A good place to avoid
New Holland, all too well known to be both dangerous and useless, was a place to be avoided while hunting for Terra Australis. In 1764 the English sent an expedition to the unmapped South Atlantic Ocean, and another to the South Pacific in 1766. Day after day they searched the horizon for Terra Australis until at last they seemed to have found it – a long grey landmass to the south. Unfortunately their ‘Land of Gold’ turned out to be a band of cloud. But there were rumours – which grew to a certainty in later years, as rumours do – that someone on the ship had glimpsed land, but the wind had not allowed them to pursue it. Once more the loneliness and terrors of the vast ocean – and the dream of gold – bred illusion.
The French also hunted for the fabled south land. In his 1768 search, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville saw and avoided the Great Barrier Reef. In 1772 Louis François de Saint Allouarn sighted Cape Leeuwin, sailed north to Dirk Hartog Island and claimed the west coast of Australia for France, and Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne landed on the south coast of Tasmania. Du Fresne’s expedition didn’t bother to follow the Australian coast north but instead sailed on to New Zealand, once again seeking the land of gold. And didn’t find it.
Australia had now been ‘discovered’ many times. But without safe harbours, harvestable grass, easily acquired slave labour or an existing empire that had collected gold that could be looted, it had no value to Europeans even as a staging port for their valued trading partners. And it was so obviously not the land of gold that Marco Polo had promised.
But there was still a large blank of blue on maps of the world where Terra Australis might be lurking. Despite the many expeditions, most of the Pacific was still largely unknown, partly because the ships were small and the Pacific Ocean is large, but also because there’d been no systematic survey.
A pedantic ex-grocery clerk from the north of England would change that.
CHAPTER 6
The goat, the grocer’s assistant and the mistake that led to a nation
Australia was colonised by mistake. If 1770 hadn’t been an unusually wet season for Botany Bay in New South Wales, providing the grass and fresh water needed to keep the Endeavour’s crew alive as well as giving a misleading impression of lushness, Australia would not have been colonised by the British in 1788.
Instead we might – possibly – have been colonised by the French (although they had many chances to do so, and didn’t). We would more likely have been haphazardly invaded by the whalers and sealers of the early 1800s as they harvested the newly discovered rich whaling grounds of the Southern Ocean, with farms and merchant settlements around the coast to supply them.
The First Fleet was sent to found the Port Jackson colony (now Sydney) because of the complete misreading of the land by a slapdash but enthusiastic rich amateur botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, and because of the longing to map new land of a calm, meticulous captain, who would disobey his orders and risk his crew, his ship and his life to sail up the uncharted east coast of Australia.
In the rank and riches-dominated Britain of the 1700s, James Cook should never have been given captaincy of a ship much less placed in charge of an expedition. Born in Yorkshire, the son of a Scottish farm labourer, Cook began work as a grocer’s assistant before at eighteen becoming an apprentice merchant seaman on a collier, a ship used for hauling coal along the English coast. He worked his way up from apprentice to seaman, and from seaman to mate. In 1755 he was offered the captaincy of a collier, but Cook refused.
Instead he enlisted in the Royal Navy as an able seaman – the bottom rank of the navy ladder – although he did not remain in that lowly position long.
Cook timed his career move perfectly. The English fleet was building up for war and there weren’t enough trained seamen, so Cook was promoted quickly. By 1757 he was master on a warship – a non-commissioned position, and as high as any man who wasn’t born a gentleman could hope to rise.
Cook would never be a gentleman, but he was a brilliant, meticulous surveyor, forging his reputation during General Wolfe’s campaigns against the French in Canada. Cook was selected to survey the coast of Newfoundland when peace was declared in 1763.
Cook spent the next four summers surveying Newfoundland, and each winter in London with his wife, Elizabeth, preparing his charts. These were accurate and comprehensive – surveying classics. He also, as a private citizen, observed an eclipse of the sun and wrote a paper on how the observation of the eclipse could be used to measure the longitude of Newfoundland accurately. It was well received by the Royal Society.
Cook also had the Comptroller of the Navy as a patron. Sir Hugh Palliser gave Cook command of an unusual expedition to the Pacific: a joint venture of the Royal Navy and the Royal Society, a club of wealthy and, mostly, well-born scientists.
It was an age of naval empires, with the British, French, Spanish and Dutch vying for supremacy. And the dream of a Great South Land of gold was still very much alive.
An excuse to sail south
The well-connected Scottish scientist and hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple had translated Spanish documents captured in 1652 in the Philippines which showed Torres’ discovery of a Strait between New Guinea and New Holland.1 Dalrymple – a brilliant but mostly an armchair explorer – was convinced that the vast Great South Land (not New Holland) existed. He persuaded the British Admiralty that a top-secret expedition was urgently needed to find and claim the Great South Land before any other nation did. If the other nations knew that a British expedition to the south had been mounted they might follow, even mapping and claiming the land before the English could.
The expedition needed an excuse to voyage to the south. The Admiralty chose the forthcoming transit of Venus as their cover story. The best chance of observing this phenomenon required a voyage to the Pacific to measure how long it took the planet Venus to cross the face of the sun. It was an excellent excuse. The measurements would let scientists work out how far earth, Venus and the sun were from each other, and navigators could use this information to calculate where a ship was on the surface of the earth using the stars, otherwise known as celestial navigation. In 1769 it would be possible to see the transit of Venus really well from Tahiti. There wouldn’t be another chance to measure this until Venus crossed the face of the sun again in 1874, more than one hundred years later.
Top secret southern survey
James Cook’s other orders, to search for Terra Australis Incognita, the mythical Great South Land, were kept sealed and secret, not to be opened or disclosed until they were at Tahiti.2 He was to sail to a latitude of forty degrees south, to where the ‘continent, or Land of great extent, may be found’. If Cook didn’t find the Great South Land he was to head back and map the land Tasman had touched on, now called New Zealand. By now Staten Land had been mapped, so Tasman’s theory that New Zealand reached almost to the Cape of Good Hope had been disproved. But New Zealand might still be the tip of a vast continent. Cook was to continue mapping; he had just enough provisions to get back to a port and resupply for the return to England. He was to claim New Zealand for Britain: ‘You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain; or, if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for His Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors.’
There was no mention of going to New Holland. Why bother?
We have grown so used to the expanse of blue Pacific Ocean on our maps that it is difficult to comprehend the certainty with which so many authorities believed that the Great South Land had to be there. The scientific consensus was that another large land mass must be there to balance northern Europe, otherwise the spherical earth couldn’t maintain its equilibrium.
It was true that no mariner had discovered it yet, and there had been many, many journeys south. But European ships kept to the known northern routes across the Pacific, using the trade winds to get there. Very
few had gone south or, if they had, had not returned.
A most unusual expedition
A non-commissioned officer like Cook could not be made captain of a ship, but Palliser argued that his protégé should be. To the conservative ranks of the Admiralty this was heresy – a labourer’s son could not be an officer! Finally they compromised, giving Cook command of the ship but with the rank of first lieutenant.
Cook immediately rejected the Admiralty’s assumption that a navy frigate would be used for the voyage. Navy frigates needed deep water. If Cook were to go close enough to shore to map the land accurately he needed a shallow-bottomed ship.
He asked for a collier, the ships he was most used to sailing. The Earl of Pembroke, a Whitby cat – a sturdy, broad-beamed, flat-bottomed, three-masted collier built in Whitby – was selected: not quite four years old, 106 feet (just over thirty-two metres) long and twenty-nine feet (nearly nine metres) wide. It only needed four metres of water to stay afloat even when fully laden, and the flat bottom meant that if it did go aground it could be beached and refloated. The ship cost £2800 and was then refitted, with another outside skin of thin planking lined with tarred felt, a third deck put in the massive hold to accommodate the extra crew and marines, as well as extra cabins, store rooms, a powder store and a great cabin that Cook would end up sharing with the gentlemen naturalists.
Renamed HM Bark Endeavour, the rebadged ship had no figurehead, no smart paint. But it was superbly fitted out for the expedition to the unknown: twelve swivel guns and ten carriage guns; tons of coal for cooking; barrels of tar and pitch and planking for repair of the ship when no port was near; carpentry tools; spare canvas for the sail makers; 1200 gallons of beer, 1600 gallons of spirits, 4000 rounds of salt beef, 6000 rounds of salt pork, 160 pounds of mustard seeds, twenty tons of ship’s biscuit and flour, and 107 bushels of dried peas.
They also loaded the breeding animals necessary for such a long voyage: seventeen sheep and a small mob of cattle for meat, four ducks, four or five dozen hens housed in the ship’s boats, a boar, a sow and her piglets as well as the hay and dried peas to feed them, plus three cats to catch the rats. And, of course, the single famous milk goat.
There was also more controversial food: 7860 pounds of fermented cabbage, 80 pounds per man, to test the new theory that fresh vegetables might keep away scurvy.
Scurvy killed more sailors than shipwreck. Your gums became inflamed; your teeth loosened. Finally your body swelled, and you died in agony and delirium. The great Polynesian sailors took bananas and coconuts on their voyages, as well as dried yams and other dried fruits, dried fish or dried fruits mixed with flour and fat. Their long voyages might leave them thin and starving, but their food was nutritious. European ship’s biscuit provided kilojoules but not much else. The salt beef and pork combined with inadequate fresh water in the long months at sea left men’s lips blistered and bleeding, but it was eat them or starve. Cook’s voyage would possibly be the first European expedition during which no man would die of scurvy.
Cook was given one other important cargo: Joseph Banks, and his party of assistants.
Joseph Banks was twenty-five years old, handsome, rich and a gentleman, with an income of £6000 a year. He was also arrogant, slapdash and absurdly self-centred. He didn’t finish his university degree, would jilt the fiancée who waited for him for three years and, when due to Banks’s own stupidity one of his servants died on the voyage, would lament the death only because the man ‘was of some use to me’.
But Banks, a member of the Royal Society, was also fascinated with plants and animals. He had already been on one scientific expedition to Newfoundland and knew what life aboard ship was like. And he was enthusiastic. This voyage would be an opportunity to collect and name new species or, rather, species not so far catalogued by Europeans. A young man as rich and well-connected as Banks usually got what he wanted, especially as he put up a considerable amount of the money required for the scientific side of the expedition – £10,000, according to the expedition’s naturalist, Dr Solander, a Swede who had studied under the famous botanist Linnaeus (Professor Carl von Linné).
In a stroke of extraordinary luck – though neither man would possibly admit it – Banks was paired with the scrupulous man of integrity James Cook. Each time Banks would endanger the expedition, Cook would counter him. Without Cook, the expedition would have been lost. Without Banks, it possibly would never have happened at all.
Banks insisted on the trappings of a gentleman as well as a scientist. Cook was forced to find room on the small ship for Banks’s scientific library, equipment and five assistants – Swedish naturalist Solander, secretary and draughtsman Sporing, and botanical artists Buchan and Parkinson as well as an astronomer, Charles Greer. While the assistants would collect species that were new to Europeans, a painting of the living plant was more valuable than dried specimens. Even today, botanical artists are highly valued because they can draw parts of a plant that a camera can’t see or pick up, and put bark, buds, flowers, seed capsules, new and old leaves in the one drawing or painting.
Banks himself would do some collecting – his work could later be easily identified as he used the ‘snatch and stuff in it a bag’ method instead of carefully selecting and cutting buds, seeds or juvenile leaves, then drying them and pressing them, as his assistants would do.
Banks also brought four servants, two of them fashionably black, his greyhounds (the mythical Great South Land must be rich in game as well as gold) and his personal musician, to play for him while he ate. One might be heading into the unknown, but one still dined like a gentleman. He would also have brought his own stores of superior food and alcohol, not listed in the ship’s inventory.
The crew desert
The expedition was as planned as a meticulous man like Cook could make it. Yet there was no denying that its captain had never commanded a ship before, nor had he ever faced the seas of the Southern Ocean. This mattered: a ship’s survival might depend on its captain having enough experience of the area to know where and when the wind might come from, wave conditions and much else. Cook’s career had been mostly hugging coastlines.
This expedition would also only have a single ship, unlike Tasman’s. If the Endeavour sank, there would be no rescue. Eighteen men deserted before the ship even sailed from Plymouth, about a third of the crew. Although the orders to search for the Great South Land were still under seal, the crew must have guessed from the very size of the stores that this was no relatively easy jaunt to Tahiti and back. Other men were hired, but there were not enough volunteers to man the ship. The rest of the crew were impressed – kidnapped, either from the docks or while drunk in nearby pubs. Slavery might have been outlawed in England, but the Admiralty still had the power to take any able-bodied man and force him to crew their ships.
It was not an auspicious beginning.
The Endeavour and its willing as well as unwilling crew prepared to sail on 19 August 1768 with ninety-five people on board.3 But the wind was from the wrong direction, and a ship like the Endeavour could only manoeuvre with the right wind. Banks and Solander went back to wait in comfort on shore while Cook and his crew remained on board. Day after day, and no wind filled the sails. It must have seemed an appalling omen for the voyage.
At last on Thursday, 25 August the wind veered to the northeast. Cook hoisted a signal flag to tell Banks and Solander to come on board. Banks was hungover from the night before and he still hadn’t told his new fiancée that he was about to leave on what would be a three-year jaunt around the world.
They climbed aboard and sailors ran to set the topsails. The ship’s timbers creaked as the ship began to move. Up at the wheel two sailors waited until the ship had picked up enough speed to allow them to steer, though not yet into the unknown.
The voyage south was a well-followed route. The Endeavour rolled like a pregnant duck even in relatively calm weather and Banks was seasick for the first few days. At Rio de Janeiro, the Portuguese vice
roy decided that the Endeavour was a smuggler’s ship, the story of an expedition to measure Venus’s shadow crossing the sun an obvious fabrication. How could a planet pass through the sun? The Endeavour was certainly no British naval vessel – yet it was armed. Eventually the viceroy allowed Cook to purchase fresh food, but when a dozen sailors went ashore to load the supplies they were flung into jail along with the English merchant who was supplying them. No explanation was given, though it is possible that the viceroy had learnt that Banks and Solander had disobeyed orders and sneaked ashore.
Cook protested vehemently and at last the men were released, but worse was to come when the harbour fort fired upon them on the way out – the viceroy had not informed them that the Endeavour was free to leave. A sailor fell overboard and drowned before he could be rescued. And then the winds failed. They lay becalmed, with five thousand kilometres of ocean between them and Cape Horn, the gate to the Pacific. At last the wind rose. It kept on kept rising. The gales sped them on, but the sea grew steadily rougher. The sky loomed grey, and darker every day.
Cook kept strict order on his ship, apart from Banks and his party, who refused to admit his authority. The sailors refused to eat their pickled cabbage. Cook decided on a stratagem – it would be served to the officers and gentlemen, but not to the sailors. Cook smugly reported in his log that within a week the sailors were eating so much sauerkraut that he was forced to ration them to a day’s allowance.
The Endeavour stopped at Tierra del Fuego, off the tip of the South Americas, to fill the barrels with fresh water and to cut grass and let it dry into hay to feed the animals. Tierra del Fuego was cold, even in January, midsummer.
Banks was bored. Against Cook’s advice he raised an expedition of twelve men to go ashore and look for specimens, despite the clouds heavy with snow. The blizzard caught them without provisions. In the morning two of Banks’s servants were dead, his greyhound just alive. The survivors stumbled back to the ship the next morning.
Let the Land Speak Page 11