Exploring Endeavour

A new look at Cook’s first voyage maps the life of his ship.

Few ships in history can be seen as often and thought of as seldom as James Cook’s Endeavour in New Zealand. Frozen in time on our 50c piece, rounding Mt Taranaki in early 1770, it passes through most hands without a second look. It’s an appropriately commonplace afterlife for a very ordinary vessel with an extraordinary legacy – and surely one of Endeavour’s only historical traces unmentioned in Peter Moore’s epic biography of what he calls “one of the most significant objects of the Enlightenment’’.

Accounts centred on Cook’s voyage typically sum up the ship’s origins in the throwaway phrase “Whitby collier”. Moore draws back the curtain on this piece of trivia, from the acorn up, and the result is an enthralling cultural history of English oak, the physics and art of shipbuilding and the coastal traders that linked Newcastle’s mines to London. This is probably the book at its best; within 100 pages, Moore has established the Earl of Pembroke, its name when launched without fanfare in 1764, as a ship with a lot to say about the age that produced it.

The bulk of the story naturally centres on Endeavour’s most famous incarnation, in 1768, where its name and mission coincide with Moore’s larger focus: capturing the spirit of 18th century endeavours – spectacular headlong rushes for the greater good. Endeavour’s successful voyage under Cook was a case in point, and Moore captures the excitement and courage of the expedition. He also documents the bureaucracy, tantrums and bruised egos that preceded and followed the mission – the less elegant aspects of a grand Enlightenment venture.

He highlights alternative views of the ship’s arrival, and its legacy, in Tahitian, Māori and Aboriginal communities, but appropriately leaves their perspectives to be told by others within those traditions.

No punches are pulled in recounting