The story of a ship that changed the world

Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World. By Peter Moore. Chatto & Windus; 432 pages; £20. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus & Giroux next year.

ONE clear moonlit night in June 1770, James Cook ran into yet more proof of how remarkable the newly explored continent of Australia was. Literally: his ship, Endeavour, ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. The next 23 hours were spent bailing water in terror, until finally Endeavour slid free. Ship, captain and the intelligence he had gathered returned to England—and a rapturous welcome.

Rarely has a craft been so well named. As Peter Moore shows in his new book, Endeavour was more than merely the first English vessel to reach New Zealand and Australia’s east coast. She was also a floating laboratory, a vast seed-bank and an international observatory. Along with sails and anchors she carried telescopes, microscopes, two artists and several scientists. Endeavour was the spirit of the Enlightenment under sail.

She was also much less elegant than is Mr Moore’s immersive account of her life, from acorn to ending. The ideals she came to serve belied her earthy beginnings. Built in Whitby of Yorkshire oak, twisted and hardened by Yorkshire winds, Endeavour had been designed to carry not intellectuals but coal. When Australian Aboriginals first saw her, they imagined she was a “big bird” with animals clustering about her wings. Her crew referred to their matronly ship as “Mrs Endeavour”.

Yet when Britain decided to seek out Terra Australis, she was the craft chosen for the perilous undertaking. It had been over two millennia since Aristotle discussed the idea of a southern continent in which men would stand with their feet (-podes) opposite (anti-) those of Europeans. A century before Cook, a Dutch seaman called Abel Tasman had returned with reports of a land whose people were “rough, uncivilised, full of verve”. Yet still the bottom-right corner of maps remained indistinct.

It was a tantalising smudge. This was the great age of labels, in which educated men roamed the earth naming and (they felt) taming it. Surveying the world today is like looking at a schoolboy’s desk: the scratched names remain, even if many of the boys are forgotten. This enjoyable book breathes life into characters better remembered for their namesakes than themselves: Tasman (Tasmania), Louis Antoine de Bougainville (bougainvillea) and Carl Linnaeus (Linnaean classification).

The Royal Society, the moving spirit behind Endeavour’s mission, was less concerned with colonisation than with science. Its chief interest was in observing the transit of Venus: by measuring its duration from both hemispheres, the data could be used to accurately calculate the distance of the sun. Botany was a close second. By the summer of 1768 the team had been chosen. On July 30th Cook, his crew and a bumptious young botanist named Joseph Banks left their last London anchorage.

Their triumphant voyage changed the world. Its very map could be redrawn; the sun could be set more securely in the sky and, thanks to Banks’s samples, the catalogue of known plants increased by a fifth. The reputation (and in some cases egos) of Endeavour’s crew swelled similarly. Linnaeus was so impressed by the trip that he gave Banks his own binomial classification, addressing a letter to “Immortalis Banks”. Banks was not the sort to demur.

He may be immortal; Endeavour was not. She limped on, transporting first food to the Falkland Islands, then troops to the American war of independence, before finally being scuttled off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1778.