Endeavour

Chatto 432pp £20 The Week Bookshop £17 The ship that Captain Cook commanded on his first voyage of discovery was “not an obvious beauty”, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. “A stout little coal ship” known as a Whitby collier, built from oak planted a century earlier, Endeavour “sailed the world” for 14 years between 1764 and 1778, travelling not only to the South Pacific with Cook – it was the first European ship to reach the east coast of Australia – but also to the Falkland Islands and North America. In this “dazzling” book, Peter Moore uses the ship as a window onto the culture of the 18th century, a period he characterises as an “age of endeavour”. The men who travelled with Cook – such as the botanist Joseph Banks – were “thrillingly open-minded”, curious individuals who invariably behaved with “Christian decency” towards the people they encountered. Combining history and science with “evocative descriptions of lush tropical landscapes”, Endeavour is an “absolute joy”.

Originally christened the Earl of Pembroke, Endeavour (pictured) started out life as an “unglamorous” collier travelling between Yorkshire and “coal-hungry London”, said Gerard Degroot in The Times. In 1768, it was moored on the Thames when the Royal Society decided to mount an expedition to the South Pacific to “observe the transit of Venus over the face of the Sun”. The ship’s size and sturdiness made it ideally suited to such a mission, and it was swiftly “refitted and renamed”. Having set sail in July 1768, the 70-strong crew of HMS Endeavour observed the transit in Tahiti in June 1769, before “continuing further south into uncharted seas”, said Ruth Scurr in The Guardian. Over the next two years, they travelled to New Zealand, Australia and various other South Pacific islands, collecting “30,000 samples, 1,400 previously unknown to European scientists”. On their return, not everyone was impressed: Dr Johnson observed to James Boswell that “they have found very little, only one new animal, I think” – the kangaroo.

Endeavour’s “third life” was as a troopship during the American War of Independence, said Robert Mayhew in the Literary Review. After serving as a “floating prison” for captured soldiers, it was scuttled in 1778 to defend British fortifications on Rhode Island. In attempting to make Cook’s ship a symbol of its age, Moore is occasionally guilty of “overreach”. Yet overall, this is a “deeply satisfying” and “beautifully crafted” book, which “gives the Endeavour a new lease of life long after its sinking”.