. Perhaps they have been lost or destroyed. Perhaps they did not exist to begin with.
Some might say that the trees grew in the snow-carpeted forests of central Poland. Cut with axes in the bitter continental winter, the timber would be floated down the Vistula to Danzig where it would be sold and loaded into the holds of merchantmen bound for Britain. Plying the old sea paths, those once sailed by the portly cogs of the Hanseatic League, the merchantmen would cross the Baltic, thread through the strait that separated Denmark from Sweden before entering the subdued mass of water called the German Ocean that conducted them to England’s eastern shore.
Roger Fisher, a shipwright from Liverpool, voiced a different theory. In 1763 he wrote that the eastern shipbuilding ports of ‘North Yarmouth, Hull, Scarborough, Stocton, Whitby, Sunderland, Newcastle, and the North coast of Scotland’ sourced their oak chiefly from the fertile lowlands that bordered the rivers Trent and Humber.1 Writing at the moment Endeavour’s oak would have been reaching the Whitby yards, Fisher’s opinion cannot be discarded. But, equally, it seems more flimsy the more that it is examined. Fisher was a west-coast man. He confessed to having little knowledge of the ways of the eastern ports. All that he had gathered had come second- or third-hand.
Fisher was writing to a different purpose, too. His book on British oak, Heart of Oak: the British Bulwark, was published in 1763, a loaded year in history. This was the year the Treaty of Paris concluded the Seven Years War. During this conflict England’s woodlands had suffered violent incursions from foresters, determined to supply the growing navy. Like so many before him, Fisher had been left cold by the destruction. He saw it everywhere. The forests, woods, hursts and chases of Old England were vanishing and he filled his Heart of Oak with evidence of this. Contacts in the timber trade had told him, ‘fifteen parts out of twenty’ of England’s woodlands had been ‘exhausted within these fifty years’.2 The axe had been thrown indiscriminately. In the river valleys and sunny southern fields, in Wales and the ancient Midland forests, the story was the same.
To Fisher’s mind the country stood as a pivot between the virtuous homespun past and a bleak treeless future. To underscore his theme Fisher evoked a vision of yesteryear. He pictured a landowner, at one with nature, ‘a little cloyed with enjoyment’, and wishing ‘to retire from business, or for the sake of meditation’, taking a saunter in his spacious woodlands. This was the Horatian ideal, liberty from the cares and distractions of the city. Using the present tense to enhance the sense of loss, Fisher described how:
The variety of the scene revives his drooping spirits. On the branch of a full topt oak, at a small distance, the blackbird and thrush warble forth their notes, and, as it were, bless their benefactor. A little farther, the turtle dove, having lost his mate, sends forth his mournful plaint, till, by means of echo from a neighbouring wood, passing through the silent air, the happy pair are again united. Variety of changes draw on the pleasing hour amongst the massy bodies of the full-grown oaks and thriving plants. The prospect of his country’s good warms his heart.3
Anticipating Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring by two centuries, Roger Fisher was depicting the same vision of a paradise lost. Recent scholarship has indicated, though, that the oak problem was not as grave as he believed. Fisher may well have suffered a form of environmental panic, half seen, half felt, a type that would become increasingly prevalent in times ahead. In the 1760s attitudes like his masked a historical truth. In the mid-eighteenth century, as Thomas Fishburn went searching for faithful timber, there might not have been an abundance of oak – but there was still plenty left.
Ancient, twisted, vast, with their goliath limbs outstretched, almost every English parish had its own loved oak, a timeless presence on the landscape. When the clergyman and naturalist Gilbert White started to document the natural history of Selborne in Hampshire in the 1760s, he set out with a description of the village oak. He wrote mournfully of a ‘venerable’ tree that had stood in the centre of Selborne on a green by the church. The oak had a ‘short squat body, and huge horizontal arms extending almost to the extremity of the area’. For centuries it had been ‘the delight of old and young’. Parishioners had surrounded it with stone steps, and had erected seats around it so that it had become ‘a place of much resort in summer evenings’. The village elders had made it their custom to congregate at the Selborne oak ‘in grave debate’, while the young parishioners ‘frolicked and danced before them’.4
A similar story came from White’s contemporary, Reverend Sir John Cullum, who included a description of the parish oak in the opening paragraph of his History and Antiquities of Hawsted, and Hardwick (1784). Cullum wrote of ‘a majestic tree’ named the Gospel Oak that ‘stood on an eminence, and commanded an extensive prospect’. On his annual ‘perambulations’ Cullum and his congregation would pause in the shade of the tree, and ‘surveying a considerable extent of a fruitful and well-cultivated country, repeat some prayers proper for the occasion’.5 This image of the worshipful parishioners under the village oak is a vivid one, and Cullum was only doing what generations had done before him. A millennium before, the Anglo-Saxons had been buried in hollowed-out trunks of oak. People had pinned oak leaves to their jackets as signs of fealty and carried acorns in their pockets for luck.
If people recognised the oak’s potency as a symbol, they venerated the tree equally for its strength. No tree could compete. A favourite classical tale told of Milo of Croton in ancient Greece. ‘Renowned in history for his prodigious strength’, explained a book in the 1760s, Milo was six times victor at the Olympic Games, ‘he is said to have carried on his shoulders the whole length of a stadium an ox four years old; to have killed it with a single blow of his fist; and to have eaten the whole carcass in one day’.6 The story was subverted by Milo’s demise. Having found an old oak, to flaunt his strength Milo had tried to rip it open with his hands. As he grasped the tree, it closed around him. In an instant the oak had transformed Greece’s strongest man into its most tragic victim. Unable to free himself, a pack of wolves had emerged, tearing Milo to pieces.
People did not need to know Milo’s story to recognise the oak’s strength. They only had to look around them, to the great manor houses and cathedrals that adorned the landscape, to the towers and bridges and a hundred everyday objects from mill wheels to casks, cudgels, daggers and poles. To look at the parish oak as Cullum and White did during these years, was to stir associations of quiet, brooding might. Both intrigued by nature, the clergymen may have realised that an oak derives its strength from its shape. A mature specimen can be three times as wide as it is tall. On a January day when the tree is stripped of its leaves you can absorb this. There it stands, serpentine limbs outstretched. When winds whip through these branches they sway and strain like levers, gathering up elemental energy. The forces are channelled backwards, from the budding tips, to the smallest branches and back along the boughs to the trunk. The motion creates massive stress forces. When 60 mph winds gust against the tree, it is equivalent to a weight of 220 tons. Oaks, like all nature, seek equilibrium. They respond by fortifying their wood and stiffening their fibres.
This is what the oaks would have done at Hawstead and Selborne, as would the other cherished English oaks: the Darley Oak in Cornwall, the Bowthorpe Oak in Lincolnshire or the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest. In a society changing fast, these oak trees provided powerful links with the past. They were the perpetual survivors, the time-hallowed, stoic relics of a medieval age. But these were not the trees that had made the country great. Those that had were the young oaks, aged between 50–150 years old, felled in a continuous harvest to build anything that had to last and needed to be strong. As the Cambridge ecologist Oliver Rackham later put it, this left England a place ‘of young or youngish trees, like a human population with compulsory euthanasia at age thirty’.7
It has been estimated that 200 mature oak trees were used in the construction of Endeavour, providing the raw materials for the great structural timbers inside her hull: her floors, futtocks and knees, all of her outer planking and most of her inner embellishments. In Heart of Oak, Roger Fisher may not provide a reliable location for the source of the Endeavour oaks, but he does offer a formula to suggest their age at the time they were felled. ‘It is generally taken for granted, that an oak tree is at least one hundred years before it comes to its perfection’, he writes, ‘continues in that position one hundred years more, and gradually decays another hundred.’8 This rule of thumb would subsequently be sharpened by Robert Greenhalgh Albion in his Forests and Sea Power (1926):
The time for felling the great oaks was one of the chief problems of the timber grower. There was a ‘psychological moment’ for cutting, when the tree would yield a greater profit than at any other time. Oaks, it will be remembered, grow very slowly. The period of maturity is reached between the ages of eighty and a hundred and twenty years, when the tree attains a diameter of fifteen or eighteen inches. Up to that time it was not profitable to cut oaks for ship timber because of the additional value of a large-sized tree. Beyond that period of maturity, the risk of decay was great.9
This dislocates Endeavour’s story at its very beginning. It jolts the story from mercantile Britannia of 1764 to the more religiously fervent age of a century earlier: the reinvigorated England of Charles II, the Merrie Monarch, and his louche, extravagant Restoration court.
Always beloved by the English, at no time in the nation’s history were oaks so idolised. Everyone knew the story of Charles II’s – then Charles Stuart’s – hair’s breadth escape from the Parliamentarians following the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Chased from the battlefield, Charles concealed himself in the branches of an oak in the grounds of Boscobel House on the border between Shropshire and Staffordshire. The day passed in suspense as Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers prowled beneath. At Charles’s bleakest moment the oak lent a providential hand. When restored as king in 1660, Charles exploited the story to its maximum. He appointed 29 May, the date of his return to London in 1660, as a national day of celebration, Oak Apple Day. Great processions marched through the City of London, the people dressed in costume as oak trees, representing ‘a greate Wood, with the royal Oake, & historie of his Majesties miraculous escape at Bosco-bell &c’.10 In the years that followed the towns across England filled with Royal Oak taverns, where people could drink Burton ale, eat Cheshire cheese, damn the French and feel more English than anywhere else.
It’s a striking thought, the idea of the Endeavour’s acorns germinating at the time that oak trees were being elevated as patriotic, national symbols. And if the 1660s brought a general celebration of all oak trees, it equally saw the beginning of modern attempts to scientifically understand what it was that made them so special. This movement was led by John Evelyn, the clever, inquisitive, founding fellow of the Royal Society. Today Evelyn is chiefly remembered for his diary – the cold-blooded twin to the warm-blooded diary kept by Samuel Pepys – but in the 1660s his reputation came from the book that would make his name: Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees (1664).
Sylva was a fresh and eloquent blend of classical thought, wood-manship, folklore and careful observation. When gathering the materials for Sylva Evelyn drew on his own personal knowledge and on the collective wisdom of a network of philosophically inclined correspondents. His ambition was to create a survey of English trees, emphasising utility, explaining the characteristics of various species and demonstrating how they could be raised and turned to practical advantage. Evelyn began, naturally, with the oak. He toyed with several scientific names for the tree. One was Robur from the Latin, signifying strength. Next was a second Latin term, Quercus. Whichever was best, Evelyn divided British oaks into a few distinctive ‘kinds’. There was Quercus sylvestris, with its ‘hard, black grain, bearing a smaller Acorn’. Evelyn glided over a type called Cerris, ‘goodly to look on, but for little else’. Most interesting, he thought, was the Quercus urbana, which ‘grows more up-right, and being clean, and lighter is fittest for Timber’.11
Wanting to encourage the growing of oaks, Evelyn set out the space required for the tree to grow or ‘amplifie’; ideal conditions for planting, raising and transplanting; and the importance of surrounding young trees with thorns or stakes to defend them from cattle or protect from the ‘concussions of the Winds’. How they grew, he advised, very much depended on their setting. He warned that ‘the Air be as much the Mother or Nurse, as Water and Earth’, and so advised growers to be wary of ‘unkindness’ of various ‘Aspects’ like the windy brow of a hill. Trees grew ‘more kindly on the south side of an Hill, than those which are expos’d to the North, with an hard, dark, rougher, and more mossie Integument’.12 But sown with foresight and left with patience, an oak tree with its arms outstretched in welcome would one day become a ‘ravishing’ sight.
Evelyn’s chapter ‘Of the Oak’ preceded others on elm, beech, ash, chestnut, and forty or so other species. Combined with other sections on soils, seeds, seminaries and infirmities, Sylva was published in 1664, exactly a century before Endeavour’s launch. It was the first book produced under the aegis of the new Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge. The book tapped into the mood of the times, capitalising on the vogue for oaks and blending it with a patriotic cause – the regeneration of English woodlands – after the destructive Civil War. Such was the anticipation, 700 private citizens subscribed, and within two years more than 1,000 copies of the first impression had been ‘Bought up, and dispersed’, which, Evelyn immodestly noted in the preface to the second edition, ‘is a very extraordinary thing in Volumes of this bulk’.13
Sylva would have many legacies. It provided a model for a learned, empirical work of popular science with a practical, patriotic edge. Furthermore it demonstrated that an oak tree was as susceptible to its environment as any other living being. This led, inevitably, to the notion of the ‘ideal’ oak. That England was so densely stocked with oaks had long been regarded as incontrovertible proof of God’s providential goodness to English people. But it went beyond that. Something existed in the climate that invested the tree with unrivalled qualities. ‘Our English oak is infinitely preferable to the French’, Evelyn had affirmed, ‘which is nothing so usefull, nor comparably so strong … wanting that native spring and toughness, which our English Oak is indu’d withall’.14 For centuries such silvicultural xenophobia would persist. ‘Privateer Captains are more cautious than to venture their Egg shells Sides against our English Oak’, announced one book during the Seven Years War in the 1750s.15
But where were the finest trees of all? In Sylva Evelyn had made his preferences clear. ‘If I were to make choice of the place, or the Tree’, he had asserted, ‘it should be such as grows in the best Cow-Pasture, or up-land Meadow, where the mould is rich and sweet (Suffolk affords an admirable instance).’ Here, perhaps, was the germ of a bias that would take hold in the navy. For Stuart and Georgian naval administrators, it became an article of faith that a golden belt of the trees stretched across southern England, commencing in the Forest of Dean, then progressing east across Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Hampshire and Kent, with the finest specimens of all being ‘good, sound Sussex oak’.16
‘To an English shipwright’, Robert Greenhalgh Albion would affirm, ‘there was no wood in the world superior to Sussex oak’, and along with this favouritism tagged a prejudice. Naval contracts not only specified southern oak, but they ‘constantly discriminated against the oak of Yorkshire and other counties of the north’. In the northern counties the Quercus genus was believed to be ruined by the heavy soils that strangled the oaks rather than nourishing them. But in Yorkshire, very few agreed.
In 1782, a land surveyor called William Marshall returned to his native Yorkshire to begin an agricultural survey of the county. Marshall had already authored two dense reports, Minutes of Agriculture and Experiments and Observations on Agriculture and Weather. These were productions of a man with a sharp eye and an independent mind. Marshall had lately studied rural Norfolk and in years to come he would extend his scheme into the Midlands, but in 1782 he was happy to be at home in Yorkshire, ‘as my early youth was spent among it; and my acquaintances with its present practitioners of course extensive.’
Marshall’s survey would expand into a five-year project, with him receiving ‘an influx of fresh information I did not expect’. It eventually led to his Rural Economy of Yorkshire (1788), which began with typical regional conviction:
YORKSHIRE has always been spoken of as the first Province of these kingdoms. If we consider its superior magnitude; the variety and strength of its natural features; the fertility of its soils; and the industry of its inhabitants; the abundance and copiousness of its rivers; the richness of the views on their banks; and the wildness of those which are found among its mountains; – it is well entitled to pre-eminence.17
It was a trenchant opening, but perhaps a justified one. Yorkshire – subdivided into its various ridings – was England’s largest county. Anyone who climbed the tower of York Minster and turned 360 degrees could appreciate the diversity Marshall alluded to. To the east of York, the Wolds, chalk downlands, swelled in long elegant curves all the way to the coast at Flamborough Head. To the south and west were fertile grassy plains, while northward lay the Vale of York. ‘The fens at its base, and a healthy plain’, wrote Marshall, ‘If we estimate the Vale of York by the number and copiousness of its rivers, and by the richness of its marginal banks, it would perhaps be difficult, in any country, to equal it.’18
But not all the county was so inviting. In the north-eastern corner, kennelled away beyond the luxuriant lowlands, lay the moors. A foreboding landscape, most avoided these moorlands unless they had an unavoidable reason to cross them. William Camden, the Elizabethan topographer, had written of burnished hills animated solely by a few ‘wandering beakes [streams] and violent swift brookes, which challenge the vallies everywhere as their owne to passe through no memorable thing’.19 Wolves were still rumoured to skulk in the hollows and throughout winter they were treacherous, even for locals. Eight years before Marshall began his survey, a man called Nicholas Harker had been caught in a blizzard on the moorland paths outside Scarborough. Days had passed before Harker and his wife had been dug, stiff as lead, from the gullies.
Marshall walked these same paths and visited Whitby, where Harker had worked as a roper before his death. Whitby stood at the end of the moors. It was a curious place. Once just a small fishing port, in the seventeenth century it had undergone a brisk period of growth fuelled by the start of alum mining. Loads of the alum were dug out of the surrounding cliffs, burnt in pits and boiled to create a crystal used to dye wool. In the seventeenth century a fleet of merchant ships had developed to ferry the alum crystals to outside markets, even as far as London, ‘whither nobody belonging to Whitby before that time had ever gone without first making their wills’.20 From this beginning, by the time Marshall was at work in the 1780s, ‘the sea-ports of Whitby’ and neighbouring Scarborough had become renowned ‘as nurseries of hardy seamen’, to which ‘the nation at large owe much’.21
The hardiness of Whitby’s sailors was matched by the durability of its ships. In merchant shipping the shorthand ‘Whitby-built’ had become a stamp of quality. There was a toughness to them that came from some element in their construction. While the Royal Navy were pleased to get thirty years’ service for one of their vessels, Whitby merchantmen or colliers would last twice or three times as long. A collier called William and Jane launched in 1717 had still been afloat in the 1780s when Marshall was compiling his research. Another, The Sea Adventure, built in 1724, would remain in service until 1810 when she was eventually wrecked on the Lincolnshire coast. Nor ‘did she go to pieces even at the last, but was carried up by the violence of the wind and of the flood tide into the midst of a field, where she was left high and dry, a good way from the sea’.22 Another called the Happy Return would survive a century, while the whaling vessel Volunteer would spend seventy-five years plying the northern seas, making fifty-four voyages to the Greenland fisheries.
Marshall knew that Whitby’s shipwrights had long made use of local oak. Years before, Whitby’s timber had come from a place four miles away called Egton, a derivative of ‘Ochetun’, ‘so called from the oak trees that surrounded it’.23 But as time passed and supplies dwindled, the shipwrights had begun to look further afield. A bill of sale from 1707 shows one Whitby shipwright buying 239 oak trees from a location near York for £850 and ten guinea pieces of gold. This transaction was typical of the early trade which involved bargains directly between shipbuilders and landowners. As the 1700s wore on this process evolved to include specialist wood-buyers, middlemen who scoured the countryside, negotiated and sold the choicest pieces direct at the port at prices up to three guineas a ton. This was the system Marshall found in operation in the 1780s. The agents supplied the principal markets, the ports of Whitby and Scarborough, ‘who take off the larger timber’.24
Marshall learned that the primary source of timber was the Vale of Pickering, which lay at the opposite side of the moors to Whitby. He declared this ‘a singular passage of country’. ‘Nature, perhaps,’ he wrote, ‘never was so near forming a lake without finishing the design.’ As an example of the extreme flatness of the vale, he described the ‘sluggard pace’ of its rivers. One, the Rye, took ‘four or five days in passing from Helmsley to Malton’, a distance of fourteen miles, while the Derwent was ‘not less than a week’ covering the fifteen miles from Ayton to Malton. These rivers flowed over land once covered by the Royal Forest of Pickering, a deciduous woodland where in ancient times kings had hunted stags and boars. By the eighteenth century the forest had vanished as an entity, but distinct ‘oak, ash and elm’ woods survived, with many thriving in the valleys. ‘Were the extensive woodlands which these vallies contain scattered on the bottom of the surrounding hills’, Marshall contended, ‘the Vale of Pickering would be a passage of country as singular in point of beauty as it is in natural situation.’25
Twenty miles of moorland separated Whitby from the Vale. This had never been an easy distance to cross. But in 1759 a subscription had been collected by Whitby’s merchants and ‘a very good turnpike-way’ had been built. It ran direct from the town, across the moorlands to the northern opening of the Vale at Dalby.26 The turnpike had been in operation by 1763, at about the time a sustained period of felling had commenced. An advert in the Newcastle Courant on 15 August 1767 lays bare the scale of this: 3,543 oaks were advertised in a single lot ‘mostly fit for ship Timber’, just ‘17 miles from Whitby’. Though none of these oaks could possibly have been used in Endeavour – she was at sea by then – the sheer availability of timber is significant. In the mid-1760s there was enough oak timber in Whitby’s neighbourhood to build Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose twice over, or fifteen of Fishburn’s colliers.
Another advert in the Newcastle Courant on 10 April 1762 offered oak from the west side of the moors:
To be SOLD
Standing and growing in Colemandale, in the Parish of Guisborough, in Cleveland, Yorkshire;
A Parcel of fine OAK WOOD, marked and numbered, consisting of upwards of 500 Oak Trees, all full grown, fit for Ship Timber for Vessels of the largest size; amongst which are many large CROOKS, and other choice and valuable TIMBER.27
This is just one of a number of adverts that appeared at this time. But this lingers in the memory for its timeliness. It was published two years before Endeavour’s launch.
John Tuke was the second agricultural surveyor to investigate the North Riding of Yorkshire immediately after Marshall in the 1790s. Tuke agreed with Marshall’s assessment of the Vale of Pickering – an area he termed ‘Ryedale’ – as the chief source of timber for the shipbuilders. He noticed an unusual richness on the fringes of the moors, where black peaty soils gave out to a red clay or hazel loam. In these borderlands there was a richness in the earth, a quality Tuke supposed was ‘evidently washed down by the floods of many former ages, from the higher country’. It made a soil bed of ‘extraordinary fertility’.28 Though the climate was hard, this soil was rich enough to support mature deciduous trees, oaks, elms, ash and broad-leaved or witch elm. They grew slowly. Their roots clutched the rocks. The annual rings of mature oaks were not spaced in the regular half-inch intervals; instead they clustered tight.
The oaks that grew in this landscape were dyed with a northern character – swart, savage, permanent – that came from the air as much as the earth. The weather in the North Riding was ‘extremely cold and bleak’ for as much as nine months of the year, wrote Tuke, with the summer season at least three weeks behind that of the south. Throughout winter snow stood yards deep, lit by a pale sun which slanted low over the slopes. Only the strongest trees could survive in this environment, and throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the winters were as hard as ever. The years 1650–1800 comprise the major part of what some climatologists now call the Little Ice Age, a time of frost fairs on the River Thames that lasted for weeks at a stretch. The cold was if anything magnified in Yorkshire, with snows that in years like 1698 endured from December until April.
Whatever the climate, the North Riding was subject to the vicious northerly air that blew all the way from the Shetland Islands without interruption. Marshall, the surveyor, wrote of the ‘cold, pinching winds’, and ‘smart frosts’.29 Between October and February, gales were feared. Sheets of livid cloud would slide in from the north, swallowing the moorlands. Sometimes north-easterly storms arrived from Scandinavia to terrifying effect. The most violent came on 20 November, 1740. So extreme were the consequences, reports made it as far as the Scottish newspapers:
By the late Storm the Town of Whitby in Yorkshire has suffered vastly: Many of their Ships of 500 Tuns coming from Southwark in Ballast, were obliged to ly up in sight of the Harbour, and being suddenly caught, some foundered at Sea, others dash’d to pieces on the Rocks, and many run on Shore; the Damage already known amounts to 40,000 l. But the Deaths of many expert Commanders and stout Sailors renders this a National Loss, since Whitby has now long employed 200 large Ships in the Coal Trade, and was a Nursery of Seamen. The whole Town is in Mourning; of 1,200 Families scarce one but has suffered in Relations or Fortunes, and too many in both.30
Another gale hit in April 1743. Then one more in January 1752. While reportage remained fixed on the human suffering in the towns, these storms shaped the landscape behind too. And, as many people suffered in the storm, oaks, oddly enough, gained something from this weather. The classical thinkers had speculated about this. Didymus had written how oaks ‘being continually weather-beaten they become hardier and tougher’ – a notion that had appealed to Seneca too: ‘Wood most expos’d to the Winds to be the most strong and solid.’ This was a question Francis Bacon had turned over in the seventeenth century. Where Evelyn had favoured warmth over the wet and cold, Bacon had preferred ‘that which grows in the moister grounds for Ship timber, as the most tough, and less subject to rift’.31
This was a truth the shipwrights of Whitby had doubtless absorbed too. Quite the opposite of the navy’s view, Yorkshire oak was not inferior, rather it was dependable, strong and versatile. These qualities were also noticed by the surveyor Tuke. His verdict was unequivocal:
The oak timber grown in great part of this Riding, though not large, is most excellent; produced as it chiefly is, upon sound and often rocky ground, its growth is very slow, which renders it extremely hard and durable; and probably to the use of much of it the ship-builders of Whitby owe their riches, and the ships they build their great celebrity.32
Tuke does not mention any ‘celebrity’ ship by name. But in 1794 when he was writing, there can only have been a few he had in mind. Of those Endeavour is most prominent. Four years earlier the artist Thomas Luny had travelled to Whitby to research a historically themed seascape, The Bark ‘Earl of Pembroke’, Later ‘Endeavour’, Leaving Whitby Harbour in 1768. No other ship in Whitby attained the pre-eminence of being painted by a professional artist for an exhibition at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly.
The Yorkshire landscape provided the Whitby shipwrights with one further advantage. It produced what was known as compass timber. Compass timber came from oaks that did not belong to a particular plantation or wood. These trees lived solitary existences on the side of highways, in hedgerows or on the borders of fields. Shipwrights and foresters recognised the crucial importance of compass timber in the making of ships, and they knew that these trees were most often found near heaths and on moorland.
These oaks grew as best they could, but their existences were destined to be fraught. Exposed to the atmospheric tumults of the open countryside, and the destructive behaviour of cattle and deer that would repeatedly maul their tops, they grew disfigured. Their limbs slanted, jutting in baffling directions. They grew slowly, and responded to the stresses they were forced to bear by reinforcing areas of their wood. To shipwrights these were a prize. In the puzzle of construction they offered ready-made pieces, especially suited to fit specialised sections of a ship’s hull. Bent trunks formed catheads and futtocks. Oaks that forked in a Y near the ground made transom knees. Those whose trunks swayed one way and then another in an S were incorporated as floor pieces. No matter the skill of a carpenter, the strength of a single piece of compass timber would always outstrip that of several fastened together. As Tuke the surveyor recorded, Yorkshire was filled with a ‘considerable quantity of timber in the hedge-rows, particularly in those of the Vale of York, the Howardian Hills and Ryedale’. And the advert in the Newcastle Courant in 1762 specifically mentioned ‘many large Crooks, and other choice and valuable Timber’.
The Yorkshire moorlands and vales were a natural factory for the Whitby shipwrights, forging materials unique to their corner of the country. Tuke and Marshall knew this. To look at a tree was not just to study its form and colours. It was also to consider its past. The more a tree is forced to withstand, the stronger it becomes, which is why withered oaks standing in isolated ground survive gale after gale for a thousand years, while young, supple, apparently healthy other examples do not. In the hundred years an oak takes to mature, it becomes an archive or repository for everything it encounters, an archive not only captured in annual rings, but in zones of massive tensile and bending strength.
Again, no one can say for certain just where the oaks that made Endeavour grew. Materials were sourced as opportunities arose, to meet specific needs. But it can be said that in the early 1760s there was plenty of local oak in Whitby’s neighbourhood for Thomas Fishburn to buy if he wished. Spring was the felling season in Yorkshire. Foresters would run their eyes over the shape of a tree. Was it straight and true, or gnarled and bent? They might run the palm of their hand over the bark or tap it with a hammer. Anything to divine the quality of the wood inside. For as Evelyn scolded in Sylva, ‘There is not in nature a thing more obnoxious to deceit, then [sic] the buying of Trees standing, upon the reputation of their Appearance to the eye … so various are their hidden, and conceal’d Infirmities, till they be fell’d, and sawn out … A Timber-tree is a Merchant Adventurer, you shall never know what he is worth, till he be dead.’33
Really there was only one way for a forester to test the quality of a tree. Half an hour with an axe and soon enough the blemishes or the brilliance of the timber was clear.
Oaks never do anything quickly. Life ebbs out of them just as it ebbs in. But few things have afterlives like oak trees. Nearby at Whitby, in the early months of 1764, the oak timber seasoning in Thomas Fishburn’s yard was turned to a new purpose. A new life was poised to begin.