Cook had always sought out paths. From his boyhood on the wet slopes of Cleveland he knew the emotional tug of uncharted terrain. For Thomas Pierson, a poet of Cook’s time, the moors were a ‘sterile’ and ‘shaken’ land, ‘whence fall unnumbered streams’. To climb from the grassy lowlands onto the moors was to pass into the ‘impervious glens’, where ‘weeds, wild fern, coarse brakes, black heath, and moss’ carpeted the earth from the conical hill called Roseberry Topping in a ‘pathless desert’ all the way to Whitby.1
A keen eye could pick out the pony or foot tracks on a good day, but when the clouds swept over the moorlands the landscape became indistinct and perilous. Cook had many great voyages, but the earliest of them were his treks over these swelling hills, not the rolling seas. In the time of Cook’s apprenticeship, the moors were an obstacle he had to master. One can imagine him – long-limbed and footloose – striking out from Ayton to Whitby in the January snows, wrapped in a borrowed greatcoat, with no one for company but the hen harriers in the skies above. Or, again, tramping home at the end of the sailing season in autumn, mazing through the bronze bracken, purple heather and burnished gorse, testing the terrain with a wary foot or tracing the contours of a hill.
Had Cook not left home he would, no doubt, have made a tolerable moorland guide. But Cook had left to encounter new geographies and establish new paths. As one of his midshipmen later observed, ‘Action was life to him & repose a sort of death.’2 For a decade and a half Cook had been finding his paths. He had guided the British fleet along the rock-strewn St Lawrence River in Canada. He had negotiated the treacherous coastlines of Newfoundland and Labrador. And now with Endeavour he had found his most dramatic paths yet: through the Strait of Le Maire and past Cape Horn, to Tahiti and the Society Islands, to Tasman’s New Zealand and all the way around both its land masses.
New Zealand was as far as the Admiralty’s ambitions had extended. They had mentioned no new island or coast after it. To find New Zealand would have been impressive enough. They may have counted themselves lucky if such an untried commander as Cook had managed to find his way past Cape Horn and kept his crew content for long enough for them to locate George’s Island and observe the Transit of Venus. They needn’t have worried. Once again Cook found his way, and his curiosity was not yet sated. As those at the Admiralty came to recognise, one of Cook’s best qualities was his resourcefulness. He was never one to let an opportunity slip and now he turned his attention to New Holland, a place that even those at the Admiralty had not felt fit to mention. And yet here in front of Endeavour, in April 1770, a new coastline rose out of the sea. It was one that had never appeared on a European chart before.
Understanding Cook’s deep character has always posed a challenge for his biographers. To some he remains as fathomless as the Pacific. But it is in fleeting moments like this – catching the first glimpse of a coast – that the opacity sometimes fades and he admits ‘small satisfactions’. Reading his accounts of these moments you can almost detect, if not quite see, a transient gleam in his eye or smile on his face. Perhaps it’s the same emotional pang he may have felt fording a moorland river decades before, or the feeling he carried home having established a better way of traversing a dale. Now, though, his paths had taken him further than he could ever have imagined. Zealous in his cartography, Cook would have noticed that at Poverty Bay he had been almost exactly at the opposite side of the globe to Valencia in Spain. Rounding the South Cape of the South Island of New Zealand, they had been just a short distance from London’s counterpoint, Mile End and his family. There were few places further to go. As Cook stated in a rare candid statement, some years later: ‘I who had Ambition not only to go farther than any one had done before, but as far as it was possible for man to go.’3
Reflections like these were put aside in April 1770. Before him was a new coastline to explore. As Endeavour cruised northwards at a steady four knots, the sun shone brightly over the landscape. Through his telescope he looked over a land ‘which had a very agreeable and promising Aspect’. The land behind the line of the coast was ‘diversified with hills, ridges, planes and Vallies with some few small lawns, but for the most part the whole was cover’d with wood’.4 Cook brought Endeavour close to the shore. They came so near as ‘to distinguish several people upon the Sea beach’. As he and all ninety or so of his shipmates stared towards them, the people on the beach looked back.
There is an intensity to Endeavour’s gaze: the sailors, divided into their watches, studying the skies and the sea; Green the astronomer and Tupaia, looking at the moon and stars; the botanists scanning the surrounding water for signs of life. Their watching is intensified by technologies like eye glasses or telescopes. So penetrating does their gaze seem, it’s easy to think the attention travels in one direction. This overlooks a central truth. At many times during Endeavour’s voyage more eyes stared back at the ship than gazed out from her.
The question of what people saw had tantalised history. Fragments have travelled across the centuries. From Tahiti come accounts of a floating island or a godlike creature. From New Zealand, descriptions of ‘a houseful of divinities’ or a fledgling bird. A memorable description of Endeavour’s arrival derives from Whitianga in the Waikato Region of New Zealand:
In the days long past … we lived at Whitianga, and a vessel came there, and when our old men saw the ship they said it was an atua, a god, and the people on board were tupua, strange beings or ‘goblins’. The ship came to anchor, and the boats pulled on shore. As our old men looked at the manner in which they came on shore, the rowers pulling with their backs to the bows of the boat, the old people said, ‘Yes, it is so: these people are goblins; their eyes are at the back of their heads; they pull on shore with their backs to the land to which they are going.’5
Yet more stories attempt to capture the sightings of Endeavour’s cruise northwards along the eastern coastline of what would become modern-day Australia. A particularly vivid one comes from the Aboriginal people living in the Kamay or Botany Bay area. It tells that they saw a ‘big bird’ filled with something like opossums scampering ‘up and down the legs and wings of the bird’.6 Other oral traditions suggest that people thought the ship was carrying ‘wawu-ngay’ or the spirits of departed ancestors.7
At first the vibrancy of these accounts seems to befit a moment of true historical gravity. Geographically speaking, a mile or so might have separated Endeavour from the shore, but that space contained – in Australia’s case – something like fifty millennia of divergent human history. The instant Endeavour’s mainmast was sighted, represented a moment of reconnection. It feels appropriate, then, that this rejoining should be marked by a sparkling account, a historical firework to crown the momentous occasion.
In the 1750s Edmund Burke, the Irish writer, had written about the psychological process humans undergo when they encounter new objects. A human mind, he contended in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), always cleaves to the familiar. ‘By making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock’, whereas ‘in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination’.8 For Burke, perception was a three-stage process. First the senses would transmit the information to the brain. Then the imagination would scour the mind for familiar equivalents. The image produced would then be subject to a person’s judgement. Accounts of birds or goblins or spirits, then, were more than delightful pictures, they were a door into a wider culture or a belief system.
But it is dangerous to over-philosophise. To look more carefully at the eyewitness accounts from the shore is to see that people soon rationalised Endeavour. It was not long before she became just ‘a big canoe’. If the figures inside were said to be long-tailed possums, then they did not remain so for more than a passing moment. Rather the sailors were soon recognised as people ‘something like themselves’.9 This is demonstrated in Parkinson’s ‘Vocabulary of the Language of Otaheite’ where the English word ‘ship’ – presumably Parkinson was pointing to Endeavour as he elicited – is translated as ‘paee’. The very next word in Parkinson’s list is ‘canoe’, and back comes the same Tahitian word, ‘paee’.10
There are more complexities to these accounts too. They have come down to us today through storytelling traditions, not in contemporary journals or documents. Most of the accounts were originally collected in the late nineteenth century, a very different period of human history, when the imperial enterprises of the European super-powers were well underway, infecting many accounts with narratives of dispossession and conflict. As the historian Maria Nugent explains, when analysed closely many ‘seemingly strange’ stories about Captain Cook or Endeavour are not so strange after all. They are often ‘an amalgam, or a montage, of incidents from different times and different spaces, which have become telescoped, condensed and conflated into a singular moment involving a singular man’ – or in this case, a single ship.11
What is more clear is that Endeavour elicited three distinctive reactions in the three geographical territories she visited. Arriving in Tahiti after the Dolphin, she was treated with caution. The people knew what her weapons could do. In New Zealand, where there was no understanding of gunpowder, the reaction was belligerent. Cook had been prepared for such responses. But no one aboard could have anticipated what materialised when they came to Australia. Having anchored at what was soon to be named Botany Bay, the general reaction was aloofness. The people seemed unimpressed both by Endeavour and the trinkets and other objects the officers tried to please them with. Banks, in particular, found the attitude perplexing. The opening day of their visit he watched as:
an old woman followd by three children came out of the wood; she carried several peice[s] of stick and the children also had their little burthens; when she came to the houses 3 more younger children came out of one of them to meet her. She often lookd at the ship but expressd neither surprize nor concern.12
As ever Banks had been reading in preparation for what he was to experience. In particular he had looked at William Dampier’s racially charged description of ‘the miserablest People in the World’, which he admitted had left him with low expectations.13 His prejudices seemed to be confirmed by what he viewed through his glasses, the complete nakedness – ‘the women did not copy our mother Eve even in the fig leaf’ – and the absence of the ‘large fires’ they had seen in the Society Islands and New Zealand, made ‘in order to clear the ground for cultivation’. ‘We thence concluded not much in favour of our future freinds.’14
Thereafter the people Banks saw at Botany Bay seemed to exist as an antithesis to him and his inquisitive, endeavouring peers. Parkinson described how:
The natives often reconnoitred us, but we could not prevail on them to come near us or to be social; for, as soon as we advanced, they fled nimbly as deer, excepting at one time, when they seemed determined to face us: then they came armed with spears, having their breasts painted white; but, as soon as they saw our boat go off from the ship, they retreated. Constrained by hunger, they often came into the bay to fish; but they kept in the shallows, and as near as possible to the shore. In one of their houses, at the top of the bay, we had laid some nails, pieces of cloth, and various trinkets; and though the natives had been there in our absence yet they had not taken any of them.15
This was a place to intrigue the European philosophers like Rousseau and Montesquieu, who contended that ‘nothing is more fearful than Man in a State of Nature, that he is always in a tremble, and ready to fly at the first Motion he perceives, at the first Noise that strikes his Ears’.16 Whatever the cause of the behaviour, Banks did not like it. He derided the Aboriginal people as ‘rank cowards’ in his journal. Apathy was a crime for him far greater than the violence of the Māori or the thieving of the Tahitians. It was made worse by these people’s proximity to the thriving plant life of the bay. Ever since their arrival he and Solander had been galloping around like young spaniels, botanising in the sunshine.
By now their collection of plants had swelled to such enormous proportions that Banks decided to take ‘some extraordinary care’ of them to stop the pressed specimens spoiling in the books. Plant collecting was a challenging task on a voyage like this. Each seed had to be dried and folded up in paper and kept apart from others to prevent muddling. Books of pressed flowers needed to be carefully labelled and everything had to be stored in a part of the ship free from moisture. Banks spent a whole day bringing the pressed flowers, ‘near 200 Quires of which the larger part was full’, to the shore and spreading ‘them upon a sail in the sun’, turning them every few hours until they were in pristine condition.17 This done, the books were carried back into Endeavour where they were filed back in their places alongside all his other collections: the Tahitian bark cloth beaters, drums and nose flutes, the feathered helmets, the cleavers and quarterstaffs, the flax cloaks and canoe paddles, all crowded into every nook.
Just as the voyage had overshot Cook’s orders, it must have outshone Banks’s expectations. Plants were not merely growing matter, delicate shapes, fragrant blooms, exotic tastes, captivating colours. They were power. Ever since the pharaoh Hetshepsut had imported incense trees from Punt to Egypt in the fifteenth century BC – species like myrrh and frankincense – people had understood both the economic and symbolic value of owning plants. A lust for spices like cloves, nutmeg and mace had inspired much of the exploration age. Banks might have been classifying within the Linnaean tradition, but equally he knew that with every new species he obtained, his power inflated. What he might find on these strange shores it was impossible to say. A plant as beautiful and economically valuable as the tulip? That may have been his ultimate hope.
Banks was the most charismatic figure aboard Endeavour. By the standards of his time he acted impressively well and generously – within the context of his social standing – to the people he met. But in him we can see the British imperial project of the next century in embryo. Impelled onwards to find, pick and preserve, he did not pause to consider that the great diversity of plant life at Botany Bay was a product of the way of life of the people who lived there. While gathering his collecting materials in London before Endeavour’s departure, Banks had picked up some old newspapers that he and Solander could use to press the botanical specimens they found. It is both a historical irony and darkly poignant that among these newspapers was a copy of the Spectator, containing a ‘Critique and Notes’ on John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Some of Banks’s specimens survive today in the Natural History Museum in London, pressed inside the lines:
the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste,
Brought death into the world and all our woe, with loss of Eden.
Endeavour sailed on 6 May. Crossing into the open ocean, Cook put the ship’s head north. Having pleased himself with finding Botany Bay, Cook didn’t feel the need to explore the next bay to the north, thereby missing what became Sydney Harbour. ‘It is indeed rather curious, though not important, that Cook so consistently missed the best harbours in those countries he deemed of most importance’, Beaglehole, his biographer, wrote.
Creeping along the coast, people continued to watch from the shore. One glistening account has been handed down in oral memory by the Badtjala people of K’gari or Fraser Island. It is the single most poignant depiction of Endeavour. It was recently translated into English:
Strangers are travelling with a cloud, Areeram!!
It has fire inside, must be a bad water spirit.
It’s stupid maybe? It’s going directly to that rainbow serpent place,
This is the truth that I bring.
It is breathing smoke rhythmically from its rear, must be song men and sorcerers.
Coming up and going back with the wind at its rear, like a sand crab.
The sea carries this ship here, why??18
Rainbows were shining over Endeavour. One day Parkinson saw ‘two of the most beautiful rainbows my eyes ever beheld; the colours were strong, clear and lively; those of the inner one were so bright as to reflect its shadow on the water. They formed a complete semicircle; and the space between them was much darker than the rest of the sky.’19 To his mind the rainbow must have been a reminder that God’s majesty was better experienced in nature than it was in a church. The rainbow may well have been uplifting for Tupaia, too. Thousands of miles away in the Society Islands rainbows were a powerful sign of Oro.
For Parkinson this was a rare escape from his cabin, where he was racing through drawings. ‘In 14 days just, one draughtsman has made 94 sketch drawings, so quick a hand has he acquird by use’, his admiring master wrote.20 As Parkinson hurried through his backlog, elsewhere the ship’s usual rhythms were being tailored to their changing environment. Once again the sea had grown shallow and colourful. Banks was able to peer ‘distinctly’ towards the seafloor ‘at innumerable large fish, Sharks, Dolphins &c, and one large Turtle’. This brought challenges for Cook. The water was uncertain. The depth was sometimes thirty fathoms, sometimes ten or sometimes six. This was a danger he recognised. Just as it was for the coal colliers sailing south and passing the Ouse at Hull, everything thereafter was caution. He opted to tread carefully – sounding often, sending boats ahead to find the route for the ship to follow.
At least Cook could be confident of Endeavour’s condition. In Rio, at Tahiti and, recently, at Queen Charlotte Sound, she had been overhauled, cleaned fore and aft and recaulked. In New Zealand, too, he had been able at long last to perfect her trim, hauling aboard stones to bring her a little more by the stern. Now, thousands of leagues from any dry dock and way off the charts that existed at the Admiralty, she was little worse than a collier on the run to Wapping. Only her rigging and sails were in a frail state. As for her hull, battered around New Zealand, it remained as sound as ever. Even Banks had been impressed with her dexterity off New Zealand: ‘We turnd all day without loosing any thing, much to the credit of our old Collier, who we never fail to praise if she turns as well as this.’21
The relationship between Cook and Banks had turned out remarkably well. When the close confines of the ship and the confused social standing of each of them are taken into account, there was explosive potential for things to go disastrously wrong. But ever since Rio, Cook and Banks had worked efficiently and kept to their own responsibilities. Cook did his best to accommodate Banks’s collecting whims and Banks respected that Cook was in ultimate command. There had only been one obvious collision between them. It had come when Cook had refused to put into a bay on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island. Cook had eyed up the entrance with its sheer cliffs and concluded that were they to go in they might wait a month to get out again. It was an astute reading of the circumstances, but Banks grieved a missed opportunity. He brooded on this, but it did not detract from his admiration for a navigator and a leader who, he well knew, was something quite outside of the ordinary.
At nine o’clock at night on 10 June, Endeavour was running on an east-north-east course, straying from the coast out several leagues into the open sea. A man was at the chains as ever, hauling the sounding lead. ‘My intention was to stretch off all night as well as to avoid all the dangers we saw ahead’, Cook later explained. They were carried along by a fine, even breeze of wind. It was a clear moonlit night. Swinging the lead, though, the sailor found something that surprised him. The depth had been deepening, from fourteen to twenty-one fathoms, but then in an instant the trend reversed. Eight fathoms were called. Cook responded by ordering everyone to their stations, ready to bring the ship round, ‘and every heart felt some trepidation’, Parkinson wrote. Banks and his suite were at supper, but the shoal, or whatever it was, passed beneath, and they were left to retire to bed in ‘perfect security’.
Endeavour continued on her course over the next few hours. She was travelling at about two knots, a ponderous pace over the black water. All this time she was putting the mainland further off her larboard quarter. The depth had deepened to twenty fathoms. The hush of another night, the 655th of the voyage, had settled over the deck. Then, at a few minutes to eleven o’clock, just before the lead could be heaved again, the hull clattered against something. All her forward motion was arrested in a single, jarring instant: ‘the Ship Struck and stuck fast’.22
Banks was scarcely warm in his bed when the collision happened. In a few moments he left his cabin, passed through the great cabin and climbed the companionway onto the quarterdeck. There through the timbers, he felt the sensation of Endeavour ‘beating very violently’ against what he supposed to be submerged rocks. The realisation then succeeded that these must be coral rocks, ‘the most dreadfull of all others on account of their sharp points and grinding quality which cut through a ships bottom almost immediately’. Absorbing this, the wretchedness of their situation began to settle. Endeavour had spent three hours running offshore. They were well into the open sea. Parkinson, now on deck, experienced the same dreadful thought. His mind raced to Britain, ‘our native land’, a place ‘many thousand leagues’ away.23
The officers responded quite differently. It was all ‘coolness void of all hurry and confusion’. Pickersgill, one of the prime hands, was already out in one of the boats, sounding the depth right round the ship. He found that she had come to ‘on the edge of a bank of coral’. Verifying what he must have suspected, Cook now set in motion a period of tremendous activity. The sails were immediately handed, the yards and the topmasts struck down; the smaller, coasting anchor was got out of the hold and loaded into a boat to see if they could use it to lever Endeavour clear. All of this was already done by midnight when, ‘by the light of the moon’, Banks spotted several timbers and boards floating beside the ship. Then another, more substantial piece appeared. ‘All this time she continued to beat very much so that we could hardly keep our legs upon the Quarter deck’.24
To confuse their situation still further was the news that Endeavour had run against the coral at almost the top of high tide. For the next six hours the water would drop, bringing, minute by minute, increasing stresses to bear against the floor timbers. The noise, Banks decided, was coming from somewhere under her starboard bow, it ‘kept grating her bottom making a noise very plainly to be heard in the fore store rooms’. No one doubted this would eventually bore a hole through Endeavour’s bottom. Only three factors remained in their favour: the sea was calm, the sky was clear, and the moonlight strong enough to illuminate the work. If the wind freshened and whipped the sea into motion, they could not possibly hope to survive long.
The sailors’ unremitting work continued. As soon as the coasting anchor was out, Cook tried to heave off with ‘a very great strean’. But nothing would free the ship. With the tide ebbing, the grating continuing, and hours left before low water, there was only one course available to him. The valuable guns, the terror of Tahiti, were cut loose from their breechings and heaved overboard. Anything heavy the crew could lay their hands on was jettisoned next. Part of the eight tons of iron ballast, loaded at Deptford, was thrown over, then the stones gathered from Queen Charlotte’s Sound and neatly arranged to settle the trim. Hoops and staves went too, and the oil jars and firewood and then cask after cask of water. This was hours of heroic, relentless toil. The sailors, wrote Banks, ‘workd with surprizing chearfullness and alacrity; no grumbling or growling was to be heard throughout the ship, no not even an oath’.25
This activity consumed the night and, at least, gave the crew a feeling of purpose. At about a quarter to seven on 11 June, a bright morning broke over the troubled scene. There was the warm southern sun, and calm settled sea, and Endeavour lodged fast in the centre of it, listing to starboard. They had survived the night and the low tide at least. But if the morning had lightened spirits, they were soon to be dampened by news from Pickersgill who had discovered a leak in the ship’s floor. Of the four elm pumps on board, two were set to work, endless heaving revolutions in fifteen-minute stints, teams not just of the sailors and warrant officers, but also the commissioned officers Gore and Hicks, and the captain, and Banks himself too.
Eleven o’clock brought high tide. By now Cook had ordered all the anchors out, their flukes biting into the ocean floor to stop Endeavour drifting further onto the coral. The captain estimated that forty or fifty tons had been thrown over. This was the time to heave her off. But again she proved immovable, a deadweight in the fluid ocean. With high tide went the great sustaining hope. At noon Endeavour’s listing became more noticeable, Cook estimated that she was ‘three or four Strakes heel to Starboard’ – a strake being a panel of wood. Though depressed on all other fronts, at least the weather was holding. Again Cook had Endeavour braced with the anchors to hold her as the tide fell. By one in the afternoon it had already fallen so low that Banks, despair descending, saw the pinnace almost touching the sea bottom. The ship’s oak had now been ground by the coral rock for fourteen hours.
Water was rising in the well now. At 5 p.m. Cook had a third pump set to work, if not to staunch the leak, then at least to stall its progress. The fourth of Endeavour’s pumps would have been got going too, had it not been choked and useless. The turning continued, and continued, watch and watch. At dusk there was at last some movement in the ship as the tide rose a second time. But by now Endeavour was making so much water she could barely be expected to float if she was wrenched clear. The coral was now, strangely enough, both the cause of her injury and the reason for her survival. As it had collided with the hull it had, most probably, plugged the leak. To escape the coral, therefore, was also to expose to the ocean the damage they had sustained.
In the darkness of nine o’clock, Endeavour righted perceptibly. But if this suggested any improvement, then it was misleading. Below, the situation was desperate. ‘The leak gaind upon the Pumps considerably’, Cook conceded. ‘This was an alarming and I may say terrible Circumstance and threatened immidiate destruction to us as soon as the Ship was afloat.’ By now, Banks had given Endeavour up entirely. In his cabin he was, ‘packing up what I thought I might save’, and preparing himself for the worst.
The worst they must all have contemplated, though no one had quite said it yet. Everyone knew that their boats could not carry all of them ashore. Nor could Cook give cork jackets to everyone. Twenty of them had been stowed away on Endeavour, but they were designed only as a protection for ‘the use of the men that it may be necessary to employ in boats’. Whether some of these might be distributed or not, they would have proved mostly useless. The closest land lay about eight miles away. It would be a miracle if any of them could swim that distance. Even for those in the boats it would be a few hours’ work. And even if they did get to the shore, what then? As for those who might make off in boats, Banks thought a more desperate fate awaited, ‘ashore without arms to defend themselves from the Indians or provide themselves with food, on a countrey where we had not the least reason to hope for subsistence’. There, stranded at the far side of the world, the ship destroyed, half of them dead, his immense collections on the sea bottom, he might be better drowned.
Cook’s thoughts can only have followed a similar path. Cautious by nature, one of the qualities that made him an exceptional commander was his recognition that chances sometimes needed to be taken. ‘Adversity does not build character, it reveals it’, the novelist James Lane Allen wrote. And Cook’s was to be exposed here, on the reef. After the ship righted at nine o’clock, he knew that he had two hours before high tide. ‘I resolved’, he wrote, ‘to risk all and heave her off.’ The time spared him was given over to setting this plan in process.
There were four possible outcomes. First, they might fail to move Endeavour at all, as before. Then she could hardly be expected to weather a second night and another tide. Second, they might free her, but even then any coral in her hull would work loose and in a matter of minutes she would settle, then slide to the bottom. Third, they might get her off and be able to keep pace with the leak until they reached some nearby island. Then they might be able to fashion something ‘out of her materials’ to get them to the East Indies. The final possibility was the one that they all wished for: Endeavour would float.
‘The dreadfull time now approachd’, Banks wrote, ‘and the anziety in every bodys countenance was visible enough.’ The equation was not unlike one of Charlton’s mathematical enigmas. The ship, a solid object, was suspended between forces. One of these was the upward pressure of the tide. A further force was generated by Cook and the sailors heaving on anchors, the flukes of which had bit into the seabed forty or fifty yards off. Was the combination of these forces sufficient to wrest the collier from the grip of the coral? Banks framed the scene with words that would have seemed melodramatic at any other time: ‘fear of Death now stard us in the face’. Just after ten o’clock, with three feet nine inches of water in the hold, Cook ordered all hands that could be spared up from the pumps to man the capstan and the windlass. With sailors rowing in the boats and everyone else heaving with all their might, at 10.20 p.m., after twenty-three hours lodged on the reef, Endeavour slid clear.
For an instant it seemed as if everything had gone perfectly. Endeavour righted and was hauled into deep water at a safe distance from the corals. ‘This desirable event gave us spirits’, Parkinson recorded, ‘which, however, proved to be the transient gleam of sunshine, in a tempestuous day; for they were soon depressed again, by observing that the water increased in the hold, faster than we could throw it out; and we expected, every minute, that the ship would sink, or that we should be obliged to run her again upon the rocks.’26
Cook felt this fear too. He heard from the well that the pump was increasing fast, ‘which for the first time caused fear to operate upon every man in the Ship’. But for once, a pleasant surprise awaited him. It turned out that one man relieving another had formulated a new way of calculating the depth. When the difference in methods was discovered, eighteen inches of water vanished in a second. As the news of the mistake was passed through the ship, it ‘acted upon every man like a charm’.27
Another night was spent at the pumps. Cook noticed that the improvement in their circumstances had made the sailors more productive. By sunrise on 12 June the depth of water had lowered considerably. Rest had no longer been thought of, Banks wrote, ‘but the pumps went with unwearied vigour till the water was all out which was done in a much shorter time than was expected’. By ten in the morning the yards were being hoisted back up, the sails were being retrieved and preparations were all being made to hobble the ship to the mainland so they could solve the greatest question of all and find the location of the leak.
To aid them on their passage an innovative technique was now proposed by Jonathan Monkhouse, younger relation of the surgeon, who was among the ablest of the midshipmen. He suggested they try to fother the leak. This was something he had executed once in a voyage across the Atlantic from Virginia, and involved wrapping a specially prepared sail around the bottom of the hull so that the pressure of the water would clamp it over the hole. Approving of Monkhouse’s design, four or five sailors were set to accompany him, mixing together ‘a large quantity of Oakum chopd fine and wool’ and sticking it down on one of the studding sails. Ropes were then tied to either end of this sail. It was then threaded down under Endeavour’s hull, in a complicated sequence of pulling, adjusting and fastening, and it proved to be so successful the leak was almost stopped.
Although Cook detailed the preparation of the fothering sail he did not explain just how it was applied or whether any sailor was obliged to plunge beneath the waterline to help heave the ropes around. What they would have experienced if they had, beneath the surf that beat on the surface, was a marine environment of unmatched colour. It was a world of slanting light, rainbow-coloured fish being thrust to and fro like leaves on a breeze by the play of the underwater currents and the carry of the tide; of turtles and eels and pristine, glinting light, ricocheting off the corals themselves. They did not know it, but they had been suspended above a marine city, one as complex as London with all its medley of inhabitants. He would have caught sight of a small fragment of the largest living structure on the planet, that irreplaceable wonder of nature we call the Great Barrier Reef.
Ten days passed until, on the morning of 22 June, they got to examine the damage to Endeavour’s hull. The coral had gashed a hole in the floor heads a little forward of the starboard fore chains. It was a deep cut. In either the initial contact or the slamming that had followed it, four planks had been punched through in the most extraordinary way. This was no livid gash, no splintered mess; rather a neat hole, ‘as if’, Cook decided, ‘it had been done by the hands of Man with a blunt edged tool’. Luckily the coral had collided with one of the strongest sections of the hull, in the internal scaffold of her rounded bows where the oak timbers were reinforced. Had this not been the case, Cook plainly saw, ‘it would have been impossible to have saved the ship, and even as it was it appear’d very extraordinary that she made no more water than what she did’. Plugging the injury was a piece of dislodged coral, ‘as large as a Mans fist’, as well as remnants of the fothering sail. There was more destruction too. The protective sheathing had come away, the false keel had gone while the main keel – the backbone of everything – had suffered too, though not ‘materialy’.28
Banks looked over Endeavour’s injuries as well, reinforcing his view that it had been a close run thing. As ever, he had quickly regained his equilibrium, beginning his botanising ashore even before the ship was safely beached. But he came away from the episode with a new-found admiration for the ship’s crew. ‘I beleive every man exerted his utmost for the preservation of the ship’, he wrote, ‘This was no doubt owing intirely to the cool and steady conduct of the officers, who during the whole time never gave an order which did not shew them to be perfectly composd and unmovd by the circumstances howsoever dreadfull they might appear.’29 Cook, too, had committed to his journal some choice words, acknowledging ‘In justice to the ships Company I must say that no men ever behaved better than they had done on this occasion animated by the behaviour of every gentleman on board, every man seemed to have a just sense of the danger we were in and exercised himself to the utmost.’
Endeavour – which must have felt a comfortably spacious ship after all the jettisoning – was now careened on the steep bank of a river on the mainland. A camp had been established on the slopes as well, the smiths had set up a forge, a stage had been built for the carpenters to work on, making the bank as good a dry dock as they could have hoped to find. It had been an anxious cruise ashore. Cook had sent Molyneux ahead with two boats to sound and look out for a suitable location. One of the mates had returned in the pinnace with news they had ‘found just the place we wanted, in which the tide rose sufficiently and there was every natural convenience that could be wishd for either laying the ship ashore or heaving her down’. This was more than any of them had expected, ‘too much to be beleivd by our most sanguine wishes’, Banks admitted, their situation still dire, ‘nothing but a lock of Wool between us and destruction’.30
This was far from being their only piece of good fortune. They had not long escaped the open sea when the weather broke. The soft breezes of the days before were replaced by rising winds, too brisk for them to weigh and sail at all. Had this come just two days before then it would have proved deadly. But rather than Endeavour being sunk and lost in a mystery, she now cruised into a harbour that was narrow yet shallow, with tides that rose and fell six or so feet, just the natural levers they needed. It was not quite a Bell Island at Whitby, but it was a place where they might moor in safety and explore the surrounding terrain to replenish provisions. To Banks, this good fortune, so hot on the heels of their unlikely deliverance, even drove him towards a religious concession, being ‘almost providential’.31
Endeavour’s situation on the riverbank is portrayed in one of the best-known visual representations of the voyage. It depicts the collier, tilted to one side at the water’s edge with all her masts bare but a pennant still streaming above as a symbol of hope. Behind them is a dreary landscape. Mangrove trees skirt the riverbank and the hill crests. A few tents and some anchors stand in a clearing and a party of sailors row in dogged solemnity towards the opposite bank. Portraying British resourcefulness in extremis, the engraving emphasises the alien nature of the New Holland landscape. It was an inhospitability that Parkinson had already remarked upon before the accident on the reef. ‘The main-land looked very barren and dreary’, he had written, ‘the hills upon it looked like a heap of rubbish, on which nothing was to be seen, excepting a few low bushes.’32
This was the terrain they would have to subsist off until they could sail again. But Parkinson found that it contained more than he anticipated. Over the next days the sailors ate cabbage palms, beans, seeding plants ‘the kernels of which, roasted, tasted like parched pease’, a sweet-tasting ‘black-purple fruit’, ‘a small-leaved plant that smelt like lemon and orange peel, and made an agreeable substitute for tea’, and something that reminded Parkinson of a fig tree, which tasted ‘very insipid’. Parkinson’s list of experimental foodstuffs is a reminder that exploration was not just about seeing. The ship’s company had tasted their way around the world. Supplementing John Thompson’s boiled rations had been gannets, geese, albatrosses, limpets, green-lipped mussels, oysters, clams, roast dog and rats by the dozen in Tahiti, and stingray in Botany Bay (so big were the stingray they encountered there, the bay had originally been called ‘Stingray Bay’).
In this river – Cook called it ‘Endeavour River’ – more wildlife emerged by the day. Banks was pleased to find an ‘Opossum’, ‘with two young ones sucking at her breasts’. Parkinson saw two cockatoos, an owl-like bird ‘having the iris of its eyes gold colour’, a ‘very uncommon’ hawk with eyes of a ‘rich scarlet colour’. There were also ants, snakes, venomous flies and many alligators, which ‘we frequently saw … swimming round the ship’. None of these were eaten but the near-hundred men kept their eyes open for anything they could find. It wasn’t long before they found something that would rank as a dainty in Britain. Turtles existed in abundance on the nearby reefs. Once they had been chanced upon, they became the sailors’ staple, and, not long after, the cause of their conflict with the Guugu Yimithirr people.
Parkinson’s journal tells us that Endeavour had been watched in the days before the shipwreck. On 8 June he wrote of ‘a company of the natives’ watching them from one of the inland islands. They were ‘standing quite still, and beholding the ship with astonishment’. Parkinson afterwards saw a fire being lit. It ‘yielded a very grateful odour, not unlike that produced by burning the wood of gum benjamin’.33
The story is also told from a different perspective:
On the morning of 10 June 1770 a strange large canoe, which the coastal people had kept under observation, was seen just east of Kulki (in Koko Yalanji), which is now known as Cape Tribulation. It appeared that something was not right. Then it started moving along the coast again.
At times our Bama [Guugu Yimithirr people] lit small fires to inform other clan members regarding the whereabouts of this strange canoe. Two days later our Bama saw it drop anchor at the mouth of the ‘Waalumbaal Birri’, which Captain Cook later named the Endeavour River. Our Guugu Yimithirr ancestors considered that these boat people like others who came and went, would not cause problems.
After these strange beings beached their canoe our Bama decided not to make contact but to observe. They decided to do what they normally did. Bama got into their canoes, they speared fish, women and children collected wood and other things from the beach; two Bama even paddled close to the visitors’ boat.
The strangers gave our Bama fish and beads. Next day four of our men went back and gave them fish in return, which is customary. Though our Bama recognised the predicament these visitors were in, they were discreet because they needed to make sure the visitors were not reincarnations of ‘wawu-ngay’ spirits of our ancestors. Every effort was made to be tactful. Women were not allowed to approach the strangers.
In this telling of the story it was only when the Guugu Yimithirr saw how many turtles the Europeans had taken that ‘it became an offence’.
The sharing code was broken. The visitors had trespassed. They should have got permission from us as the owners or custodians. Then things got out of hand. Our Bama were so confused and angry that they set fire to the campsite. Then they heard a loud bang and saw a puff of smoke. One of the men could not believe that something invisible punctured his leg and blood started to flow. They all ran away. Before going back to their camp our Bama lit more fires to warn other clans that something had gone wrong.34
Marooned and short on provisions, anything might have happened next. But what did ensue was far better than Cook might have expected. A remarkable peace conference was held, with Cook and Banks on one side and a tribal elder on the other, on some rocks about a mile from the river. The Guugu Yimithirr people ‘set up their lances against a tree, and advanced towards us in a friendly manner’, the British account went. Cook and Banks laid down their weapons too.
The account continues:
Before leaving to board their canoes, our Bama agreed between themselves that the things the strangers gave them were to be got rid of and that no further contact was to be made and that the visitors should have freedom of movement. Then, finally, one day they watched the ship sail out of the Waalumbaal birri and away from our Guugu Yimithirr land.35
Although Cook would never appreciate it, he had experienced an enormous stroke of luck. Endeavour’s life had been lived in hallowed places. Fishburn’s yard lay beneath Whitby Abbey. She had been to Taputapuatea in Opua and to Tolaga Bay in New Zealand. Now Cook had unwittingly careened her at a section of the Waalumbaal birri river known as ‘Gungardie’, where the Guugu Yimithirr and other tribes in the region gathered to reconcile disputes and for meditation. As one knowledge custodian, Eric Deeral, has explained, ‘The law that governed this area was that no blood was ever to be shed.’ He elaborated, ‘My theory is that my forefathers recognised the plight that the visitors were in … Their spiritual beliefs led them to be generous towards these strangers because they did not want them to perish in their lands and be troubled by their spirits in the future.’
These meetings with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had an effect on Cook. Some weeks later he wrote what would become a surprising and much-reproduced journal entry. It is worth quoting in full:
From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff &ca, they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air, so that they have very little need of Clothing and this they seem to be fully sencible of, for many to whome we gave Cloth &ca to, left it carlessly upon the Sea beach and in the woods as a thing they had no manner of use for. In short they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.36
Few Britons over the next 150 years would write such an open-minded appraisal. Cook’s statement surprises because he, an English naval officer in trim uniform, seems to exist in opposition to all they were. Theirs was a dreamland world of spirits and traditions. Cook’s was a geographical world of instruments and the Enlightenment. Some have connected Cook’s sympathies to the fact that he was tutored in Whitby’s Quaker environment, where a simple lifestyle was valued. Henry Taylor – who lived and learned in exactly the same culture as Cook – proclaimed in his memoir, ‘O self interest! Thou art the god of this world, and almost all the world doth worship thee!’, and at John Walker’s in Grape Lane it was forbidden for apprentices to ‘play dice, cards or bowls’ or ‘haunt taverns or playhouses’.37 It seems that much of this sobriety stuck. Cook never openly consorted with Rousseau’s philosophy, though some have wondered whether he passed time discussing its merits with Banks.
It should perhaps be borne in mind that Cook had just endured a near-death experience on the reef. He had seen the destructive nature of the endeavouring impulse and, if European society was racing forwards, then it was kicking up a cloud of dust and debris as it went. Every time he had returned to London from Newfoundland in the 1760s, things must have seemed more chaotic. There was the North Briton in 1763, then the Cider Riots in 1764, the Stamp Act a year later, then all the upheavals he had witnessed first-hand in the spring of 1768.
This, though, was the world that the ship’s company were increasingly eager to return to. It may be confused and intricate, but it was the world they knew. As Banks wrote in his journal, many of them were ‘pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia’. Only Cook, Solander and himself were immune to such a distemper, something he put down to the thoroughly Banksian prescription of ‘constant employment for our minds which I beleive to be the best if not the only remedy for it’.38
They would soon sail from Endeavour River, but not before they made one final discovery. As soon as they had careened the ship in June, sightings of a bizarre new creature had begun. The thing, whatever it was, had been sighted on an opposite shoreline by a party of sailors sent out to shoot pigeons. They had caught a glimpse of this beast, ‘as large as a grey hound, of a mouse coulour and very swift’.39 More reports followed. A better description was set down by Cook, who saw the creature ‘a little way from the Ship’. It was, Cook reckoned, of ‘a light Mouse colour and the full size of a grey hound and shaped in every respect like one, with a long tail which it carried like a grey hound, in short I should have taken it for a wild dog, but for its walking or running in which it jumped like a Hare or a dear’.40
For so long the Endeavour’s crew had instigated confusion. It is refreshing to watch the tables turn, and see them grasping for adjectives. Banks himself ‘had the good fortune to see the beast so much talkd of’ on 25 June, ‘but imperfectly’. ‘He was not only like a grey hound in size and running but had a long tail, as long as any grey hounds; what to liken him to I could not tell, nothing certainly that I have seen at all resembles him.’ Parkinson had a stab at a description too:
The tail, which is carried like a grey-hound’s, was almost as long as the body, and tapered gradually to the end. The chief bulk of this animal is behind; the belly being largest, and the back rising toward the posteriors. The whole body is covered with short ash-coloured hair; and the flesh of it tasted like a hare’s, but has a more agreeable flavour.41
Banks eventually got a name from the Guugu Yimithirr people: ‘kanguru’.
The sailors might have been eager to sail for home, but to leave Endeavour River was to return to a sea that was seemingly strewn with coral reefs, ‘innumerable shoals, some above and some under water, and no prospect of any streight passage out’. These were Banks’s words at the start of July 1770. He posed the dilemma best. ‘We began to think how we should get out of this place, where so lately to get only in was our utmost ambition … To return as we came was impossible, the trade wind blew directly in our teeth; most dangerous then our navigation must be among unknown dangers. How soon might we again be reducd to the misfortune we had so lately escapd!’42
To gather all the intelligence he could, while the sailors were busy rigging the ship again, Cook climbed a hill over their anchorage. ‘I saw what gave me no small uneasiness’, he admitted in his journal, a succession of sandbanks and shoals in a chain that extended right along the coast. Keeping between them and the land was one option. But by doing so they would be exposed to all the dangers of the coast, ‘besides the risk we should run of being locke’d in within the Main reef’. Should they become trapped then they would miss the trade winds that blew from June to October and which he hoped would carry them to the East Indies. This, Cook reasoned, might ‘prove the ruin of the Voyage, as we have now little more than 3 Months provisions on board and that short allowance in many Articles’.
These reflections ran through Cook’s mind right through July and into August, as a sea breeze kept the ship penned in the river. Only at the beginning of August did they timorously launch into the water, but several fraught days followed with them narrowly avoiding submerged rocks and reefs. On 6 August, having analysed their surroundings from the masthead, Cook experienced an unusual sensation: doubt.
I saw that we were surrounded on every side with Shoals and no such thing as a passage to Sea but through the winding channels between them, dangerous to the highest degree in so much that I was quite at a loss which way to steer when the weather would permit us to get under sail; for to beat back to the SE the way we came as the Master would have had me done would be an endless peice of work, as the winds blow now constantly strong from that quarter without hardly any intermission – on the other hand if we do not find a passage to the northd we shall have to come [back] at last.43
At a loss, Cook decided to visit in his boat one of the high islands five leagues out to sea. They ‘seemed to be of such a height that from the top of one of them I hoped to see and find a Passage’. On 11 August, accompanied by Banks, Cook set out. As soon as the boat landed, Cook ‘immediately went upon the highest hill on the Island’. What he saw ‘mortified’ him. About two or three leagues out to sea, ‘extending in a line NW and SE farther than I could see’, was a ‘Reef of Rocks … on which the Sea broke very high.’
It was a sight to defeat many. For weeks Molyneux, the sailing master, had been arguing they should turn back southwards, sounding all the way with the yawl and pinnace. Anything to retreat to the open waters of May. Cook knew the folly of this, but now, high on this isolated hill in an uncharted sea, strewn with coral rocks and concealed shoals he must have entertained second thoughts. He stayed on the hill until sunset, thinking. He had confirmed the danger of the reefs. But he also came to a resolution that if he could navigate through them, the open sea awaited. And to the north-east of where he stood he thought he had spied a channel.
Returning to Endeavour he combined what he had learned on the hill with a report from Molyneux, whom he had ordered out in the pinnace. Molyneux’s news was more of the same: treacherous seas and only wicked passages. ‘I therefore resolved to weigh in the morning and endeavour to quit the coast altogether untill we could approach it with less danger’, Cook declared. He had had enough. This meant cruising out into the sea, taking every chance.
On 13 August they sailed and stood out to the north-east, towards the place where Cook thought he had seen a channel. At around midday they approached it, an opening in the reef about half a mile broad. Cook put Endeavour on a tack and again sent Molyneux ahead to examine the channel. ‘He soon made the Signal for the Ship to follow which we accordingly did’, Cook wrote, and at about two o’clock in the afternoon they threaded through. ‘We had no sooner got without the breakers than we had no ground with 150 fathom of line and found a well growen Sea rowling in from the SE.’ They were finally liberated, ‘free’d from fears of Shoals &ca’, Cook wrote in a line he would soon repeat to John Walker at Whitby, ‘after having been intangled among them more or less ever sence the 26th of May, in which time we have saild 360 Leagues without ever having a Man out of the cheans heaving the Lead when the Ship was under way, a circumstance that I dare say never happen’d to any ship before’.44
In the open sea they found Endeavour was in worse repair than they had feared. With water seeping in, the pumps were set to work again, although this was ‘looked upon as trifeling to the danger we had lately made our escape from’. A rising gale from the south-east gave them all the speed they could want and at last they were crossing more miles in an hour than they had done in as many weeks. Cook’s aim was to take Endeavour into the lower latitudes, clear of the corals, before turning back to fall in with the coast to locate a passage that Dalrymple had marked on a chart. Dalrymple’s strait, if it existed, would lead them to charted waters once again, just a few hundred leagues from Batavia and the Dutch East Indies, where they could give Endeavour the attention she needed. After a day of making steady progress to the north-west, crossing a whole degree of latitude, on the morning of 15 August Cook reached the thirteenth parallel and turned Endeavour west. He was, he reflected, ‘fearfull of over shooting’ the passage they so dearly needed to find.45
After a few hours of westing, at one o’clock on 15 August land was sighted again from the masthead, a sign they had perhaps turned too soon. Any disappointment at this was nothing to the feelings when they saw, an hour later, that dead ahead the same reef barred the water in front of them. Thinking he could see an end to the reef somewhere towards the north, Cook stood on. But what had looked like open water turned out to be nothing more than a tiny passage. Cook now hauled close reefed on an east-south-east wind, to bear back out to sea, but, this time, his luck entirely failed. The breeze shifted, so that it now blew from east by north, ‘which was right upon the Reef and of Course made our clearing of it doubtfull.’
As darkness fell on 15 August the jollity of the previous days evaporated and Endeavour became tense once again. ‘All the dangers we had escapd were little in comparison of being thrown upon this reef if that should be our lot’, Banks wrote in his journal:
A Reef such a one as I now speak of is a thing scarcely known in Europe or indeed any where but in these seas: it is a wall of Coral rock rising almost perpendicularly out of the unfathomable ocean, always overflown at high water commonly 7 or 8 feet, and generaly bare at low water; the large waves of the vast ocean meeting with so sudden a resistance make here a most terrible surf Breaking mountain high, especialy when as in our case the general trade wind blows directly upon it.46
With the wind offering them little assistance, a northward course that took them parallel to the coral was their best hope. Cook kept to this ‘with all the Sail we could set’ as long as he could. Then, ‘fearing’ the consequences, he turned Endeavour south. They had barely completed this manoeuvre before it fell quite still. Second to an east wind, this was the worst of all outcomes. They were becalmed. A sounding lead was thrown out to test the depth of the sea, but there was nothing with 120 fathoms. The time was three o’clock in the morning, ‘we judgd ourselves not more than 4 or 5 l’gs from the reef’, Banks wrote, ‘maybe much less, and the swell of the sea which drove right in upon it carried the ship towards it fast. We tried the lead often in hopes to find ground that we might anchor but in vain.’47
Though no reefs like this existed in Britain, it was a scenario every Whitby master would have recognised and shuddered at in an instant. With no wind, a ship had few ways of propelling herself. However skilful a commander, however good they were at executing manoeuvres, it did not matter if they did not have wind. With little ability to steer or to move, a ship would usually go where the swell of the sea carried it. The best that could be hoped for was a sandy beach, a smooth bottom or, best of all, plenty of open water. Keeping sea room was a mantra of every collier master. But there was none to be found here. Everyone aboard, whether versed in marine dynamics or not, could absorb the simple fact that without wind a ship would go where it was taken. And they had all seen the reefs. Looking out at them from Endeavour River, they had studied their sandy tops, their uneven spires of rock that jutted this way and that in defiance to any sense of proportion or shape or form. They had seen, too, what the coral could do to the ship’s bottom on a glassy sea on a moonlit night at a few knots. That had nearly finished them all. But to be flung, broach to, against a reef wall with the whole weight of the South Seas – waves that might have started their journey in Tahiti, as far as they knew – would have the most logical of all outcomes.
By four o’clock in the morning ‘the roaring of the Surf was plainly heard and at day break the vast foaming breakers were too plainly to be seen’, Cook recorded. The waves were propelling them ‘surprisingly fast’. ‘We had at this time not an air of wind and the depth of water was unfathomable’. About now Cook ordered out the boats, in the hope that their feeble influence in the whole equation would have some bearing. Two sweeps were fetched up out of the hold – long oars – that were thrust out of the portholes in the gun room. Together with the boats these managed to pull Endeavour’s head ‘round to the northward which seem’d to be the only way to keep her off the reef or at least to delay time’.
As day broke, Banks got his first view of ‘the vast foaming billows’, ‘scarce a mile from us’. By six they had drifted alarmingly close, like a reed approaching the top of a waterfall. Cook reckoned they stood at a remove of ‘not above 80 or 100 Yards’:
the same Sea that washed the sides of the Ship rose in a breaker prodigiously high the very next time it did rise so that between us and distruction was only a dismal Vally the breadth of one wave and even now no ground could be felt with 120 fathoms. The Pinnace by this time was patched up and hoisted out and sent ahead to tow; still we had hardly any hopes of saving the Ship and full as little our lives as we were full 10 Leagues from the nearest land and the boats not sufficient to carry the whole of us, yet in this truly terrible situation not one man ceased to do his utmost and that with as much calmness as if no danger had been near.48
Just now, ‘at this critical juncture when all our endeavours seem’d too little’, a faint breeze ‘sprung up’. Cook recorded that it was ‘so small that at any other time in a Calm we should not have observed it’, and captive to terror some might not have done. But with the faint tug of the breeze and the help of the boats, they felt Endeavour ‘move off from the Reef in a slanting direction’. The wind lasted not more than ten minutes. But it blew them about 200 yards from the breakers. ‘Soon after our friendly breeze Viseted us again’, he wrote, ‘and lasted about as long as before.’
The wind – its strength, its direction, its timing – acted on the ship’s company as nothing else could. Banks wrote: ‘The fear of Death is Bitter: the prospect we now had before us of saving our lives tho at the expence of every thing we had made my heart set much lighter on its throne, and I suppose there were none but what felt the same sensations.’49 Within minutes, an opening was discerned in the reef, a quarter of a mile away. Cook instantly sent one of the mates to examine it. ‘Its breadth was not more than the length of the Ship but within was smooth water, into this place it was resolve’d to push her if possible haveing no other probable Views to save her, for we were still in the very jaws of distruction.’50
They managed to master the distance, but only found water ‘gushing’ out on the ebb, ‘so that it was impossible to get in’. The audacious manoeuvre brought Cook another chance, though. The force of the ebb catapulted them a quarter of a mile into the ocean and by midday, six hours after the worst moment of their desperation, they were one and a half or perhaps two miles out to sea. From there another opening was seen and Hicks, the lieutenant, was immediately sent to survey it.
At two o’clock in the afternoon Hicks returned ‘with a favourable account’. Cook instantly ‘resolved to try to secure the Ship in it, narrow and dangerous as it was’. They were aided by a light breeze from the east-north-east which, with the help of the boats and the spring tide, allowed them to approach the gap in the reefs. It was about quarter of a mile broad, an irregular space filled with mottled, skittish water for the quartermaster to aim at. As the afternoon sun began to dip at the start of its downward arc, Cook pointed Endeavour’s head into the gap and felt her gather way. ‘We soon enter’d the opening’, he wrote, and were ‘hurried through in a short time by a rappid tide like a Mill race’.51 Beneath, the unfathomable ocean’s bottom disappeared astern, the reef slid alongside their gunwales, the waves retreated and the glossy water of the inner lagoon opened up before them. Once again James Cook had found his path.