Joseph Banks. Patrick O’Brian

for the purpose – she was – but only to emphasize the fact that Cook and his friends were intimately acquainted with that suitability, not always evident to those whose service had been confined to men-of-war. And it is quite clear that Banks knew he would be a member of the expedition long before his formal acceptance in July. Lord Sandwich was not only a friend of long standing and a fellow member of the Royal Society, but he also formed part of the government and in a few months he was to return to the Admiralty (where he had many friends) as First Lord: he was therefore ideally placed for those unofficial contacts that can give an early assurance of success even in the present century. Besides, as early as April 1768 Pennant was urging Banks to take umbrellas, both the fine silk kind and the strong oilskin kind, as well as oilskin coats; and in any event a satisfactory suite of eight persons, all willing to go to the ends of the earth, with no certainty of return, could hardly be gathered together in a few weeks: still less could Banks and Solander have accumulated all the equipment that Ellis described in a letter⁴ to Linnaeus – equipment that was said to have cost ten thousand pounds. “No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly. They have got a fine library of Natural History; they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing … All this is owing to you and your writings.” There was however one remark in the letter that Sandwich or any other friend of Banks’s with long experience of the world would have read with some uneasiness: “After … their observations on the transit of Venus they are to proceed under the direction of Mr Banks, by order of the Lords of the Admiralty, on further discoveries of the great Southern continent …”

      Whether this was a mistake on Ellis’s part or whether Banks or possibly Solander had been boasting or had even been facetious about who was to direct whom there is no telling. What is certain is that on 30 July 1768 the Endeavour dropped down the river from Gallions Reach (she had been fitting in Deptford Yard) and anchored in the Downs; Cook joined her there, having received his orders, and sailed for Plymouth on 8 August. He had a tedious passage down the Channel, but six days later he was able to send an express to London, telling Banks and Solander to come directly.

      On 15 August, the day the message reached him, Banks was at the opera with Miss Harriet Blosset, a ward of the Hammersmith nurseryman James Lee. Horace de Saussure, the Swiss botanist and physicist, met them there and went back with them to sup at the Blossets’ house, he being acquainted with the family. He speaks of them as being engaged, of Miss Blosset’s being desperately in love and of Banks drinking heavily to hide his feelings, since he was to leave the next day. Yet since Banks could not speak a word of French, as Saussure points out, there was no communication between them, and Saussure’s testimony⁵ would not be worth recording but for the fact that it is confirmed by others. Not only was the matter taken up in ill-natured squibs and scandal-sheets when Banks returned famous from the voyage, but Beaglehole quotes two letters from Daines Barrington to Thomas Pennant in the Turnbull Library at Wellington in New Zealand, the first of which reads in part “Upon his arrival in England he took no sort of notice of Miss Blosset for the first week or nearly so at the same time that he went about London and visited other friends and acquaintances. On this Miss Blosset set out for London and wrote him a letter desiring an interview of explanation. To this Mr Banks answer’d by a letter of 2 or 3 sheets professing love &c but that he found he was of too volatile a temper to marry.”

      The interview took place, and although the account, which Barrington received from a lady, is confused, it was obviously very painful (“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