The Earl of Pembroke made her last journey under her old identity on 2 April 1768. That Saturday she sailed through the turbid waters of Thames to the single dock at Deptford. Here all her merchant coarseness was to be smoothed into the neat regularity of a ship of His Majesty’s Navy.
Deptford nestles on the western bank of the Thames as the river darts south towards Greenwich. In 1768 the yard dominated the town. Dry and wet docks were cut into the riverbank, and cascading back from the shoreline were warehouses, victualling offices, rope yards, sail lofts and buildings occupied by the yard’s officials. Out in the river lay the ships the yard existed to maintain. There would be the great men-of-war, the iconic seventy-fours like HMS Bellona or the older sixty-gun fourth-rates like HMS Anson, both with complements of several hundred. Some would be paid off in ordinary. Newer arrivals would be anchored further out, the sixth-rate frigates or sloops with thirty-two or twenty-four guns, the store ships, hospital ships and yachts, then the yard boats plying between them all. Other vessels would be fitting out at the quayside or being attended on the stocks. For all this variety, these vessels would in some ways conform to a type. Many would be painted with a blue stripe along their hull’s upper body, a dash of vivacity sometimes offset with bursts of canary yellow across the stern. Their pennants reflected the ranks of the commissioned officers, and the adherence to order continued in the yard itself with its teams of shipwrights, storekeepers, clerks, ropers and victuallers, all of whom were subservient to the most prominent figure: the master shipwright, Adam Hayes.
It was into Hayes’s care that the Earl of Pembroke was now passed. Three days after her arrival, on 5 April, he received his instructions. The vessel was to be ‘sheathed, filled and fitted’ to convey ‘to the Southward the persons intended to be sent thither to observe the Transit of Venus over the Sun’s Disk’. The board had settled on a second, administrative, point too. She was ‘to be registered on the List of the Navy as a Bark by the name of the Endeavour’.1
The decision to call the exploration ship Endeavour was almost certainly confirmed at the Board of Admiralty on 5 April – the day the note to Deptford was sent. The First Lord and leading voice of the 1768 Commission was Admiral Hawke. It is appealing to think of Hawke proposing the name, Endeavour, eager to imbue the forthcoming voyage with a quality many had associated with him since Quiberon Bay. By doing so he would not only instil a daring identity onto the ship but, as he well knew, it would be a signal for the crew: an inner quality of temperament for them to aspire towards.
Perhaps the better question is not who suggested the name but why it was a likely choice in April 1768. The Admiralty meeting took place exactly a week after Wilkes’s election victory at Middlesex. All London remained in thrall to his audacity. ‘I will endeavour through life’, Wilkes had proclaimed, ‘to merit the continuation of your approbation … I intreat you to accept of my best endeavours to express the joy which inspires me on so interesting, so affecting, an occasion.’2 ‘Best Endeavours’ was the resonant term of the moment. On 16 April Franklin wrote to one of his Pennsylvanian correspondents, ‘While I stay, I shall use my best Endeavours in the Service of the Province.’3 It seems that something of the brave, resolute atmosphere of April 1768 rubbed off on Fishburn’s bark. It was no longer to be the starchy Earl of Pembroke. Instead it was the lucent, probing Endeavour.
Though the name conferred a fresh sense of identity, it would hardly have been among Adam Hayes’s chief concerns. Hayes was a veteran of his trade. Over the past decade he had specialised in the pioneering class of seventy-four-gun third-rate ships of the line, dashing warships with swaggering names – Magnificent, Albion, Superb, Dragon – all elegant lines and brute firepower. Occasionally he was obliged to take a different type of vessel in hand, a fourteen-gun sloop, a cutter or a yacht like the William and Mary. But in his career Hayes had never had to superintend the conversion of a Whitby collier. Nothing of her type had ever been formally purchased into the navy before.
Hayes was in his twelfth year as Deptford’s master shipwright, a position of considerable status. Now land-bound, Hayes nonetheless had as much an understanding of the sea as anyone. As a young boy in the 1730s he had begun his career as a ship’s carpenter. Soon after he was taken on board HMS Centurion, starting an association with the most celebrated voyage of the age. The Centurion had sailed from Spithead in September 1740, a ship of sixty guns with a complement of 400, under the command of Commodore George Anson. She embarked in convoy with the Gloucester (fifty guns), the Severn (fifty guns), the Pearl (forty guns), Wager (twenty-four guns), the Tryal (eight guns), and a set of merchant vessels – including a Whitby collier – that carried supplies for the total 1,900 men. At the beginning of a war with Spain, Anson had been instructed to disrupt the Spanish trade across the South Seas.
Almost everyone in Britain knew something of Anson’s voyage. There were the tremendous hardships the squadron had encountered off Cape Horn. There was the subsequent outbreak of scurvy and other sicknesses which killed nearly 1,400 of the original crew. Then there was the majestic triumph when Anson’s Centurion sighted the fabled treasure galleon, Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, on its passage between Manila and Acapulco in 1743. Called the Prize of all the Oceans, Anson bore down on the galleon and in an action of less than two hours had taken her. Not since the age of Sir Francis Drake had there been such plunder. The galleon was carrying 1,313,843 pieces of eight, and 35,682 ounces of virgin silver, enough to transform Anson, once the prize money had been calculated, into one of England’s richest men. The whole expedition was immortalised in A Voyage Around the World by George Anson, which became the dramatic travel narrative of the age, with the fight against the Nuestra Señora de Covadonga its central breathless scene. The Centurion’s voyage had come to epitomise the glory of adventure and was told and retold in thousands of tavern tales and street-corner ballads.
Even now, more than twenty years on, those who had fought on the Centurion had their reputations illuminated by a radiant afterglow. Some of the officers – John Campbell and Augustus Keppel among them – had since risen to prominence in the navy. Whether Hayes, like Keppel, still bore the scars of that voyage in missing teeth or shrapnel gashes is unknown, but he had been there on 20 June 1743 when Anson engaged the galleon. Thereafter, too, it seems that he had become one of Anson’s protégés. Soon after the Centurion’s return, in 1746, Hayes had been appointed master shipwright of the Gibraltar shipyard. From there he progressed to Plymouth to work under the influential Benjamin Slade. Among Britain’s leading shipbuilders, there were few better mentors. Slade seems to have introduced Hayes to his nephew, Thomas Slade, an innovative young shipbuilder who designed many of the iconic warships of the time, including the revolutionary class of seventy-fours, as well as massive warships like HMS Victory.
Hayes followed Thomas Slade through a series of appointments in the 1750s: as master shipwright at Sheerness, then master shipwright at Woolwich, then at Chatham. Hayes was not only competent, he was popular too. When his promotion to the Deptford Yard came through in 1755, the Whitehall Evening Post reported how he had set out from Chatham ‘attended by a great number of Officers and others from the Dock Yard, who (to show their true Regard for so worthy and so good a Man) intend to accompany him as far as Deptford. It is remarkable that his kind and affable Behaviour had gained him a universal Love and Esteem.’4
Hayes knew that ships were fundamentally strong objects. Were they to be attacked with axes or hammers, it would take some effort to split them apart. But theirs was not robust strength. As soon as a ship was sailing in the open sea it began to degrade. The hempen ropes shrank, frayed or chafed. Sails tore. Yards and masts might spring and the caulked seams that kept a ship watertight were worn down by salt water. In the coastal service this was not a problem. Relays between London and Shields took no longer than a month and at any time a collier could be beached. Any Whitby master knew how to perform basic sea-side maintenance. A collier might be breamed, burning the grass, ooze and weeds from her bottom, then rubbing her with a mixture of sulphur and tallow. A similar procedure was called boot-topping, when a ship was scraped at the waterline. The favoured method of the diligent was careening, which meant ballasting the ship to one side so she could be scraped right under.
But once on a long, deep sea passage, all this routine maintenance became difficult. Weeds or periwinkles or other sea creatures might accumulate on the bottom. The officers of the warship Champion paused one day to have her hull inspected in the Firth of Fife, finding ‘to their amazement, large clusters of shell-fish, almost as large as sugar loaves’ stuck to the bottom. The Champion’s enterprising captain had these pulled off and used them to ‘scrub and cleanse’ her bottom, but in the midst of an ocean this sort of thing was not possible. A ragged hull would disrupt sailing and make fraught the simplest of manoeuvres. An even worse pest lurked in the South Seas. This was the teredo worm, a bivalve mollusc. ‘The worm’ had been the source of much destruction since the age of exploration began. Thriving in temperatures between 60–80°F, in its larval stage the worm burrowed into the submerged timbers of a ship, infesting it, hollowing it out, with inevitable consequences.
That such a meek invertebrate could destroy a massive ship seemed the stuff of Greek myth, but as the era of exploration advanced the challenge had become acute. For centuries shipwrights had sought a remedy for the worm, smearing ships’ bottoms with tar, ox or goat hair, and covering them with brass or, lately, copper. Several experimental ‘coppered’ ships had come out of Deptford Yard recently, but with time short and no settled opinion yet reached on the process, the Admiralty had decided it best for Endeavour simply to be ‘filled’. This meant that Fishburn’s oak floor pieces were to be smeared with tar and matted hair. Onto this viscous surface, more oak boards were fitted before the whole of the bottom portion of the hull was covered with broad-headed iron nails, a process called ‘hob-nailing’.
Once this preparatory step was done, Hayes was able to concentrate on the interior. The Earl of Pembroke had been selected for her broad voluminous hull. Every inch of this was to be turned to use. By mid-April, plans had been drawn up. An entire new deck was to run through her middle, seven feet below the main deck, giving room for the expanded crew to sleep and eat. The two existing decks – the foremost fall and the after fall – were to be retained but integrated within this design, which generated some odd spaces. Beneath the forecastle and quarterdeck the interior deck would be just four feet high, hopeless for standing in and awkward for everything else. At least it left a generous space in the stern for the commissioned officers: a great cabin, a lobby, cabins and a pantry lit by a skylight, all accessible by a ladder from the quarterdeck. More cabins were inserted into the bows, just behind the eyes, spaces for her warrant officers to mess. Beneath this, in the depths, there were to be more partitions, places for the stores needed on a long voyage.
Everything was detailed in letters between Deptford and Whitehall. On 7 April the order for the sheathing was given. On 12 April a longboat, a pinnace and a yawl were added to the list of requirements. Progress, at long, satisfying last, was coming at a pace. On 19 April, the initials AH – almost certainly those of Adam Hayes – appear on a note to the Navy Board, proposing certain tasks be outsourced to joiners: that a run of steps be added to the side, that lockers and cott cabins be fitted, new bulkheads and compartments installed. Endeavour was becoming something new. Where there had been space, there was now shape. Hatches led down into an interior unmistakeably that of a naval ship. On 25 April the yard officers were able to report to Stephens, the Admiralty secretary, ‘The officers of HM Yard at Deptford say the Endeavour Bark will be ready to receive men next week.’5
In the heated aftermath of Wilkes’s election victory a cantankerous letter from a ‘Mr John Trott’ appeared in the Public Advertiser. ‘The rage for carriages is so great at present’, it began, ‘and the town and its avenues so full of them, that some speedy method should be taken to stop them.’ Trott, aptly named and certainly a pseudonym for one of the city’s wits, complained that ‘every man who pretends to the smallest share of taste, has almost forgot how to use his legs’.6
As so often with the Georgian press, the letter used wry comedy to make a serious point. The rising mercantile classes, Trott asserted, had exchanged freedom for luxury. ‘[I] sincerely beseech them, as they love liberty, to stand upon their own feet, nor any longer suffer themselves to be run away with by any headstrong brute or brutes, to whose caprice, the moment they step into a carriage, they submit their persons.’
All the nations we read of, that from a state of freedom have fallen into slavery, have bought that disgrace upon themselves by luxury. That carriages are strong symptoms of luxury, is not to be disputed; and I think I know some men yet who look upon them but as stately prisons. The freest people are certainly those who never knew the use of them, and are most likely to stand their ground. We have a late instance in our own country, where the only few who seem to be possessed of the genuine and uncontroulable spirit of freedom, I mean the voters for Mr Wilkes, almost to a man, walked on foot to Brentford, to poll for that honest gentleman; and many of them, I dare say, dread the thought of being conveyed in a carriage as much, nay more, than they would the pillory.7
Trott’s letter is a sample of the conversations happening in London after the Middlesex election. The focus was ‘liberty’, which today means ‘freedom’ in a general sense but which in the eighteenth century was a word loaded with political significance. As the nation state had strengthened and expanded, with its national bank, standing army, judiciary and taxes, individuals had increasingly felt its force pressing in upon them. ‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had famously written in The Social Contract (1762).8 By 1768 the extent of a person’s subjection to the state was foremost in their minds. At one of the capital’s ‘great speaking or disputing clubs’, the question was proposed: ‘If happiness be in our power, in what state of life is it most easily acquired?’ One answer came back, ‘What is it that we pant after in this country: – Liberty. What is the favourite wish and solace of our hearts? – Liberty. What is the surest road to fame in this country, – to signalize one’s self in the cause of liberty.’9
Watching on, Catharine Macaulay wrote of ‘the peculiar spirit’ loose in the city’s streets. Wilkes had stirred something fervent, something latent. ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ rang the slogan. For Macaulay, whose convictions about liberty were every bit as (and perhaps much more) deeply held as Wilkes’s, the Middlesex episode had been a confusing one. She was thrilled at the humbling of the ministerial faction at the ballot box, but equally she felt consternation that ‘a man guilty of so many excesses and inconsistencies’ as Wilkes had become a popular hero.10 High on his success, Wilkes had soared to altitudes of grandiloquence in his victory speech to the Middlesex voters:
Let them call their PUSILLANIMITY prudence, while they ignominiously kiss the rod of power, and tamely stoop to the yoke, which artful ministers insidiously prepare, and arbitrarily impose. You, Gentlemen, have shewn, that you are neither to be deceived nor enslaved.11
Swelling Wilkes’s vanity to a pitch was a letter from Denis Diderot in Paris, written days after his election. ‘I am the first to felicitate you on the occasion, and to join my congratulations to those of all the friends of the human race, which was certainly never intended to wear fetters. The august senate of Great-Britain will still count a Wilkes among its most illustrious members.’12
Or would it? No one was yet sure how the government would react. ‘The ferment is not yet over’, Benjamin Franklin conceded in a letter to his son in mid-April, ‘he has promised to surrender himself to the Court next Wednesday, and another tumult is then expected; and what the upshot will be no one can yet foresee.’ The showdown to which Franklin alluded was set for 20 April. Then the British legal system would have its say on Wilkes’s status as an outlaw. With typical brio, Wilkes had let it be known that he would present himself voluntarily to the Court of the King’s Bench at Westminster and act in perfect obedience with its wishes. He also let it be known that he expected to be acquitted to take up his seat in the Commons and resume his former status as an MP.
Wednesday 20 April came and Wilkes kept his word, surrendering to the court. The streets all around the Palace of Westminster were thronged with expectant crowds. Wilkes later complained that ‘an idle tale was artfully and industriously propagated’ by ‘the spies and runners’ of the government, warning that ‘great riots and tumults would certainly happen.’13 In consequence all Westminster’s constables had been put on patrol, two battalions of guards were on standby in St James’s Park while more troops were posted in St George’s Fields, the Savoy and the Tower. This, many reckoned, was Bute’s doing. It was said that the troops ‘were furnished with sixteen rounds of ammunition’.
The day turned out anticlimactic. There were legal problems that prevented Wilkes’s case from going ahead. It was postponed for a week, during which time tensions simmered. On 27 April, at noon, Wilkes came to court again. This time the charges were admitted and a future date appointed for the case to go ahead. In the meantime, Wilkes was refused bail. Until his case could be tried he was to be committed to the King’s Bench Prison, in St George’s Fields. Now a prisoner, Wilkes was taken into a private room by the marshal of the prison and from there was escorted out by two tipstaffs who ushered him into a hackney coach. This scene was inevitably played out in front of the crowds that now followed Wilkes everywhere – Horace Walpole had taken to calling them ‘the third house of parliament’ – and the sight of their hero being arrested provided them with just the provocation they needed.
The hackney carriage only progressed as far as Westminster Bridge before it was halted by the mob. Wilkes appealed for calm, but within a minute the officials were overpowered. ‘I tell you, Master Wilkes’, one cried out, ‘horses often draw asses, but as you are a man, you shall be drawn by men.’14 The horses were then unhitched, and Wilkes, sensing the trouble, bid the tipstaffs to flee while they could. Then, in brazen violation of the court’s order, the crowd bore Wilkes in triumph through London’s streets. The procession ended up far to the east at the Three Tuns tavern, Spitalfields. There boisterous celebrations commenced. Having first been the prisoner of the Crown then the prisoner of the people, only as night fell in Spitalfields was Wilkes able to make his getaway. He slipped out of the tavern in disguise and made his way to St George’s Fields, surrendering to the turnkey. ‘Many persons have fled disguised out of a Prison’, wondered the Courant in astonishment, ‘but Mr Wilkes is perhaps the first who ever stole disguised into one.’15
These were unsettling days for the ministry. The people had demonstrated a disturbing fact: that, together, they could face down the might of the government and win. This was the terror of democracy – a word that still carried disturbing connotations of its original Greek, ‘mob rule’. At St George’s Fields, to the south of the Thames, Wilkes understood how tense the situation had become. Remembering the incident on Westminster Bridge, he wrote to a friend, ‘I have saved three lives last Wednesday, which I hold to be the most glorious day of my life. Such a rescue, such a triumphant entry from Westminster to Spitalfields. I am king of this great people, and will reign for their good.’16
As April brightened into May, St George’s Fields was established as Wilkes’s new headquarters. His every appearance at the gaol window was deemed newsworthy, and the disruption he had seeded continued to intensify. Outraged at the government’s treatment of their hero, tradesmen and apprentices took the opportunity to vent their own grievances. The King’s Yard at Deptford was not spared. After the vigorous weeks of work on Endeavour in early April, all momentum stalled. The yard was dependent on manual labour, but like the milliners, the hatters and the coal-heavers further upriver, the carpenters laid down their tools – seizing the chance to petition for higher wages.
On 1 May, traditionally a day of fairs, dancing and merriment, ‘a very numerous body of sailors’ began to congregate on the shores of the Thames at Wapping. They detained all the outward-bound ships. On 2 May they massed ‘to the amount of many thousands’ in Stepney Fields, where their demands were gathered into a petition. This done, the sailors paraded towards the Royal Exchange, joining all the way ‘in repeated huzzas’.17 Only as they reached the City were they persuaded to disband. Some of the sailors acquiesced and went home but others joined the steady stream of malcontents who were making their way to St George’s Fields. For now, at least, Wilkes was their king and the King’s Bench Prison his palace.
Desperate to contain the situation, Lord North, Chancellor of the Exchequer, hosted a meeting of the king’s party in Whitehall. It was agreed that Wilkes must not be permitted to take his seat in the Commons. When the king heard this, he approved. Excluding Wilkes, wrote George III, would act to ‘curb that levelling principle that has been of late years gaining ground and restore that due obedience to law and government which this constitution has so wisely formed as the sole means of preventing liberty from degenerating into licentiousness’.18
It was too late for high-mindedness. For the first ten days of May London’s streets were filled with marching protestors, ‘colours flying, drums beating, and fifes playing’, carrying petitions to their nervous masters. Wilkes later maintained that everything would have calmed down but for the unfortunate arrival of a Scottish detachment of troops. ‘Afterwards they raised a disturbance by the rough manner of treating the people, by their abuse, their menaces, and the actually pushing at and wounding them with their bayonets.’19 As ever in these situations, accounts differ on the specifics of what happened next. The government would laud the troops’ alacrity, their ‘zeal and good behaviour’. Others would say they panicked. One story, at least, is clear. Provoked by a man wearing a red coat, a small band of Scottish troops pursued him to a ‘cow house’. There they cornered him and shot him dead. This had barely happened before they realised they had hit the wrong man. The innocent victim, William Allen, was the son of an innkeeper. A spectator, not knowing what was happening, ‘on seeing some persons run, he ran also, but was unhappily mistaken’.20
As news of Allen’s murder was relayed through the streets, the situation caught fire. Stones and bricks were thrown. A party of horse grenadiers was called, as was a justice of the peace who read the riot act. ‘Damn the king, damn the Parliament, damn the justices!’, chanted the mob. Within minutes the soldiers were told to fire. But again they were clumsy rather than clinical. Aiming over the crowd’s heads, the soldiers inadvertently struck bystanders further off. One was sat in a hay cart. Another was selling oranges. A third was innocently walking down the road. The mob, seething, surging, began to move. Horses were rushing at full speed, galloping ‘backwards and forwards’. ‘Such a day has not been in England since the accession of the mild house of Brunswick’21, one of Wilkes’s publications later asserted. The mob progressed to London Bridge then crossed into the City, carrying Allen’s body on a slab, telling everyone of the outrages. The news flew. The English had been mown down ‘like flocks of sparrows, in absolute wantonness’. There had ‘not been such a massacre of the English by Scotsmen since Prestonpans and Falkirk.’22 Riots and violence spilled through London for days. This was the moment for everyone to voice their own latent grievances. In Limehouse and Shadwell, some 5,000 to 15,000 sailors – the number was variously estimated – marched all the way to the Palace of Westminster to see their petition accepted.
The mob came to Deptford too. ‘A great body of sailors assembled’ jubilant around the docks, went a report. They ‘forcibly went on board several ships, unreefed their top-sails, and vowed no ships should sail out of the Thames till the merchants had consented to raise their wages.’23 In Deptford, where precious weeks had slipped away without a day’s work being completed on Endeavour, the collier could hardly have escaped the attentions of the mob, being the easiest of all targets in the single dock.
Out of this multitude, one sailor emerged from Assembly Row, Mile End Old Town. He was not setting out to march or to riot. James Cook – tall, purposeful, calm, deliberate – late master of HMS Grenville, was not the rioting type. Nor did this man have reason to complain. Unlike his peers at Stepney Fields, the spring of 1768 had been kind to Cook. It had provided him with an excellent opportunity, and the most unusual of jobs.
On 13 May, as the disorder was at its height, Cook took and passed his lieutenant’s examination. The event is captured in the usual terse language of official documents. ‘We have examined Mr James Cook, who by Certificate appears to be more than 39 Years of Age, and find he has gone to Sea more than 11 Years in the Ships and Qualities undermentioned.’ There follows a list of names and dates: the Eagle (able seaman then master’s mate), the Solebay (master), the Pembroke (master), the Northumberland (master), the Grenville Schooner (master). ‘He produceth Journals kept by himself in the Eagle & Northumberland and Certificates from Captains Craig, Palliser, & Bateman of his Diligence & he can Splice, Knot, Reef a Sail, &c and is qualified to do the duty of an Able Seaman and Midshipman – 13 May, 1768.’24
This was a deft, administrative review of what already had been an impressive career for the ‘strong-faced, tall, well set-up, healthy’ man that presented himself at the Admiralty that day.25 With riots outside, it was an appropriate context for them to meet Cook. Throughout his service, whether on the quarterdeck of a man-of-war under fire or mazing through coastal shoals in a boat, Cook was known to retain an even temperament. He was not docile or wooden, but Cook had a seemingly natural ability to absorb the manifold happenings of life and counter them with cool rationalism. Some might have appreciated Cook’s talents already, but few knew just how good he was.
Like Thomas Milner and Henry Taylor, Cook had begun his professional sailing career in Whitby, in ships like those Fishburn built. Born the son of a farm labourer in Marton, a moorside village, Cook had ventured over the hills to Whitby as a lad of seventeen in 1746. His master, John Walker, was one of the leading Quaker shipowners in the town, and he took a special interest in his new boy. Cook learned the art of loading, hauling and splicing, eventually progressing to the art of ship management and elementary mathematics. In late 1747, aged eighteen or nineteen, Cook had first gone to sea on the 318-ton collier Freelove, a collier built by the Coates family.26
Cook had stayed in Whitby until 1755, overlapping with a young Henry Taylor. The two of them shared traits. Cook had Taylor’s caution, the same knack for building camaraderie among his crews, the same levels of diligence and love of duty. But Cook also had traits Taylor did not. Chief among these was ambition. Having completed his training and risen to the point of being offered his own command, Cook abruptly left Walker, Whitby and the coal trade for greater things. What prompted him to go has been much debated. A difficult man to know well, reticent, not given to outward reflection, Cook wrote of his desire ‘to take future fortune’. This may have been wanderlust. But equally it feels more calculated than that. All that can be said for certain is that in June 1755, Cook volunteered for the Royal Navy at Wapping. A relatively old and unusually skilled recruit, Cook had signed up for a hard life in the lowest strata of the navy while his old friends in the north grew rich working contracts during the Seven Years War.
But if adventure was the lure, then Cook certainly found it. Within a month of volunteering he had earned a promotion to master’s mate on HMS Eagle. From there he had risen to become the sailing master – ‘the chief professional on board though not the highest ranking one’ – of the seventy-gun Northumberland, with her complement of 500. Cook had seen action in the Bay of Biscay, commanding a prize into Plymouth. He had crossed the Atlantic to Virginia and New York and he had been involved in the Canadian campaign, helping to usher the fleet up the St Lawrence River in the superb prelude to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.
Throughout these years Cook had thrived. He demonstrated himself as diligent, capable and having some usual inner force of character. As his biographer J. C. Beaglehole observed:
The genius of Cook was not, in the ordinary sense, creative. Nor was it precocious. There was nothing aesthetic, nothing of early brilliance, about him. He would have been startled at the idea that anything he did might touch the emotions. His energy of mind was of that mature kind that is, on the intellectual side, critical, a sort of analytical and detective energy; on the practical, the constructive side, it was an energy of planning, of administration and foresight. It came to fruition almost by accident.27
The ‘analytical and detective energy’ Beaglehole writes of could be seen most of all in Cook’s surveying work. It is intriguing to wonder whether he got his earliest taste of precise measurement watching Charlton plotting out the Esk-side farms in the 1750s. Perhaps Cook did see the schoolmaster with his flags and theodolites, demonstrating techniques Cook was to perfect during his spare hours as a young warrant officer. Then, Cook, thirsty for knowledge, learned to draw with clarity and precision. He mastered scientific instruments. By the time the Seven Years War had finished, Cook’s skills had been noticed by one of his old captains, a fellow Yorkshireman, Hugh Palliser, who had him appointed to the Newfoundland Survey. Retaining his rank as master, Cook had been given a twelve-gun schooner, HMS Grenville.
Taken in the broad context of events in the colonies, the Grenville was no glorious command. But for Cook she had served admirably. Impelled by a preternatural desire to master his environment, to freeze the wild coasts within the confines of a chart of an inch to a league, he had sailed over hundreds of miles of foggy coastline in Newfoundland. He had probed into bays, inlets and creeks, planted flags, triangulated points, computed angles and sounded depths, in the estimation of Nicholas Thomas, ‘working magic on rugged and intricate coastlines, reducing a shoreline as torn as an awful wound to points and lines on paper’.28 Approaching forty, Cook had become something different to the keen-eyed, dutiful Whitby sailor Taylor epitomised. He was a naval asset, one of a few hydrographically trained experts. For some years he had been noticed by the grandees at the Admiralty who had acknowledged his ‘Genius and Capacity’. Now these skills and connections had brought him an unexpected opportunity.
Cook had established a routine during his time on the Newfoundland Survey. He sailed in early spring and returned in autumn, spending the winters with his wife Elizabeth and their family – James and Nathaniel, their two young boys, and Elizabeth their infant daughter – at their home in Mile End, drawing and perfecting his charts, corresponding with the Admiralty, sourcing books and preparing for the next year’s season. It was shortly before the Grenville’s intended departure in April 1768 that the first indication came that something else was intended for him. On 12 April, nine days after Dalrymple’s appearance at the Royal Society Council meeting, the Admiralty minutes signalled ‘Mr Cook who is master of the Grenville schooner, is to be employed elsewhere.’29 Opaque as it was, the plan may already have been in motion. The Lords of the Admiralty and organisers of the Venus expedition at the Royal Society knew that time was running short. A voyage to the far side of the world, to an as yet unspecified location, could take as long as a year. By April 1768 just fourteen months remained to them.
To those like Franklin or Nevil Maskelyne at the Royal Society, it must have seemed that this was history repeating itself. During the transit expeditions of 1761 voyagers had set off too late, alternative locations had had to be substituted and attempts had been abandoned. Desperate not to fail again, having lost Dalrymple and with London abandoned to rioting and disorder, it seems the responsibility for finding a replacement commander was passed to the navy. Cook’s nomination rested on his relationship with Hugh Palliser, the outgoing governor of Newfoundland and an influential figure. Palliser liked Cook; he had seen him as both a sailing master and a hydrographical surveyor and he had faith in his abilities.
Cook heard of the South Seas voyage during the first ten days of April. If he was surprised at the news of such an unusual commission, the first shock must have been followed by a second. Cook had first gone to sea in a Whitby collier. Twenty-one years later, having travelled across the Atlantic to find his fortune, it transpired that this fortune was to be precisely the type of ship he had first learned to sail. Events had conspired strangely but auspiciously. Like any Whitby apprentice, Cook had an instinctive understanding of what Whitby colliers could do, how they might behave in a given scenario, how far they might be driven and when they needed care.
But before Cook could take command his lieutenant’s examinations were a necessary step. Passing the test must have been a moment of pride for Cook. He could now count himself among the sons of gentlemen as part of the Royal Navy’s officer class. As first lieutenant of HM Bark Endeavour, he had the undisputed privilege of the quarterdeck, a servant of his own and a distinct uniform of a blue wool coat with white facings, white waistcoat, cuffs and breeches. There would be money too. On 5 May Cook attended a Royal Society meeting with the Earl of Morton, Franklin, Maskelyne and the rest of the council who had all been ‘informd that Mr Js Cook … was a proper person to be one of the Observers’ of the Transit of Venus. In a society where class boundaries were often impenetrable, Cook must have felt off kilter standing in front of peers and philosophers, receiving the news he was to be paid ‘£120 a year for victualling himself’. The upturn in his fortunes was crowned on 19 May at a further meeting when Cook ‘accepted the sum of one hundred Guineas as a Gratuity for his trouble as one of the Observers’.30
The die was now cast. Both the Admiralty and Royal Society were content. Lieutenant Cook was to lead a voyage to the South Seas in Endeavour to observe the Transit of Venus. This clarity coincided with easing tensions in London. Never again after mid-May was the threat of riot so extreme. On 18 May news reached the Navy Board from Deptford: ‘We have undocked the Endeavour from the single dock and put her into the Bason in order to finish the painting &c’. A week later the Admiralty minutes signalled it was ‘Resolved that the Endeavour Bark be fitted out at Deptford for Foreign Service, manned with 70 men and victualled for 12 months.’31
It is enchanting to think of Cook first clapping eyes on Endeavour, a Whitby collier, lifted up on the stocks of the dry dock as if she was a fighting frigate. Cook had seen scores of cats and barks aloft in such a state at the Coates and Fishburn yards. But to encounter one at the King’s Yard must have been completely novel – like visiting an old house to find the rooms repainted and the favourite furniture replaced. This was a Fishburn bark, there was no doubt about that. But it had been subjected to a surprising transformation. The Endeavour had a complete internal deck running through its middle where the coals used to be heaped high. There were cot cabins for the warrant officers, fitted with miniature pantry doors. There were the even rows of hooks for the hammocks, long benches for mealtimes, sail rooms, a magazine and the officer quarters further back. Gone was the spartan emptiness Milner had presided over. There was more to Endeavour yet. Down below this interior deck was space for provisions, which would soon be heaped high with bags of flour, barrels of beers, casks of spirits. There would be bags of bread (21,226 pounds), 4,000 pieces of salt beef, 6,000 pieces of salt pork and 800 pounds of suet, 120 bushels of wheat, 10 bushels of oatmeal, 2,500 pounds of raisins, 120 gallons of oil, 1,500 pounds of sugar, 500 gallons of vinegar, 160 pounds of mustard seeds.32
Endeavour’s transformation gathered pace as spring turned to summer. With the major structural changes complete, the insides of the ship acquired a different feel. A regulator clock was brought aboard, part of the apparatus for the Venus observation. It was a precision instrument that suggested Endeavour’s purpose. She was no longer to be governed by traditional chants, rules of thumb and good lookouts; she was to be an instrument of scientific exactitude. Along with the regulator clock came more quantifying devices: globes, sextants, telescopes, azimuth compasses, dipping needles, thermometers, and then there were technical books on navigation, medicine and histories of South Seas voyages by explorers like Anson and Abel Tasman that were slotted into bookcases in the great cabin.
As Cook went about sourcing his philosophical instruments and books in Fleet Street, the first members of crew began to enlist. Assigned to the newly fitted cabins was the second lieutenant, a twenty-nine-year-old Londoner called Zachary Hicks. Also with his own quarters was the surgeon William Monkhouse. Further forward, two other warrant officers were allotted cabins: the boatswain John Gathrey – ‘of good testimony’ – whose berth was to the larboard side beneath the forecastle, and the carpenter, whose cabin lay opposite on the starboard side. Cook did not have much of a following of his own to bring with him from the Grenville, just four dependable seamen, one of whom, Peter Flowers, had served with him in Newfoundland for five years. But he did exploit his position to draft in a few of his own picks, including a young cousin of his wife’s called Isaac Smith, who had some aptitude as a draughtsman.
Scores of other, faceless recruits would join this inner core. The names of all of these survive, though in most cases little else. But even so it becomes less necessary to imagine. As the Earl of Pembroke vanishes and the Endeavour supplants her, so details emerge into faithfully recorded history. On Friday 10 June, for instance, we know ‘a proper quantity of Sour Krout’ was hauled on board as a remedy for scurvy.33 The same day Endeavour was ‘supplied with a machine for sweetening foul water’. On 30 June Cook requested a ‘Green Baize Floor Cloth’ for the great cabin, and on Wednesday 20 July the Admiralty confirmed that ‘twenty cork jackets’ had been purchased and sent aboard. These are snippets plucked from the scores of letters that flew from Whitehall to Deptford, their contents relating to every deck, every mast, every yard, every cabin and every boat – there were to be three: a long boat, a pinnace and a yawl. The sight of all this would have been a delight to Fishburn, who by now would have heard the news of the voyage from Milner. Moreover he would have loved to have looked over the plans Hayes signed off in July. They froze Endeavour in profile, a ship unlike any other. She had metamorphosed into a hybrid, a blend of a transport and a sloop. Even for those sages on the river she must have posed a problem of classification. Whatever she was, Cook was doing his best to get a feel of her. Running her through her paces in the Thames, he scribbled notes to the Navy Board that she ‘swims too much by the head’ and needed more ballasting to fix her trim.
There was little time for such meddling. It was now weeks since the Admiralty secretary had fired off his impatient note, sanctioning the purchase of the Earl of Pembroke ‘to save time’. Months later, Cook had still to depart. It was now much less than a year before the expedition was required to be in the South Seas and, as far as planetary orbits went, they may as well be a decade late as a day. But the delay had yielded an unexpected advantage. On 19 May, HMS Dolphin, under the command of Samuel Wallis, had anchored in the Downs after a circumnavigation of the globe that had taken them across the Pacific. Wallis had been sent as Byron had before him, to search for Terra Australis. The continent, if it existed, had eluded him, but he had made one tantalising discovery. It was a tropical island, ‘large, fertile and extremely populous’, where Wallis had stayed six weeks. ‘From the behaviour of the inhabitants’, ran an account that was syndicated in newspapers across Britain, ‘they had reason to believe she was the first and only ship they had ever seen.’34
Wallis had taken possession of this land for Britain, calling it King George’s Island, and from the stories that were soon circulating it was an extraordinary place. The island was governed by a queen, ‘to whom the natives seemed to pay the utmost reverence, as they obeyed not only her words, but even her looks and gestures’. This ‘Queen of the Island’ had loaded the Dolphin with presents and she had breakfasted with Wallis in the great cabin on tea, bread and butter. Along with her chief minister she had made a tour of the frigate. ‘She took very particular notice of everything she saw, and seemd highly pleasd.’ The Dolphin had returned her gifts in the form of looking glasses, wine glasses, buttons and earrings, ‘but what she seemd most fond of was Linnen Cloath’, revealed one of the crew. ‘I therefor gave her a very Good Ruffeld Shirt, and showd her how to put it on, this trifeling present gaind her heart.’35
With their own country mired in confusion, this faraway, untainted island was bound to appeal. That it was ruled by a beneficent queen reminded the English, too, of their own golden days. Two hundred thousand people were said to live on the island, a significant size, and after some skirmishes, the islanders who were ‘in general taller and stouter made than our people, and are mostly of a copper colour, with black hair’, had proved friendly and eager to trade. ‘It abounds with all the choicest productions of the earth’, went the report, and these were exchanged for such trivialities as nails, buttons, beads and trinkets. Wallis, ill in the Dolphin, had forbidden his men from exploring much beyond ‘a small part of the Bay where the Ship Lay’. But one of the officers had struck five miles up a river where he had discovered ‘cotton, Ginger, Indigo and many oyther things growing, that we knowed nothing of before’. In Wallis’s absence, too, an amity had sprung up between the Dolphin and the inhabitants that had quickly ripened. The women were said to be beautiful, nubile and with no trace of modesty or chastity, being happy to consort with the sailors. They wore garlands about their necks and danced seductive dances in the warm evenings as the Pacific sun sank behind the ocean waves.
All this was a welcome contrast to the reports of rioting and hardship at home. The news from America was no better. The repeal of the Stamp Act in March 1766 had briefly brought the colonial relationship back onto a happy footing. But the cordiality had not lasted long. In the summer of 1767 Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘a dazzling orator and an amusing but unreliable man’, had introduced a new series of taxes.36 The ‘Townshend Acts’ established levies on tea, paper, glass, lead and painter’s colours. They were designed, like the Stamp Act before, to raise a proportion of the revenue required for maintaining an army in America directly from the colonies.
Townshend died suddenly in September 1767 so did not live to witness the furious response his legislation elicited. In colonial America it was treated as the second coming of the Stamp Act. Talk was again of non-compliance and of the non-importation of British goods. ‘Save your money, and you save your country’, the Boston Gazette’s slogan ran. The British press, meanwhile, had begun to growl back at ‘the Americans’, as ‘diggers of pits for this country’, ‘lunaticks’, ‘sworn enemies’, ‘false’, ‘ungrateful’, ‘cut-throats’, slurs to which Franklin had objected, ‘as a treatment of customers that I doubt is not like to bring them back to our shop’.37
News of George’s Island, a sweet, zephyr land, sparkled in comparison with this. Accounts lengthened with the days. It was being spoken of as an Elysium, a fairy land of innocence, play and plenty.
It was not just the British who were animated by the news. Ever since the end of the Seven Years War, the French minister Choiseul had kept a close watch on Britain’s overseas activities. By 1768 he had spies in the Navy Board as well as the dockyards. As fascinated by reports as the British, soon a French syndicate was preparing an expedition to the island. The Spanish were alerted too. Their ambassador in London succeeded in purchasing a copy of the Dolphin’s secret accounts, which included bearings for the island. Guessing that enterprises of these sorts would be underway, the government had leaked the wrong latitude to the press. In the meantime Wallis had Anglicised the area as much as he was able, not just naming King George’s Island, but also scattering a variety of other titles on islets and atolls: Charlotte Island, Gloucester Island, Boscawen Island, Keppel Island and Duke of York Island.
The government did not yet know what advantages George’s Island would bring in the future as a trading post. But for the Royal Society it presented a perfect solution to a nagging problem. Its South Seas location fell right within the area Maskelyne had marked as suitable for the transit observation. On 9 June, soon after Wallis’s arrival in British waters, the Royal Society informed the Admiralty of their decision ‘to have their Observers conveyed to Port Royal in Georges Land Lately discovered by Mr Wallace in the Dolphin’. There was more news too. The society had appointed Charles Green to accompany Cook and act as one of the official observers. Green, thirty-three years old, was a trained astronomer who had worked at Greenwich under Maskelyne. His appointment brought a weight of formal education to the Endeavour crew that Cook, on his own, lacked.
Another benefit of the Dolphin’s return was that Cook was able to enlist several members of her crew. The most useful addition was a Virginian-born officer called John Gore. A superb sailor, Gore had twice sailed round the world in the Dolphin, first with Byron then with Wallis, both times as master’s mate. His duties on the last voyage had been considerably inflated because an illness had kept Wallis in his cabin for much of the time. In Wallis’s absence Gore had proved himself a figure of strength among the ship’s company, ‘imperturbably and absolutely reliable’. Another of the mates, Robert Molyneux, a Lancastrian, was appointed sailing master, while an eighteen-year-old Yorkshireman called Richard Pickersgill, a gifted draughtsman, was to serve as one of his mates. Joining them all was Charles Clerke, who had sailed on the Dolphin’s first circumnavigation with Byron. To protect them all from attack, Endeavour was to be fitted with ten carriage guns and twelve swivels.38
The disorder of spring behind, London returned to normality over the summer. The government tried to assert itself over American affairs, with a new Cabinet post, Secretary of State for the American Colonies, being established. Wilkes remained in St George’s Fields. There he would receive a letter of encouragement from New England. The letter – it came along with a gift of another turtle for Wilkes to roast – ran:
That the British constitution still exists is our glory; feeble and infirm as it is, we cannot, we will not despair of it. To a Wilkes much is already due for his strenuous efforts to preserve it … Your perseverance in the good old cause may still prevent the great system from dashing to pieces.39
Among the signatures were names Wilkes would not have recognised, but ones that would be immortalised by history: John Adams, Samuel Adams, James Otis Jr, John Hancock, Richard Dana, Joseph Warren, Benjamin Kent, Thomas Young, Josiah Quincy II and Benjamin Church. Wilkes had replied, high-spirited and thrilled with the turtle, ‘I hope freedom will ever flourish under your hemisphere as well as ours.’
Despite the resolves not to import any English goods, Wilkes’s speeches and papers would continue to find an outlet across the Atlantic, as would Catharine Macaulay’s History of England. The work was given a ‘free sale’, revealed the Kentish Gazette. The ‘Ladies of America’ were said to read her with a ‘great avidity, and speak of her with the greatest applause’.40
Ships carrying Macaulay’s books and Wilkes’s speeches mingled in the Thames along with East Indiamen with their spices and teas, West Indiamen with their sugar and cocoa, and the Whitby colliers that brought even more coal to fuel the growing, seething, tempestuous capital. Among all these, on 30 July, Endeavour had left her last London anchorage and begun her slow progress downstream. At a glance she would still seem like the other northern merchants congregated in the Thames, but a closer look would reveal something more. There was the sweeping blue stripe beneath her gunwale, the red ensign over her stern signalling she was a commissioned ship of the navy on detached duties; there was her lowness in the water beneath the strain of the provisions, drawing something like fourteen feet fore and aft. Then more than anything else, there was the sheer number of sailors: men teeming everywhere, cross-legged on the forecastle and the main deck, hanging from the shrouds, leaning over the bows, high in the tops.
Earlier that day Cook had been given his orders. They came in two sealed packets: ‘The Instructions’, which ordered him to sail to ‘Port Royal Harbour in King Georges Island’ to observe the transit, and the ‘Additional Instructions’ – not to be pursued until he had complied with his initial orders. Soon, having bid farewell to his wife Elizabeth, Cook joined the Endeavour at the Downs to take formal command. In the Channel he had the chance to a get a feel for the ship, as Milner had with the Earl of Pembroke. She no doubt felt altered by all her adjustments – heavier, more solid, but brighter, neater, attentive to her helm: a taut ship. ‘A better ship for such a Service I never would wish for’, Cook later said.41
Once on board, naval custom saw that Lieutenant Cook was addressed instead as ‘Captain’. George’s Island might have been his ultimate destination, but first he was compelled to ‘make the best of your way to Plymouth Sound’, where the crew were to be paid two months’ wages in advance, some last-minute changes were to be completed, extra supplies of beef, water, power and cordage were to be taken aboard, as were a sergeant, corporal, drummer and nine private marines. All this left Endeavour with just about room for its most curious and colourful cargo of all. This was a ‘suite’ or group of supernumeraries belonging to the ‘remarkable’ botanist and intrepid man of science, Joseph Banks.