professionalism. So it was ordered: No more navy crews run by a landsman. And the Admiralty, under the brilliant civilian Sandwich as First Lord and the tough warrior Edward Hawke as professional First Sea Lord, rejected Dalrymple 's terms as unacceptable. On the recommendation of Sir Hugh Palliser, under whom Cook had served at sea, the decision was made to put this virtually unknown but highly competent master mariner in charge.
Enlightenment London Afloat To Cook and Green, the Royal Society of London had added civilian volunteers, the London gentlemen who gave the voyage its unique character. Alan Villiers, seaman-author and surely the most qualified commentator on Captain Cook, who had come ashore and been living for years in Oxford in the heart of England when his biography Captain Cook appeared in 1967, surely had it right when he wrote: The great cabin of the little Endeavour made room for the most fantastic band of circumnavigating young university men-each brilliant in his own way-assembled up to that time for such a purpose, or anything like it. Joseph Banks, at the head of this group, was the patron of the voyage, the 25-year-old scion of a wealthy landowning family resident near Boston in Lincolnshire, which looks out on the North Sea less than I 00. miles north of London. Educated at both the top-flight rival school s of Eton and Harrow, he graduated from Christ Church College, Oxford. There, dissatisfied with the teaching in botany, he had imported a professor from the rival university of Cambridge to teach this subject, which succeeded with students if not with the Oxford faculty. Villiers notes that little record of this distinguished graduate survives in Oxford, but in London, where Banks lived after graduation , he cut a considerable swath. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society, the acknowledged center of humane, scientific and naturalist studies in England, and had made a voyage to Newfoundland before embarking on this South Seas voyage. Banks brought with him a party of seven, headed by the Swedish botanist Dr. Daniel Charles Solander, a student of the famous Linnaeus, and another Swedish naturalist, Herman Diedrich Sprong, who served as clerk and general factotum to Banks. The Scottish Sydney Parkinson, whose wry comments on the SEA HISTORY 83, WINTER 1997-98
The carvings on this New Zealand war canoe fas cinated the artist, Sydney Parkinson.
conditions of voyaging we've noted, served as the principal artist recording native flora, fauna and people and also kept his own remarkable notes on native ways , including detailed vocabularies of the different languages they were to encounter in the islands spread across thousands of miles of ocean. A second draftsman , also Scottish, Alexander Buchan, was an epileptic who died early in the voyage. Two footmen from the Banks manor in Lincolnshire and two black servants completed the roster. The attitudes these explorers brought to the new lands and native peoples they were determined to meet at first hand were those of the exuberant, expansive London in the midst of its own version of the European Enlightenment. This intellectual movement featured a search for truth based on empirical evidence and a growing belief in the power of reason to resolve human problemstrends reinforced, if not inspired, by humankind 's accelerating success in building machines and erecting social and economic structures that worked, in these early decades of the industrial revolution that was in the process of transforming the world and how humankind lived in it.
Entering Saltwater Space In our era of worldwide travel in the deeps of the sky above us, it is by no means easy to picture the intense loneliness of the vast reaches of the Pacific the Endeavour sailed into in 1769. Only the occasional voyager crossed this watery waste. The one regular! y traversed route, the passage of Spain ' s Manila galleon from Acapulco in Mexico to the Philippines and back across the North Pacific was customarily a matter of one ship a year. Others had been in the South Pacific, of course, but contact with the various islands as they were discovered by Western ships was sparse-sometimes more than a hundred years could pass between contacts. Such was the case with the islands Cook was first ordered to land on to
make his observations of the transit of Venus, the Marquesas. Alvaro de Mendana had sailed from Peru in 1567 in search of Terra Australis , which was then thought to lie fairly close to South America (on no evidence whatsoever). He had encountered nothing but empty ocean until, after sailing over 7,000 miles-more than twice the breadth of the Atlantic Ocean-he had come upon the Solomon Islands. On a second voyage, in 1595, he had come across the Marquesas, an island group some 3,500 miles distant, still more than the breadth of the Atlantic. Apparently no one had visited there in the intervening 173 years, and Mendana's was the only known chart on which the islands appeared-as vaguely located shapes. Cook was spared the search for this needle in a huge oceanic haystack by the timely return of the Dolphin, under the command of the able Samuel Wallis, from a voyage in which Wallis had discovered Tahiti and logged its location accurately. He arrived home in May 1768, as the Endeavour was fitting out, and hi s description of Tahiti, a beautiful mountainous island in a salubrious climate, made this the place to go. Several of the Dolphin 's people signed on for the Endeavour voyage. Even a goat that had survived the circumnavigation was signed on aboard the Endeavour. And three months later, on 26 August 1768, having embarked Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander, who hastened down from London with Banks's two greyhounds, the last of the party to join, Endeavour trundled out to sea from Plymouth, with 94 people aboard, ten guns and ammunition, and mountains of stores. She had been extensively remodeled below to take all this impedimenta in a bare cargocarrier' s hull. One of the changes was to enlarge the great cabin aft to a spacious, airy room, lit by small windows on each side and ending in a row of four arched windows , specially installed forthe voyage, with a space at the center, behind 13