(“Miss Bl: swoon’d &c”) but no marriage came out of it; yet later, to quote Dr Lysaght, “the Blosset family was rumoured to have withdrawn with a substantial sum of money from Banks [Lee 1810] to console her for all the knitted waistcoats with which she had sought to enmesh him.”
But this is to anticipate: on 16 August 1768 Banks and Solander set out for Plymouth – the “suite” was already there – and they arrived on the twentieth. The Endeavour had taken in all her stores; the shipwrights and joiners had finished their work on the gentlemen’s cabins; the ship had been brought out into the Sound; and if the wind had been kind Cook would have sailed the next day. But instead of weighing his anchor, he was obliged to let go another because of gales and thick weather, while the “gentlemen” (this was Cook’s term for those of his passengers who were not servants) had nothing to do but contemplate their vessel through the pouring rain.
Although her captain no doubt loved her, she was nothing much to look at, being only a rather small cat-built bark, a north-country collier: to a sailor the cat part of her name meant that she was built in the northern way, remarkably strong, and that she was distinguished by a narrow stern, projecting quarters, a deep waist and no ornamental figure on the prow, while the bark part implied that she was smallish, square-sterned, and without headrails – that is to say she did not have that elegant cut-away dip in front through which the bowsprit rises that was so marked a feature of the contemporary men-of-war and larger merchantmen, but ended prosaically in a point, and rather a blunt one at that. Logically enough most barks were also bark-rigged, carrying square sails on the fore and main masts and fore-and-aft sails on the mizen. But to the seaman this was not at all a necessary consequence, and in fact the Endeavour was square-rigged on all three.
Her bows were bluff; she was wall-sided, with no handsome inward slope or tumblehome; her homely lines made it clear that she would be slow and her flat bottom meant that she would not be a very weatherly ship – that she would find it difficult to claw off a lee shore. But her flat bottom and her straight sides gave her wonderfully roomy holds – she had eighteen months’ stores aboard – and a shallow draught; and if she was slow her great strength of construction meant that she was also sure: at least as sure as any vessel could hope to be on the sea, that wholly unreliable element. She was one hundred and six feet long and twenty-nine feet two inches at the widest; she drew fifteen feet abaft with six months’ stores, she gauged 368 tons, she carried ten four-pounder carriage guns and twelve swivels, and her complement numbered eighty-five, including a dozen Marines under a sergeant.
Although she was a king’s ship, wearing a pennant at the main, she had obviously been built for the coal or timber trade and she must have looked a commonplace, shabby little object in Plymouth Sound among all the regular men-of-war. But there was nothing commonplace or shabby about her captain, although he too had spent his early days at sea carrying coal and wood: James Cook was a big, unusually good-looking man with a strong, determined face, and he would have stood out even on a particularly distinguished quarterdeck; he had all the marks of a seaman, and from everything one hears or reads, all the seaman’s amiable qualities: courage, resolution, modesty, and the gift of being good company, as well, of course, as great professional abilities and natural authority. Yet like Cochrane or Sir Francis Chichester he did not go to sea until he was relatively old. Cook was born in 1728 and as a boy and a youth in Yorkshire he helped his father, a farm labourer, at the same time getting a little education at the village school; and when he was seventeen he was apprenticed to a grocer at Snaith, not far from the port of Whitby. Eighteen months of grocering was all he could bear however and in 1746 he went to sea in a Whitby collier, the strangely named Freelove, plying the difficult and often very dangerous sea between Newcastle and London. Other ships followed and a great deal of sea-time, and in 1752 he became mate of the Friendship, also belonging to Whitby. In 1755 war between England and France became almost certain, and although it was not declared until the next year, press warrants were already out: the Navy had to be manned, if necessary by force. Cook’s ship was in the London river, the most likely place to be taken, and after some hesitation he decided to volunteer, “having a mind to try his fortune that way”, and entering of course as a foremast hand. His first ship was the Eagle of sixty guns.
He did uncommonly well, finding an appreciative captain who changed his rating from able seaman to master’s mate: this was not a rank held by warrant, still less by commission, but strictly a rating, like that of midshipman. Yet it did bring him aft to the quarterdeck in an officer’s uniform, messing with the surgeon’s mates, the other master’s mates and the senior midshipmen. Then Captain Hugh Palliser took over the Eagle: he at once distinguished Cook and encouraged him, and in 1757, having passed the necessary examination at Trinity House, Cook was given a warrant as master of the Pembroke, also of sixty guns. The war now took him to Canada, where he did better still; among other things he sounded and charted the St Lawrence both above and below Quebec, a very risky and technically arduous undertaking opposite the French positions but one essential for the capture of the city. For the rest of the war Cook was on active service in the Pembroke and in Lord Colville’s flagship the Northumberland; and when peace came his service – his surveying, charting and sounding in American waters – was hardly less uncomfortable and perilous; but at least he did have more time to devote to mathematics and astronomy, and now, in his fortieth year, he was acknowledged to be the fittest man in the Navy to lead the present expedition.
His officers too were a picked, seamanlike set: what is more, Lieutenant John Gore had already sailed round the world in the Dolphin with Byron and again with Wallis, while Molineux, the master, and his two mates Pickersgill and Clerke had also made this most recent circumnavigation. The senior lieutenant, Zachary Hicks, and the surgeon, William Monkhouse, were both men of great experience; and the midshipmen were grown youths with several years of sea service, with the one exception of Isaac Manley, who was then twelve but who reached the age of eighty-one, dying an admiral of the red. Banks and Monkhouse (whose younger brother was one of these midshipmen) were old acquaintances, for they had been shipmates in the Niger: though perhaps one should write Munkhouse, since that was how he signed his will, one of the many wills written aboard the Endeavour, and rightly written, since so many were called for. Of the original gunroom, only Gore came home; and of Banks’s followers, six died out of eight.
These followers consisted of Sydney Parkinson; Herman Spöring, a Swede who had lived for some years in London as a watchmaker and for the last two as Solander’s clerk and who now acted as secretary as well as draughtsman; and Alexander Buchan, an artist who was to deal with landscapes and figures. There were also four servants, Peter Briscoe, who had been to Newfoundland with Banks, and young John Roberts, both of them from the Revesby estate, and two black men, Thomas Richmond and George Dorlton.
There was also Dr Solander, of course, though he cannot be described as one of Banks’s followers. He was more in the nature of a guest, and his presence should have been explained earlier. Quite early in 1768, when Banks was actively preparing for this prodigious voyage, Lady Monson invited him to dinner; among others she had also invited Solander, who had a considerable acquaintance in London by this time. The conversation turned upon Banks’s opportunity of enriching science and becoming famous, and Solander, leaping to his feet, proposed himself as a fellow-adventurer.6 Nothing could have pleased Banks more: he agreed, at his persuasion the Admiralty agreed, the British Museum agreed, giving Solander leave of absence; and now he was sitting here in Plymouth, waiting for the wind to change.
All these people, as well as Mr Green the astronomer and his suite of one, and the bark’s company, ninety-four souls as well as Banks’s two dogs, the ship’s cat, and a goat that had already been round the world with Wallis, were to fit into a vessel just over a hundred feet long, not all of whose meagre length was usable space by any means. It is difficult to see how they did it at all, even with the Navy’s rule of fourteen inches for a hammock and one watch perpetually on deck; it was accomplished however, yet only at the cost of making the people live on top of one another in the promiscuous fashion usual in the heavily manned ships of the Royal Navy. But in this case the promiscuity
