ENDEAVOUR

THE SHIP AND THE ATTITUDE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

PETER MOORE Chatto, 420pp, £20, Oldie price £13.34 inc p&p

Beginning her life as a Whitby collier, the Endeavour was the ship in which Captain Cook sailed to Australia and

‘A calmly written, fair-minded but ultimately angry account’

New Zealand on his first voyage of exploration from 1768 to 1771, and later served as a British transport ship during the American Revolution. Peter Moore ‘finds a form for his inquiries in the 18th-century vogue for “it-biographies”: accounts of the lives of real or fictional objects, such as coins, coaches and walking canes, wrote Ruth Scurr in the Guardian. ‘He focuses on the wood that became the ship Endeavour, and in doing so is able to connect a far-flung cast of characters and places, pulling into his story politicians, philosophers, sailors, ship-builders and the natural history of Britain, Australia and New Zealand.’ For Robert Mayhew, in Literary

Review, this is ‘a beautifully crafted book, but it does at times overreach itself. Moore’s depiction of the

Endeavour as “one of the most significant objects of the entire Enlightenment” is a pardonable exaggeration. But he also tries to

frame the Enlightenment as a whole as a “culture of endeavour”, a simplification that is unconvincing (it also results in the rather clunky subtitle of the book)… [since] there were many other enlightenments too – clerical, conservative, radical and satirical, to name a few. Broadbottomed as a Whitby collier may be, it cannot be asked to carry such a historical burden. Quibbles aside, however, Endeavour is a deeply satisfying book. It represents an intelligent, diverse, fresh and challenging approach to writing the history of exploration. Paying homage to the remarkable lives of a single vessel, Peter Moore also gives the Endeavour a new lease of life long after its sinking.’