Chapter 14

7 JUNE 1770, THE GREAT BARRIER REEF, NORTH QUEENSLAND

Our little freindly Breeze now visited us again and lasted about as long as before, thrusting us possibly 100 yards farther from the breakers: we were still however in the very jaws of destruction . . . The fear of Death is Bitter . . .

BANKS AFTER FACING DISASTER ON THE GREAT BARRIER REEF¹

BANKS THOUGHT HE WAS in paradise as the Endeavour sailed past one enticing tropical island after another, with lush green vegetation and pearly white sand. And coral shoals – lots of them.

Cook had his hands full negotiating the dangerous passages, but he was also busy naming everything he could. There was Cleveland Bay,² and Magnetic Island, which sent his compass awry;³ Cape Palmerston,⁴ Point Hillock and, perhaps at Banks’s insistence, Cape Sandwich; Rockingham Bay,⁵ the Frankland Islands⁶ and Cape Grafton.⁷ Halifax Bay and Dunk Island were both named after one British statesman.⁸

On 7 June, Cook saw what he thought were coconut trees on what is now called Great Palm Island.⁹ Thinking that he and the crew would like some of the fruit, he sent Hickes ashore. Banks and Solander joined him. The coconut palms turned out to be cabbage trees faring poorly, but by sunset Banks had gathered ‘14 or 15 new plants’ before in near darkness ‘an Indian came very near . . . and shouted to us very loud’.¹⁰

Two days later, the Endeavour rounded ‘a low green woody island . . .’¹¹ that Cook named Green Island after the ship’s astronomer. Banks, Cook and Solander then went ashore, looking for fresh water, at the seven-kilometre-wide Mission Bay between Cape Grafton and what is now the city of Cairns,¹² but the water was ‘difficult to get at on account of the Surf and rocks upon the Shore’.¹³ Banks collected a few more new plants, and next morning Cook named Trinity Bay.

He named nearby Cape Tribulation ‘because here began all our Troubles’.¹⁴ After almost two years at sea, things went very bad, very suddenly.

EARLY ON THE MORNING of 11 June,¹⁵ Cook weighed anchor and sailed north. At nightfall rocks and shoals of the Pickersgill Reef were seen ahead, but while Banks was at supper the Endeavour passed over deeper water. Concluding it was ‘the tail of the Sholes’ they had seen at sunset, he ‘went to bed in perfect security’.

Then, bang! At about 11 p.m. the men on deck were hurled forward, and those in their bunks were tossed about as the ship came to an abrupt, shuddering halt, smashing into the tropical version of an iceberg. ‘Scarce were we warm in our beds,’ Banks recalled, ‘when we were calld up with the alarming news of the ship being fast ashore upon a rock, which she in a few moments convincd us of by beating very violently against the rocks . . . we were upon sunken 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.’¹⁶

Parkinson was terrified and remarked that ‘every countenance expressed surprize, and every heart felt some trepidation. We were, at this period, many thousand leagues from our native land . . . and on a barbarous coast, where, if the ship had been wrecked, and we had escaped the perils of the sea, we should have fallen into the rapacious hands of savages.’¹⁷

Cook swung into action. In the clear moonlit night he ordered work to lighten the Endeavour as fast as possible, taking in all the sails to stop her being blown further onto the coral, hoisting out the boats and sounding for depth round the ship. Barefoot men clambered twenty-five metres to the top of the masts to bring down the sails. Even with broken sheathing boards floating round the ship and the men hardly able to keep their legs upon the quarterdeck as the Endeavour rocked violently against the rocks, Banks observed that ‘The officers . . . behavd with inimitable coolness void of all hurry and confusion’.¹⁸

There was deep water all around, but the tide was almost high – time was running out to refloat the ship. Cook sent the longboat with an anchor off the Endeavour’s starboard bow, hoping to drag her in that direction, but the sturdy coal ship wouldn’t budge.

As the clock ticked towards the next high tide after sunrise, the men worked feverishly to heave every weight possible into the water. Ten tonnes of iron ballast were dumped from the bilge. Then six carriage guns and most of the fresh water. All the firewood. Then ‘Stone Ballast . . . Hoop Staves, Oil Jarrs, decay’d Stores’.¹⁹

Banks rolled up his sleeves and got to work helping where he could as men rushed about.²⁰ He feared the ship might not hold together until the next high tide as a rock under her starboard bow kept grating, and he ‘only hopd that it might not let in more water than we could clear with our pumps’.²¹ At daybreak he observed that they were probably about forty kilometres off the coast. ‘All this time the Seamen workd with surprizing chearfullness and alacrity; no grumbling or growling was to be heard throughout the ship, no not even an oath (tho the ship in general was as well furnishd with them as most in his majesties service).’²²

At 1 a.m. the tide was so low that the pinnace touched coral, but when the tide started rising the Endeavour beat violently upon the rocks again. Within the hour she was taking on water ‘very fast’. Cook estimated that they had thrown overboard ‘40 or 50 Tuns weight’, yet the men could still not heave her off the reef at the 11 a.m. high tide.

Two pumps were worked constantly to drain water from the hull. By 5 p.m. on 12 June, a third pump was also going flat out. Cook would have had a fourth in action, but the men could not make the devil work. The situation was diabolical.

At 9 p.m. the ship shifted position, and the leak became a flood.

Cook was stunned by this ‘terrible circumstance’ that ‘threatened immediate destruction to us’,²³ while Banks ‘intirely gave up the ship’. This was the ‘most critical’ part of his distress. Sure that the Endeavour would sink, he quickly began packing what he thought he might save and ‘prepard myself for the worst’.²⁴ ‘[We] well knew that our boats were not capable of carrying us all ashore, so that some, probably the most of us, must be drownd: a better fate maybe than those would have who should get ashore without arms to defend themselves from the Indians or provide themselves with food.’²⁵

It was now 10 p.m. The Endeavour had been stricken for twenty-three hours. Cook decided to risk it all, turning as many hands to crank the capstan and windlass as could be spared from the pumps. Banks jumped in to help as the men stretched ropes to their breaking point, trying to heave the ship off the coral into the deeper water. ‘The dreadfull time now aproachd,’ Banks wrote, ‘and the anziety in every bodys countenance was visible enough . . . fear of Death now stard us in the face.’²⁶

With every muscle straining, every sinew wrenching, faces taut in grimaces, and prayers being uttered, the men heaved and heaved. Still the Endeavour refused to budge.

Then, with another mighty heave at ‘20 Minutes past 10 o’Clock’, the ship finally floated, and with cheers of rejoicing, the men ‘hove her into Deep Water’.²⁷ She still had three feet nine inches (more than a metre) of water in the hold, but Banks breathed easier, proud of the men around him as each ‘willingly exerted his utmost strength’.²⁸

THE FLAT COLLIER DESIGN of the Endeavour had worked in Cook’s favour, and he told Banks that he now ‘had hopes of being able to keep the ship afloat till we could run her ashore on some part of the [mainland] where out of her materials we might build a vessel large enough to carry us to the East Indies’.²⁹ Banks admitted that he was ‘unusd to labour [and] much fatigued’ after ‘24 hours at exceeding hard work’, and as Cook sailed the stricken ship away from Endeavour Reef, the big young botanist needed a good lie-down. There was little time to rest, though, as ‘the pumps went with unwearied vigour’ after the carpenter miscalculated and told the skipper the ship was taking on more water than it was.

With his nerves settled again, just a bit, Cook decided to ‘fother’ the vessel, patching the damaged hull with an old sail and a mixture of oakum, wool and sheep dung. Jonathan Munkhouse,³⁰ the doctor’s younger brother, and ‘four or five assistants’ took a lower studding sail. Having mixed together a large quantity of finely chopped oakum and wool, Munkhouse stuck the concoction down upon the sail as loosely as possible in bundles each about as big as his fist: ‘these were rangd in rows 3 or 4 inches from each other: this was to be sunk under the ship and the theory of it was this, where ever the leak was must be a great suction which would probably catch hold of one or other of these lumps of Oakum and wool and drawing it in either partly or intirely stop up the hole.’³¹

And so the Endeavour limped on, as Banks noted, with ‘Nothing but a lock of Wool between us and destruction’.³² The small boats led the way through the razor-like coral reefs for sixty-five kilometres until they reached a safe harbour. Cook gave thanks as they passed what he named the Hope Islands, because when stuck on the reef he had been ‘always in hopes’ of reaching them.³³

On 14 June the ship arrived at the mouth of an opalescent river that the local population called Waalumbaal Birri, and which would become better known as the Endeavour River. The village that grew there would be called Cooktown. To the north, golden rays of light bounced off white sand dunes, beaches, and towering headlands. The wind blew briskly, and Banks realised that had it blown as fresh two days earlier the ship would ‘inevitably have been dashd to peices on the rocks’.³⁴

Captn. Cook having been shipwrecked in his voyage round the world has the Endeavour repaired in an harbour. Line engraving published in Moore’s Voyages and Travels, 1778. National Library of Australia

Unbeknown to the captain, he could not have picked a safer place to carry out the repairs: it was regarded as neutral territory for rival Aboriginal clans in the area, a safe place where they came to settle disputes, where ceremonies and initiations were performed, and where women came to give birth.³⁵

Banks thought the harbour was ‘indeed beyond our most sanguine wishes’. Narrow and shallow, it would allow the ship to be turned on its side for repairs. Cook said there was nowhere in the entire voyage that would have afforded them ‘the same relief’ as this ‘place of refuge’³⁶ – but three days would pass before the winds were suitable to bring the ship to rest.

In that time, Tupaia, already suffering swollen gums, would develop ‘livid spots on his legs and every symptom of inveterate scurvy, notwithstanding acid, bark and every medecine our Surgeon could give him’.³⁷ The Polynesian priest had become extremely ill, and Green ‘was also in a very poor way, which made everybody in the Cabbin very desirous of getting ashore’ and impatient at the ‘tedious delays’.³⁸

The Endeavour was sailed to a position eight hundred metres into the river mouth, ‘alongside of a Steep Beach on the South side’.³⁹ Sheep, chickens, ducks, pigs and the nanny goat were offloaded, and Cook ordered the erection of two tents, one for the sick – ‘8 or 9, afflicted with different disorders, but none very dangerously ill’, and ‘the other for the Stores and Provisions’.⁴⁰

Banks went exploring. He followed the river through flat land overgrown with mangroves and spied Aboriginal huts, along with ‘vast flocks of Pigeons and crows’.

On 22 June, the Endeavour was positioned on the sand for an inspection of the damage. Banks was stunned to see, in the middle of the oak hull, ‘a hole large enough to have sunk a ship with twice our pumps’. ‘The . . . Coral rock upon her bottom . . . had cut through her plank and deep into one of her timbers, smoothing the gashes still before it so that the whole might easily be imagind to be cut with an axe.’⁴¹ The fact that the piece of coral remained in the hole had minimised the flow of water into the ship, and Banks realised that it had probably saved all their lives.

Almost as stunning for him, though, were the reports from ‘The People who were sent to the other side of the water in order to shoot Pigeons’. They came back not just with half a dozen birds for the table, but also with an astonishing tale about ‘an animal as large as a grey hound, of a mouse colour and very swift’.⁴² The next day Cook was gobsmacked to see one, too: ‘it was 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 jump’d like a Hare or Deer’.⁴³ One of the sailors told Banks of his own encounter with the creature ‘in so Seamanlike a stile that I cannot help mentioning it’. The naturalist was told that the animal was about as large as a one-gallon keg, ‘as black as the Devil and had 2 horns on its head, it went but Slowly but I dard not touch it’.⁴⁴

Finally, as Banks was out inspecting new plants along the Endeavour River on 25 June 1770, he looked up to have ‘the good fortune to see the beast so much talkd of . . . 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’.⁴⁵

As the ship’s carpenters busied themselves repairing the Endeavour, Banks made another startling discovery – although this one was disturbing. Since the ship had been hauled ashore, the water in her had flowed backwards, flooding the bread room where he had stored all his plants from the voyage: ‘many were savd but some intirely lost and spoild’.⁴⁶ He and Solander got cracking to replenish their stocks, with the help of the crew.

Although Banks thought that nature had doomed the surrounding landscape ‘to everlasting Barrenness’, he collected a type of wild kale resembling the West Indian ‘Coccos’. The roots were too acrid to eat; ‘the leaves however when boild were little inferior to spinage’,⁴⁷ and Tupaia made his more palatable by roasting it. There were also some unpromising cabbage palms, ‘very bad’ beans, wild plantain trees whose banana-like fruit ‘was so full of stones that it was scarce eatable’, local taro, and what became known as Burdekin plums, stone-filled fruit that ‘when gatherd off from the tree were very hard and disagreable but after being kept a few days became soft and tasted much like indiferent Damsons’.⁴⁸

There was also much fascinating fauna to observe. Banks inspected ant nests as tall as himself that ‘very much resembled stones’ he had seen in ‘English Druidical monuments’.⁴⁹ The waters were teeming with fish, and on 29 June, James Matra reported he had shot at a dingo, though he called it a wolf: ‘perfectly he sayd like those he had seen in America’. Banks noted another unusual animal, the ‘quoll’:⁵⁰ ‘about the size and something like a polecat, of a light brown spotted with white on the back and white under the belly’.⁵¹

BY SUNDAY, 1 JULY, the ship repairs were complete, and Banks accompanied Cook and the officers to a high point over the river ‘to see what passage to the sea might be open’. But ‘the Prospect was indeed melancholy: the sea every where full of innumerable shoals, some above and some under water, and no prospect of any streight passage out’.⁵² The tide did not rise enough to lift the ship, and so the pinnace was sent out into the reef to find a way through the tangle.

The boat returned with news of a route that would require ‘a land breeze’, which was scarce. But at least the boat was overflowing ‘cheifly with a large kind of Cockles . . . [or giant clams] One of which was more than 2 men could eat. Many indeed were larger; the Cockswain of the Boat a little man declard that he saw on the reef a dead shell of one so large that he got into it and it fairly held him.’⁵³

At night the Endeavour floated again, and Banks watched a crocodile⁵⁴ swimming alongside her for some time.⁵⁵ But ‘the ship has been a good deal straind by laying so long’, and she ‘sprung a plank’ and needed more repair work.

Banks used the extra time well. He found coconuts that Tupaia told him had been opened by a kind of crab, and he and Gore, together with Tupaia and two sailors, went on a three-day excursion upriver. On the first day they explored the countryside for fifteen kilometres, wading through mangroves until they were in ‘Beautifull verdure’ among magnificent hibiscus plants. Tupaia reported seeing another ‘Wolf’, while Banks observed ‘Batts [flying foxes] as large as a Partridge’. ‘A Seaman,’ he said, ‘who had been out on duty on his return declard that he had seen an animal about the size of and much like a one gallon cagg; it was, says he, as black as the Devil and had wings, indeed I took it for the Devil or I might easily have catchd it for it crauld very slowly through the grass. After taking some pains I found out that the animal he had seen was no other than the Large Bat.’⁵⁶ Alas, ‘the Musquetos . . . spard no pains to molest [us] . . . they followd us into the very smoak, nay almost into the fire, which hot as the Climate was we could better bear the heat of than their intolerable stings’.⁵⁷

On 7 July, Banks’s greyhound set off after two of the strange bounding animals, ‘but they beat him owing to the lengh and thickness of the grass which prevented him from running while they at every bound leapd over the tops of it. We observd much to our surprize that instead of Going upon all fours this animal went only upon two legs, making vast bounds just as the [hopping desert rodent the jerboa] does’.⁵⁸ Banks observed ‘a smoak’ two hundred metres away, and he immediately approached it with just two companions, hoping that ‘the smallness of our numbers would induce them not to be afraid of us’. But when the Endeavour men reached the fire, the locals were gone, leaving behind ‘shells of a kind of Clam and roots of a wild Yam’ that had been cooked on it.⁵⁹

Banks and the others slept that night upon a broad sandbank under the shade of a bush where they hoped the mosquitoes would not trouble them. Plantain leaves spread on the sand were as soft as a mattress, and they had cloaks for bedclothes and grass pillows.⁶⁰ The next day Banks saw another crocodile, more than two metres long, come out of the mangroves and crawl into the water, but he was more impressed by the three green turtles weighing a whopping 791 pounds (359 kilograms) that Molyneux brought back after another excursion looking for a way through the reef.⁶¹ ‘The promise of such plenty of good provisions’, Banks wrote, ‘made our situation appear much less dreadfull; were we obligd to Wait here for another season of the year when the winds might alter we could do it without fear of wanting Provisions: this thought alone put every body in vast spirits.’⁶² The turtles were a staple food for the local Indigenous people, and for the visitors they provided a memorable feast.

IN THE MORNING, four of the local Guugu Yimithirr people appeared on the opposite shore of the river. They had with them a wooden canoe with an outrigger, and two of them came towards the ship but suddenly stopped at a distance, ‘talking much and very loud’. Banks and the others hollered to them and, waving, made signs for them to approach. By degrees the Aboriginal men ventured nearer and nearer till they were alongside the Endeavour, holding up their spears as if to warn the visitors that they would return any attack.⁶³ ‘Cloth, Nails, Paper, etc. etc. was given to them all which they took and put into the canoe without shewing the least signs of satisfaction: at last a small fish was by accident thrown to them on which they expressd the greatest joy imaginable, and instantly putting off from the ship made signs that they would bring over their comrades, which they very soon did and all four landed near us, each carrying in his hand 2 Lances and his stick to throw them with.’ Tupaia made signs that they should lay down the spears and come forward without them. They sat on the ground with Tupaia, and Banks made signs for them to eat with the Endeavour men. But they refused, going back to their canoe and paddling away.⁶⁴

The next day, Banks was visited again by two of those he had met and

two new ones who our old acquaintance introduc’d to us by their names, one of which was Yaparico . . . they all had the Septum or inner part of the nose bord through with a very large hole, in which one of them had stuck the bone of a bird as thick as a mans finger and 5 or 6 inches long . . . They brought with them a fish which they gave to us in return I suppose for the fish we had given them yesterday. Their stay was but short for some of our gentlemen being rather too curious in examining their canoe they went directly to it and pushing it off went away without saying a word.⁶⁵

The Guugu Yimithirr became regular visitors, each introducing themselves by name. They were ‘a very small people’, Banks observed, ‘in general about 5 feet 6 [168 centimetres] in hight and very slender’; he measured one man at five foot two, while another was an exception at five foot nine.⁶⁶ The Guugu Yimithirr were always completely naked, but while Cook remarked that their skin was ‘the Colour of Wood soot’,⁶⁷ Banks wrote:

Their colour was nearest to that of chocolate . . . Their hair was strait in some and curld in others; they always wore it croppd close round their heads; it was of the same consistence with our hair, by no means wooly or curld like that of Negroes. Their eyes were in many lively and their teeth even and good; of them they had compleat setts . . . They were all of them clean limn’d, active and nimble . . . They Painted themselves with white and red, the first in lines and barrs on different Parts of their bodies, the other in large patches. Their ornaments were few: necklaces prettyly enough made of shells, bracelets wore round the upper part of their arms, consisting of strings lapd round with other strings . . .⁶⁸

Their canoes were only about three metres long and ‘very narrow built’, with an ‘outrigger fitted much like those at the Islands only far inferior’. The spears were a different story: ‘much like those we had seen in Botany bay, only they were all of them single pointed, and some pointed with the stings of stingrays and bearded with two or three beards of the same, which made them indeed a terrible weapon’.⁶⁹

ON 14 JULY 1770, Lieutenant Gore shot one of the bounding beasts. ‘To compare it to any European animal would be impossible,’ Banks wrote, ‘as it has not the least resemblance of any one I have seen. Its fore legs are extreemly short and of no use to it in walking, its hind again as disproportionaly long; with these it hops 7 or 8 feet at each hop in the same manner.’⁷⁰ Banks thought that it ‘provd excellent meat’.⁷¹ Parkinson sat down to draw and then eat it, saying its ‘flesh tasted like a hare’s’ but with ‘a more agreeable flavour’.⁷² Banks later came to believe, from talking to the Guugu Yimithirr, that the animal was called a ‘kangooroo’.⁷³

The naturalist asked one of the local men to demonstrate throwing his spear, which was made of reddish wood: ‘It flew with a degree of swiftness and steadyness that realy surprizd me, never being above 4 feet from the ground and stuck deep in at the distance of 50 paces.’⁷⁴ But the locals remained wary of the visitors, and when Banks and Solander attempted to follow one group of fishermen, hoping for ‘an opportunity of seeing their Women; they however by signs made us understand that they did not desire our company’.⁷⁵

The Guugu Yimithirr weren’t fussed with all the clothes, beads and trinkets Cook and Banks gave them, and Banks later found the gifts ‘left all in a heap together, doubtless as lumber not worth carriage’.⁷⁶ All they seemed to want was one of the turtles that their uninvited visitors had caught.

Sydney Parkinson’s sketch of a kangaroo – the first by a European – made during his time at the Endeavour River.

Natural History Museum, London

On 19 July, a group of ten Guugu Yimithirr came to the Endeavour, bringing more spears than they had ever done before. They asked for one of the eight or nine turtles that lay upon the decks, making signs that the creatures belonged to them. When they were refused, Banks recalled they ‘shewd great marks of Resentment; one who had askd me on my refusal stamping with his foot pushd me from him with a countenance full of disdain’. They decided to repossess a turtle and hauled it towards the side of the ship where their canoe lay. It was soon taken from them, but they ‘repeated the expiriment 2 or 3 times and after meeting with so many repulses all in an instant leapd into their Canoe and went ashore’.⁷⁷

There they took fire from under a kettle, which was boiling, and set fire to the grass all around the equipment, luggage and animals that the crew had left ashore. The grass ‘was 4 or 5 feet high and as dry as stubble’ and burnt ‘with vast fury’.⁷⁸ A sow had just given birth, and one of its piglets was scorched to death. Banks leapt into a boat and made it to shore barely in time to save his tent. Cook blasted bird shot into one of the warriors about to torch the Endeavour’s big fishing net, and small drops of his blood landed on some of the linen that had been laid out to dry.⁷⁹

There was an impasse for a time before the two warring parties sat down opposite each other about a hundred metres apart. Then a curious thing took place.

A ‘little old man’, known as Ngamu Yarrbarigu,⁸⁰ approached these troublesome visitors, carrying a spear without a point. ‘He halted several times and as he stood employd himself in collecting the moisture from under his arm pit with his finger which he every time drew through his mouth.’ Blowing the sweat into the air was a symbol of peace and safety, and this was the first known reconciliation ceremony between Aboriginal people and white invaders.⁸¹ Banks beckoned the old man to come forward: ‘he then spoke to the others who all laid their lances against a tree and leaving them came forwards likewise and soon came quite to us. They had with them it seems 3 strangers who wanted to see the ship but the man who was shot at and the boy were gone, so our troop now consisted of 11 . . . we all proceeded towards the ship, they making signs as they came along that they would not set fire to the grass again and we distributing musquet balls among them and by our signs explaining their effect.’⁸² When the Guugu Yimithirr came abreast of the ship, they sat down but could not be prevailed upon to come on board.

Banks recalled the next day that ‘No Indians came near us but all the hills about us for many miles were on fire and at night made the most beautifull appearance imaginable . . . I had little Idea of the fury with which the grass burnt in this hot climate, nor of the dificulty of extinguishing it when once lighted.’⁸³

COOK AND BANKS TRAVELLED about twelve kilometres north from the ship, climbing a high hill for ‘an extensive view of the Sea Coast’, but it afforded ‘a melancholy prospect’ of the difficulties they faced.⁸⁴ Although the ship had been repaired and was ‘ready to sail with the first fair wind’, Banks pondered ‘where to go? – to windward was impossible, to leward was a Labyrinth of Shoals’.⁸⁵

Unfavourable winds and unsuitable tides kept the Endeavour moored for two more weeks, and in that time Banks collected a ringtail possum and its two babies, while one of the men bagged a kangaroo weighing eighty-four pounds (almost forty kilograms). But the big roo was old and tough, and Banks found the meat ‘insipid’.⁸⁶ His greyhound ran down a terrified joey, too, but other roos were too nimble for him.

The Endeavour had now spent seven weeks on the river, by far Banks’s longest and most productive stay in New Holland. He and Solander had collected 348 species there, with 310 of them said to be new to science, including hoop pine (or Moreton Bay pine), sea hibiscus, red cedar, kangaroo grass and tulipwood.⁸⁷ But the men were consuming all their remaining provisions and still faced ‘a long Passage to make to the East Indies through an unknown and perhaps dangerous Sea’.⁸⁸

Slowly, cautiously, at 5 a.m. on 4 August the Endeavour began its journey towards what Molyneux had called Turtle Reef, while Cook tried to keep her from being dashed to pieces on the coral.

For three days they lay at anchor during a gale, but by 10 August they were about seventy kilometres north of the Endeavour River. Cook named a headland Cape Flattery because of a false sense of security he had felt near there. He believed he had a ‘a Clear, open Sea’ before him. But when he and Banks climbed a peak that Cook named Point Lookout, they realised the sea still had many hazards.

The next day Banks joined Cook and some crew in the pinnace, journeying to the highest of three islands about thirty kilometres to the north-east. They climbed the highest hill where, to the skipper’s ‘mortification’,⁸⁹ he saw another eighteen kilometres of reef running north-west and south-east. The weather was hazy, but far in the distance it seemed the sea broke very high; Cook suspected this might be the reef’s ‘outermost shoals’. There appeared to be several breaks in the reef, and deep water between it and the islands.

Cook and Banks slept under the shade of a tree on the beach. The next morning, while the captain climbed the peak to check once again for breaks in the reef, the naturalist searched the island’s ‘one small tract of woodland which abounded very much with large Lizzards’,⁹⁰ some of which found their way into his collection along with a rose butternut plant. Cook called the place Lizard Island. In their return to the Endeavour, they went ashore on the neighbouring Eagle Island where they shot many birds and killed young eagles they found in a nest for Banks’s collection. On another island nearby, Molyneux found turtle fins hanging in the trees to dry and promptly robbed the local population of their next meal.

On 13 August, the Endeavour passed through an 800-metre-wide break in the reef and was then in a hundred fathoms (182 metres) of deep water. For the first time in three months, Banks could not see land: ‘to our no small satisfaction: that very Ocean which had formerly been look’d upon with terror by (maybe) all of us was now the Assylum we had long wishd for and at last found. Satisfaction was clearly painted in every mans face’.⁹¹

Cook wanted to make sure that the passage ‘which is layd down in some charts between New Holland and New Guinea realy existed or no’ and steerd the ship west towards the land. On 15 August they anchored for the night, though Banks was afraid the ship would end up back on the coral, ‘the large waves of the vast ocean meeting with so sudden a resistance [making] a most terrible surf Breaking mountain high’.⁹²

Before sunrise on 16 August, Banks could hear the roar of the surf, and as day broke ‘the vast foaming billows were plainly enough to be seen scarce a mile from us and towards which we found the ship carried by the waves surprizingly fast’. By six o’clock the Endeavour was within two hundred metres of the breakers ‘driving on as fast as ever’ and forty yards of the reef. Between the ship and doom was only ‘a dismal valley the breadth of one wave’:⁹³ ‘[A] speedy death was all we had to hope for and that from the vastness of the Breakers which must quickly dash the ship all to peices was scarce to be doubted. Other hopes we had none: the boats were in the ship and must be dashd in peices with her and the nearest dry land was 8 or 10 Leagues [as much as fifty-five kilometres] distant . . . At this critical juncture, at this I must say terrible moment, when all asistance seemd too little to save even our miserable lives, a small air of wind sprang up, so small that at any other time in a calm we should not have observd it.’⁹⁴

The breeze checked the Endeavour’s rapid progress to destruction, and every sail was put in a proper direction to catch it. What Banks called ‘Our little freindly Breeze’ pushed them ‘possibly 100 yards farther from the breakers: we were still however in the very jaws of destruction’.

The lookout yelled that he could see a small opening in the reef two hundred metres away. Banks recalled that the fear of death was bitter, but there was a glimmer of hope amid the exploding surf. Although the tide had been pushing the ship ‘so unacountably fast towards the reef’, ‘[n]ow however the tide of Ebb made strong and gushd out of our little opening like a mill stream . . . and it Carried us out near a quarter of a mile from the reef’.⁹⁵

Cook called the passage Providential Channel. ‘This is the narrowest escape we ever had,’ wrote master’s mate Richard Pickersgill, ‘and had it not been for the immediate help of Providence we must inevitably have perished, for the ship must have sunk alongside the rocks, which were as steep as a wall, and there would have been no hopes of saving one single life in so great a surf’.⁹⁶ Cook admitted that he had ‘engaged more among the Islands and Shoals upon this Coast than perhaps in prudence I ought to have done with a single Ship’, but he was determined to find the strait that Torres had drawn north of New Holland.

The Endeavour was now back inside the reef about three hundred kilometres north of Lizard Island. Cook kept tracking north until 21 August, when the ship rounded what he named York Cape after King George III’s recently deceased brother Edward, the Duke of York and Albany.

Banks saw ten Indigenous men standing on the hill of an island: nine had spears, and the other a bow and arrow; two wore large ornaments of mother-of-pearl round their necks. As Cook and Banks prepared to go ashore, three of the locals placed themselves upon the beach ‘as if resolvd either to oppose or assist our landing’. When Banks drew near, however, ‘they all walkd leisurely away’,⁹⁷ seemingly unconcerned by these strange visitors. In the morning ‘3 or 4 women appeard upon the beach gathering shellfish . . . more naked than our mother Eve’.⁹⁸

Cook and Banks went to the highest hill on the island and, in their eyes, took possession of the whole eastern coast of New Holland ‘in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third . . . from the Latitude of 38 degrees South down to this place’, which Cook called Possession Island. He hoisted the English colours, then named the whole area he had charted ‘New Wales’, later amending it to ‘New South Wales’ for the copy of his journal sent to the Admiralty. His men fired three volleys of muskets, answered by three more from the ship.⁹⁹

SAILING THROUGH THE Endeavour Channel heading for Torres Strait, Banks and Cook went ashore on a barren, rocky island frequented by birds such as boobies. Cook named it Booby Island, and Banks found more plants he had not seen before. As they sailed north, New Guinea looked thickly wooded, and its mud banks gave the warm water around it the dirty colour of the Thames. The weather was ‘most intolerably hot’ but ‘a very Fragrant smell’ came off the shore much like ‘the smell of gum Benjamin’.¹⁰⁰

Banks and Cook worked on reports of their experiences in New Holland. They compared notes and sometimes borrowed each other’s ideas, especially when they wrote of what they both said was the happiness that came from the Aboriginal people’s unfamiliarity with materialism. Cook ventured: ‘they are far more happier than we Europeans . . . They live in a Tranquility which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition. The earth and Sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for Life.’¹⁰¹ Banks agreed, forgetting about his lavish London home and lucrative estates to opine that the Aboriginal people had shown him ‘how small are the real wants of human nature’.¹⁰² He thought, however, that ‘this immense tract of Land’, which he incorrectly estimated to be ‘considerably larger than all Europe’, was thinly inhabited, having ‘never but once saw so many as thirty Indians together . . . At Sting-Rays bay where they evidently came down to fight us several times they never could muster above 14 or 15 fighting men’. Around the Endeavour River he saw only twenty-one: ‘12 men 7 women a boy and a girl’. The only vegetables he saw any of the locals eat were yams, and he saw no tools except for a stone axe and a wooden mallet.¹⁰³

New Holland was ‘in every respect the most barren countrey’ Banks had seen, but ‘between the productions of sea and Land a company of People who should have the misfortune of being shipwreckd upon it’ might still be able to support themselves.¹⁰⁴ Water was scarce, he said, and the soil so poor ‘[it] could not be supposd to yeild much towards the support of man’.¹⁰⁵ There was ‘certainly no want of trees’ for timber, but all were ‘of a very hard nature; our carpenters who cut them down for fire wood complaind much that their tools were damagd by them’.¹⁰⁶

ON 3 SEPTEMBER, Banks set foot onto the mainland of what is now West Papua near Yos Sudarso Island, after Cook led a boatload of twelve to shore. Once they had waded through the last two hundred metres, they made a rushed visit. Banks became nervous at the sight of recent footprints: the men had little defence should they be attacked by a crowd, and their boat was a long way off. Still, in a short time Banks and Solander collected or noted twenty-three plants, including varieties of hibiscus, casuarina and cypress. Their party soon found a hut upon the banks of a small brook of brackish water surrounded by a grove of coconut trees laden with fruit. The men looked up wistfully at the fresh fruit, but as none of them could climb the limbless trunks they moved on.

When the Endeavour men were about four hundred metres from their boat, three small black men rushed out of the woods ‘with a hideous shout’. The one in front threw at Banks burning tinder from a bamboo stick that resembled a musket flash; the other two threw spears. Banks and his companions fired their muskets, most of which were loaded with bird shot, and the locals ‘ran away with great alacrity’: ‘we immediately concluded that nothing was to be got here but by force, which would of course be attended with destruction of many of these poor people, whose territories we had certainly no right to invade . . . we therefore resolvd to go into our boat and leave intirely this coast to some aftercomer who might have either more time or better opportunities to gain the freindship of its inhabitants’.¹⁰⁷ Before Banks and the others reached the water, another hundred warriors came around a point four hundred metres away. But they waited, shouting threats, as the foreigners made their escape.

The Endeavour soon sailed away ‘to the No small satisfaction of I beleive thre[e] fourths of our company the sick became well and the melancholy lookd gay. The greatest part of them were now 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 . . .’¹⁰⁸

They sailed a little south-west in waters that had been well charted by the Dutch, and at 10 p.m. on 16 September in the Roti Strait off Timor ‘a Phaenomenon appeard in the heavens’: the aurora australis or southern lights – ‘a dull reddish light reaching in hight about 20 degrees above the Horizon . . . Through and out of this passd rays of a brighter colourd light tending directly upwards . . . it lasted as bright as ever till near 12’.¹⁰⁹

Passing south of Timor, the Endeavour arrived at Savu Island where, on 18 September, Banks saw people in European dress for the first time in almost two years. The Dutch flag was flying, and the locals ‘in all respects as colour, dress etc.’ were ‘much resembling the Malays’.¹¹⁰ Because trade war tensions between the British and the Dutch were high, the German governor there for the Dutch East India Company, Johan Christopher Lange, and the local Raja would not let Banks and Solander travel around the island botanising.

Parkinson contented himself with learning as much of the local language as he could. He asked too many questions, though, for the liking of the Dutch, quizzing people about the spices ‘nutmeg, cloves etc . . . so that it immediately came to Mr Lange’s ears’.¹¹¹

But Solander managed to placate Dutch fears over any thoughts of trade espionage, and Lange and the Raja eventually came on board the Endeavour. Cook wanted to trade for supplies, and Banks revealed that some of the men were sick and in need of fresh vegetables, along with the local palm wine he believed had ‘antescorbutick virtues’.¹¹² Over dinner, Banks told the Raja about mutton, and Cook gave the local ruler the ship’s last surviving sheep as a gift. When the Raja asked for an English dog, Banks was so keen to get fresh supplies on board that he gave him his greyhound. Lange hinted he would like a spyglass, and one was immediately presented.

The governor assuaged Cook’s fears about westerly winds, assuring him that the easterly monsoon would prevail for at least two more months. So after four days of civilities on the island, the Endeavour sailed away on 21 September with ‘8 Buffeloes [though at least one was disappointingly undersized], 30 Dzn of fowls, 6 [local] sheep, 3 hogs, some few but very few limes and cocoa nuts, a little garlick, a good many eggs above half of which were rotten [and] an immense quantity of Syrup’.¹¹³

Banks detailed his experiences on Savu, a place ‘of great consequence to the Duch and scarce known to any other Europaeans even by name’,¹¹⁴ in a detailed report as much for the Admiralty as posterity. Cook set the Endeavour for Java Head and the Sunda Strait.

Off Bantam, on 2 October, they encountered two Dutch East Indiamen transport ships: one bound for Cochin, the other for Ceylon. Banks learnt a lot about what had been happening in Europe while he was away: Sandwich’s old rival John Wilkes had been elected as the Member for Middlesex only to be thrown out of Parliament; the American colonists were refusing to pay taxes, and the British were sending large forces across the Atlantic; and the Russians were causing trouble in Poland.

The British men of the Endeavour were on their way home, having survived the great voyage in remarkably good shape, free of the scurvy and other diseases that had devastated so many seagoing adventures. A week later, though, they arrived in a city of doom.