Beginning halfway up the eastern coast of Australia and running all the way to Torres Strait, the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest deposit of coral. It’s a mass of over 2900 individual reefs dotted with nine hundred islands, and it’s also the largest structure on the planet made by living organisms. Cook was caught up in what he described in his journal as an ‘insane labyrinth’.
The Endeavour on the reef, Australia, 1770, artist unknown (1886). An imaginary impression of the Endeavour marooned on the Great Barrier Reef. Once the ship was freed, Cook sent out longboats to recover his anchors – but one was not reclaimed until the twentieth century.
Getty Images, Hulton Archive, 1218507
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
A reef such as one speaks of here is scarcely known in Europe. It is a wall of coral rock rising almost perpendicular out of the unfathomable ocean, always overflown at high water generally 7 or 8 feet, and dry in places at low water. The large waves of the vast ocean meeting with so sudden a resistance makes a most terrible surf, breaking mountains high.
There’s a very good reason it’s called a ‘Barrier’ – for sailors who harbour a desire to make it safely to shore, the reef is a daunting obstacle.
It was 11 p.m. on 10 June. Cook had issued his final orders for the night before retiring. Banks and some of the officers were having supper when, as Cook put it, ‘The ship struck and struck fast.’ Cook raced up to the deck in his underwear. The mate shouted, ‘Up every soul nimbly, for God’s sake, or we all perish!’ The crew rolled out of their hammocks and stumbled up into the tropical air. They were eight leagues – about forty-five kilometres – from shore. The men were terrified. No one on board could swim. And even if they survived, if the ship was wrecked beyond salvation and they managed to make it to land, their prospects were less than fantastic.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS (1743–1820), 1st Baronet, Naturalist and Botanist on Cook’s first voyage
[They were] debarred from a hope of ever again seeing their native country or conversing with any but the most uncivilised savages perhaps in the world.
Cook’s first order was to bring in the sails and make sure the ship was driven no further into the coral. The tide was on its way out and, as the water receded, the Endeavour was marooned high and dry on the reef. Cook ordered his men to hoist overboard all but the absolute necessities.
ALBERTA HORNSBY, Guugu Yimidhirr Nation, Cooktown Re-enactment Association
They were stuck fast in the coral reef and you can see all the barrels being thrown overboard. They’ve also thrown over cannons and everything else they could spare – even their food – to make her lighter. The pumps couldn’t keep up with the emptying of the water. It would have been a very horrible time for the crew because none of them would have known how to swim, and they knew their lifeboats could only hold a certain number of people.
About fifty tons of equipment including six cannon, decayed stores and oil jars were thrown into the sea. After the cannon were salvaged in the twentieth century, one of them found a home at the James Cook Museum in Cooktown, along with one of the Endeavour’s anchors.
It was remarkable that Cook had managed to navigate so far along the Great Barrier Reef without coming to grief. Of course, this would have been cold comfort to Cook and his men as they attempted to lever the Endeavour off the coral.
DAVID PRYCE, Sailor and Adventurer
By the time Cook arrived at the Great Barrier Reef, he’d covered a lot of miles. He had learnt a lot of things. But the Great Barrier Reef provides one of the most challenging environments to navigate a ship. To press forward into the reef at night without charts is like Russian roulette. Poor old Cook had no chance. It’s remarkable that he got as far as he did. When you approach unknown shoals you’ve got to be on your toes. That’s what Cook was doing everywhere, but when he gets to the reef it’s different – it’s a network of shoals that just goes on and on and on! He couldn’t use the tactic of approaching, negotiating and anchoring offshore somewhere safe, he just had to keep ploughing through. And this is day and night, through the dark. He would have been running a line, listening for breaking water . . . trying to suss out the situation every inch of the way.
Even today, in an era of sat navs and depth sounders, sailors attempting to negotiate the reef call on the expertise of professional pilots who have intimate knowledge of these waters. Although the Indigenous Australians who lived on the coast were intimately acquainted with the perils and potential hazards of the reef and were adept at negotiating their way in and around it, Cook was the first European known to have tackled it, and he had still managed to travel 1700 kilometres from Fraser Island without coming to grief. He was just a few hundred kilometres from Torres Strait and the terminal point of the reef. From there he could have turned the ship westward past the northernmost tip of Australia and headed for the relative safety of Batavia.
It was quite an achievement.
Not that this was any help as the ship rocked and groaned on the coral. Things were desperate.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS
Our situation became now greatly alarming . . . The officers however behaved with inimitable coolness void of all hurry and confusion . . . All this time [s]he continued to beat very much so that we could hardly keep our legs upon the quarter deck; by the light of the moon we could see her sheathing boards &c. floating thick round her.
The wholesale evacuation of the ship’s stores had done little to improve the Endeavour’s prospects. Anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of standing on coral in bare feet can imagine what it does to a weighty timber vessel grinding down on its razor-sharp pointy bits.
The longer the ship remained on the reef, the greater the chance it would disintegrate. Banks and others readied to abandon ship.
Then, things began to go their way. After hours of backbreaking work on behalf of every man on board, the Whitby collier proved its mettle. The Endeavour’s flat bottom made the ship ungainly and slow, but it also saved the day. At last, the boat floated free of the reef.
But the ordeal wasn’t over yet. As the ship broke away from the coral, a breach opened in its timbers and water began to flood the hold. All hands worked the pumps – even Banks and his fellow scientists. Never one to give up when the going got tough, Cook instructed the crew to make a ‘fother’ – a sail coated with a nasty mix of dung, frayed rope fibres and wool.
DAVID PRYCE
It was a beautiful example of Cook’s leadership. One of the junior officers comes up with the idea of fothering – he’d used it before to save a sinking ship. And Cook takes up the recommendation. It probably is the key to the ship’s survival.
The fother was slung beneath the ship’s hull over the hole like a giant diaper, then lashed onto the deck. It worked, and Cook was able to negotiate the Endeavour to shore.
Cook didn’t know just how lucky they were until the crew beached the grievously damaged boat. He then realised that a great chunk of coral had broken off in the hull breach and acted as a plug. Without it, no amount of pumping would have helped and the Endeavour most likely would have sunk.
Cook had averted disaster, but he gave the bulk of the credit for the ship’s survival to the swift action and discipline of the crew.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
During the whole time of this distress I must say for the credit of our people that I believe every man exerted his utmost for the preservation of our ship, contrary to what I have universally heard to be the behaviour of seamen who have commonly as soon as a ship is in a desperate situation begin to plunder and refuse all command.
But a good team requires a good leader, and that’s exactly what the Endeavour and its crew had. In the many journals written by members of the crew during Cook’s three Pacific voyages, there are many laudatory passages praising Cook’s stoicism under fire.
ALEXANDER HOME (c.1739–1823), crew member, Cook’s third voyage
In the midst of the greatest jeopardy [Captain Cook] could judge and reflec
t calmly and always had the skill and good fortune to extricate himself and his people . . . By degrees a habit grew upon us of placing such confidence in him, that although surrounded with dangers in shallow seas, fogs and storms we could go calmly to rest placing our safety in the skill and fortune of our leader.
Cook was the man you wanted at the helm when things went wrong.
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After the Endeavour had limped to shore, Cook feared they might be stranded on the mainland for a year as they attempted to make the ship seaworthy again and find their way back out to the open ocean. Still, he had little choice. On 17 June 1770, the men – accompanied by a menagerie of sheep, pigs, dogs, ducks, hens and a goat – stepped ashore on the southern bank of Waalumbaal Birri, the river that would later be named the ‘Endeavour’.
The British ships had found a safe haven when they needed it the most. Cook declared it more than adequate and ordered tents set up on shore for the men who were suffering from scurvy, Tupaia amongst them.
After tucking into the local fare – fish, birds, shellfish, wild bananas and taro – the men who had been feeling somewhat peaky recovered quickly.
As their one means of escape was sitting high and dry with a great hole in its side, the first order of business was to repair the Endeavour. After the ongoing struggle to restock provisions along the coast, it must have been a relief to have landed somewhere with a freshwater stream and no shortage of things to eat. The men harvested greens and stocked up on birds, fish and turtles. Within ten days, the necessary repairs to the ship had been made. But the tides and winds worked against them, and it would be over a month before Cook could give the order to depart.
There’s no doubt Cook knew how lucky he was to escape disaster on the reef, but he would never know the true extent of his good fortune. He’d unwittingly escaped another potential calamity when he landed on these riverbanks and managed to find the one spot on this part of the coast where local clans forbade the spilling of blood.
According to the Guugu Yimidhirr people, Waalumbaal Birri was made when a coloured python rolled across the landscape and created the river and reefs. The place Cook landed – Waymbuur – was where the clans met to conduct ceremonies and settle disputes.
ALBERTA HORNSBY
For the thirty-two tribal clan groups that make up the Guugu Yimidhirr speaking nation, Waymbuur was a neutral zone. Cook and his crew could have been picked off at any time during their forty-eight days here, but the law dictated that no blood was to be spilt on this land. Women went there to give birth. They settled their disputes. They performed their initiation ceremonies. They had celebrations there. They all shared in the resources of that area. Cook was very fortunate that these laws – Indigenous laws – protected them.
Because of the spiritual significance of the land where Cook set up his camp, the Guugu Yimidhirr allowed him to go about his business. They didn’t make contact with him until 10 July 1770 – three weeks after his arrival.
Over a period of ten days, there were six meetings between Cook and his men and the Guugu Yimidhirr people.
And it was only the men. Although Cook and the crew saw women on the northern shore of the river, they never came over to the British campsite. Forced to focus their attentions on something other than the local womenfolk, the scientists made good use of their time on shore and their brief interactions with the Guugu Yimidhirr men. While Banks and the naturalists collected floral and faunal samples, a twenty-five-year-old artist, Sydney Parkinson, began to write down words from the local language. He also noted that the locals whistled when surprised.
This list of words became part of the first written account of an Aboriginal language. Thanks to Cook’s first voyage, over one hundred Guugu Yimidhirr words were brought back to England. When Governor Arthur Phillip embarked with the First Fleet, he carried the list with him. Of course, Phillips was oblivious to the fact that there were hundreds of Aboriginal languages in use across the continent, and so the words would only be useful if he happened to bump into a local from Guugu Yimidhirr country.
*
As their time on shore drew to a close, the British found another way to highlight the chasm that existed between their view of the world and the belief systems of the indigenous people they’d encountered across the Pacific. Under Aboriginal laws, all land and all forms of life are sacred. The right to exploit natural resources is governed by rules that, in part, ensure sustainability. So when the men on board the Endeavour helped themselves to twelve turtles from a spot now known as Boulder Reef, the Guugu Yimidhirr were apoplectic.
ALBERTA HORNSBY
It was the first time our men had been on board the Endeavour. What they saw didn’t make them happy at all. There were twelve turtles, all weighing between two and three hundred pounds, and they were taken off a reef that Cook called Turtle Reef. But it was not the right time to hunt turtles – it was actually a time for breeding, and at that time it was so rough and windy that our mob couldn’t get out to the reef ourselves. They didn’t do anything on the first day, but the next day they came back with a group of ten men. They left their spears with some young boys and went on board the Endeavour to try and reclaim two of the turtles.
The reef itself is a sacred place and an important part of a creation story shared by five clans. When Cook arrived, it was also a shared fishing and hunting ground, so strict rules and protocols controlled the use of the area. The reef is a long way from the river mouth, and the Guugu Yimidhirr could only bring one or two turtles back to shore in their canoes. This, along with the fact that it was forbidden for the locals to hunt turtles during the breeding season, ensured the turtle population was never over-hunted. That Cook took twelve turtles during the breeding season was beyond the pale. A delegation of local men boarded the Endeavour and made their displeasure known, asking Cook to return the turtles to them. He refused and the men stormed off the ship.
When they reached shore, one of the men set fire to the grass around the British camp.
ALBERTA HORNSBY
In his journal, Cook says they became angry when they were stopped from taking the two turtles. They couldn’t kill or spill blood on this land. So they went over and grabbed a firestick from around the campfire and set fire to the grass around the British camp. It was a sign of frustration – a way to tactfully get rid of the intruders without physically hurting anyone. In this way our people were still following our lore. I could imagine the frustration of Cook as well, I mean they’re ready to go – they just want to get out of here.
Cook prepared to retaliate. And just when a violent confrontation seemed inevitable, something truly extraordinary happened. An elder stepped forward holding a spear without a point.
ALBERTA HORNSBY
Out of the scrub came a Waymbuur elder who has the authority to speak for this country. He comes forward and performs a ritual. He collects sweat from under his arms and blows it in the wind. It’s a way of asking his ancestors for protection. It’s also giving him courage to resolve this conflict. He carries with him a spear that has a tip broken. Although Cook could not understand what he was saying, by his gesture he knew that this man was making an attempt to resolve this conflict. Cook himself calls this ‘reconciliation’. When we talk about reconciliation today, you know they set an example in 1770 of what can be done.
The elder was performing a ritual known as ngaalangun daama. It was a way of calling for protection while demonstrating a willingness to be friends. Of this moment, Cook wrote: ‘I handed the spears back to him which reconciled everything.’
It was Australia’s first reconciliation.
ERNIE DINGO, Yamatji Nation, Actor
If you have a disagreement between a friend over years and years and it festers to a point where you don’t even know what the truth is anymore, and you go up to that person and say, ‘mate, I’m sorry for all this stupidity – we used to be friends – we could have been better friends but we’ve wasted all this time bickering and not understandin
g’ . . . if we could start a new day right here and now, think of all the positives that could happen. But I don’t really understand reconciliation, either. I mean, we didn’t do anything wrong. Why should we reconcile? Why is reconciliation an Indigenous thing? It should be a non-indigenous thing.
Another disaster averted – this time thanks to the magnanimity of the locals – Cook confronted his next challenge. After climbing a hill, he looked out over the reef to try to find a passage back out to the open ocean.
All his survey did was to emphasise the difficulty of what he had to do next.
On 5 August 1770, the Endeavour departed the river, surrounded by shoals and reefs in all directions. Cook’s nautical skills were stretched to the limit. After narrowly managing to avoid grounding the ship on numerous occasions, he took ten days to find his way out to the open sea.
As Cook sailed away, a fire was set to cleanse the land the British had occupied and chase away any bad spirits they might have left in their wake.
ALBERTA HORNSBY
Joseph Banks noted that all the hills surrounding the Endeavour River were put on fire, and they could see this blazing at night and he said it made a beautiful sight. But for us, it means that they were glad this mob were going. The smoke would have represented a cleansing of their land. That’s what the fires tell us about what our people thought of Cook as he was leaving . . . you had a nice visit, but it’s time for you to go.
This ritual would be repeated across Australia after European settlement. Decades later in the Kimberley, locals set fire to the land after they saw the first cow walking out of the desert.
Of the Indigenous Australian attitude to the Endeavour and its strange occupants, Cook couldn’t have said it better than when he observed in Botany Bay that ‘All they seemed to want was for us to be gone.’ Who could blame them? And that was before what was to come in Cook’s wake.
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