by Tony Horwitz
On my first night aboard the replica Endeavour, I sat down with my watchmates to a dinner advertised on the galley blackboard as “gruel.” This turned out to be a tasty stew, with pie and fruit to follow. It was also a marked improvement on the fare aboard the original Endeavour. Before leaving port, Cook complained to the Navy Board that the cook assigned his ship was “a lame infirm man, and incapable of doing his Duty.” The board granted his request for a replacement, sending John Thompson, who had lost his right hand. Cook’s request for still another man was denied. The Navy gave preference to “cripples and maimed persons” in its appointment of cooks, a fair indicator of its regard for sailors’ palates.
“Victualled” for twelve months, the Endeavour toted thousands of pounds of ship’s biscuit (hardtack), salt beef, and salt pork: the sailors’ staples. On alternate days, the crew ate oatmeal and cheese instead of meat. Though hearty—a daily ration packed 4,500 calories—the sailors’ diet was as foul as it was monotonous. “Our bread indeed is but indifferent,” the Endeavour’s botanist, Joseph Banks, observed, “occasioned by the quantity of Vermin that are in it. I have often seen hundreds nay thousands shaken out of a single bisket.” Banks catalogued five types of insect and noted their mustardy and “very disagreeable” flavor, which he likened to a medicinal tonic made from stags’ horns.
On the replica, we also enjoyed a considerable luxury denied Cook’s men: marine toilets and showers tucked discreetly in the forward hold. Up on the main deck, Todd showed us what the original sailors used: holed planks extending from the bow, utterly exposed in every sense. These were called heads, or seats of ease. On Cook’s second voyage, an unfortunate sailor was last seen using the heads, from which he fell and drowned.
Once we’d eaten and showered, Todd recommended we head straight for our hammocks. “Call all hands” was scheduled for six A.M., and many of us would have to rise before then for a shift on deck. This was also our last night in port. “Once the rocking and rolling starts,” Todd warned, “you may not get much rest.”
I hoisted myself into the hammock—and promptly tumbled out the other side. On the second try I managed a mummylike posture, arms folded tightly across my chest. At least I couldn’t toss and turn, as I normally do in bed. “I feel like a bat,” moaned Chris, the crewman a few inches to my left, his nose almost brushing the ceiling.
To my right, lying with his feet past my head, swung Michael, a man built like Samson. As soon as he fell asleep, his massive limbs spilled out of his hammock and into mine. My face pressed against his thigh; a loglike arm weighed on my ankles. Then a storm came up and the ship started swaying. Michael’s oxlike torso thudded against me, knocking my hammock against Chris’s and back into Samson’s. I felt like a carcass in a meat locker. The ship’s timbers also creaked and groaned, adding to the snores and curses of my cabin mates.
At midnight, the watches changed. Crewmen thudded down the companionway and rousted the next shift from their hammocks. Then a woman began sneezing and hacking. “I’m allergic to something down here,” she moaned, having woken most of us up, “and I didn’t bring any medicine.”
I’d just managed a fitful doze when someone poked me hard in the ribs: four A.M. watch. Groggily pulling on my gear, I mustered on deck with several others. We were still near shore and had little to do except make sure that the anchor line didn’t tangle. Loitering about the dark, empty ship, I felt oddly like a night guard at a museum.
This gave me a chance to become acquainted with my watch mates. Chris, my hammock neighbor, was a bespectacled psychology professor. Samsonesque Michael worked as a tugboat captain. The fourth member of our night watch, Charlie, had just retired after thirty-two years as a firefighter. “I guess I still need excitement,” he said, when I asked why he’d signed on. “So I decided to try adventure travel.”
“Adventure torture’s more like it,” Chris said. “I was lying there all night thinking, ‘I volunteered for this? To be straitjacketed?’”
At seven A.M., we were called below for the last sitting of breakfast: porridge and toast with Vegemite, the bitter Australian spread that looks like creosote. “On deck in five minutes!” Todd shouted as soon as we’d sat down. We bolted our food and rushed to stow our hammocks. I’d already forgotten Todd’s instructions: roped up, my sling looked bloated and uneven, like a strangled sausage. I crammed it as best I could into the stow hold and lunged up the companionway, thudding my head so hard I almost fell back down the steps.
“Okay,” Todd said, clapping his hands. “Now that you’re rested and fed, it’s time for some hard labor.” As far as I could gather, this meant yanking and tying down ropes. “It’s Newton’s third law, every action has an equal reaction,” Todd explained. “You’ve got to ease on one side of the ship so you can haul on the other. Haul or ease away, either way the order is ‘Haul away!’ Take the line down the left side of the cleat, then do a figure eight with three turns and run it round the back and loop it. That’s called a tugboat hitch.” He paused for breath. “Everything clear?”
There were twelve of us on mainmast. I reckoned I could lose myself in the mob, or latch on to someone who knew what he or she was doing. “Stand by for cannon!” shouted a longhaired gunner wearing earmuffs. “Fire in the hole!” He lowered a blowtorch to a small pan of black powder, then stepped away as the cannon expelled a cloud of smoke and wadded newspaper into the damp, foggy air.
The first mate shouted, “Haul away!” and I joined the others in tugging at the thick, heavy ropes. Todd urged us on with an antique gun-crew command: “Two-six heave! Put your back into it! For queen and country!” We yanked another rope, and then another, maneuvering some small part of the impossibly complex rigging. The horizontal yards shifted along the masts, like rotating crucifixes. The first of the ship’s twenty-eight sails fluttered from the bowsprit. Rope rained down all around us, twenty miles of rope in all. After an hour of grabbing and tugging, I felt as though I’d been put to the rack.
Four older men wandered up from below, looking rested and relaxed. These were the ship’s passengers, who paid a fat sum to occupy private cabins. Like almost everything else on the replica Endeavour, their presence hewed to the original. A month before the ship’s departure, the Admiralty informed Cook that “Joseph Banks Esq.,” a member of the Royal Society and “a Gentleman of Large Fortune, well versed in Natural History,” would be accompanying the voyage, along with “his Suite consisting of eight Persons and their Baggage.”
Though only twenty-five years old, Banks had inherited a vast estate and paid some £10,000—more than twice what the king contributed to the voyage, and roughly equivalent to a million dollars today—to join the expedition. His entourage on the Endeavour included two Swedish naturalists, two artists, two footmen, and two black servants, as well as Banks’s greyhound and spaniel. Known collectively as supernumeraries, or the “gentlemen,” Banks and his retinue had their own quarters and dined with Cook in the stern’s airy “great cabin,” far removed from the teeming mess deck.
The supernumeraries on the replica enjoyed similar privileges, including tea served to them in bed in china cups. On deck, they could join in the work if they felt like it. At the moment, none did. “We’re just deadweight,” joked a burly man who occupied the cabin of the Endeavour’s astronomer, Charles Green. “Look it up in the dictionary. ‘Deadweight: a vessel’s lading when it consists of heavy goods.’” He laughed. “Plus I croak from dysentery during the voyage—Charles Green, I mean.”
Eavesdropping on the supernumeraries’ banter, I felt a sullen solidarity with my sweating, grunting workmates. Even more than most blue-collar jobs, ours demanded teamwork. If we didn’t clutch and release ropes at exactly the same moment, we were quickly pancaked, like losers at a tug-of-war match. Accustomed to spending my work-days alone, a man and his desk, I found it refreshing to labor in a group, in the open air, at hard physical toil.
Then again, we’d only just started. And the task I’d been dreading
—going aloft—was about to commence. Todd jumped atop the rail and grabbed the shrouds, vertical lines leading to the masthead that had smaller ropes, called ratlines, strung horizontally between them to create a rope ladder alongside the mast. “Try to keep three points of contact at all times with your feet and hands,” Todd said, “and always go up the windward side of the mast so if there’s a roll or blow you’ll fall onto the deck rather than in the drink.”
At first the climbing seemed easy. Freshly tarred, the shrouds were firm and sticky, easy to grasp. After a few minutes, we reached the underside of a platform called the fighting top. To surmount this, we grasped cables called futtock shrouds and did a short but unnerving climb while dangling backward at a 45-degree angle. Then, clutching a bar at the rim of the platform, we hoisted ourselves up and onto the fighting top. A chill wind blew across the platform, making the temperature feel ten degrees cooler than on deck. It was a late September morning in the Pacific Northwest, balmy compared to many of the places Cook went. And we weren’t even halfway up the mast. We also had something Cook’s men lacked: our safety harnesses, which we attached to a secure line before the next maneuver, called stepping onto the yard.
“Stepping” was a misnomer; we had to tiptoe sideways along a narrow, drooping foot line strung beneath the yard, which ran perpendicular to the mast. Each time a new person stepped on, the line quivered and bounced. I crab-walked to the end, perched over the water. This was the yardarm, from which men sentenced to death at sea were hanged. Just standing on the tightropelike line, leaning my belly against the yard, was unsettling enough. Then came actual labor. Bending awkwardly over the yard, as if flung across a gymnastic beam, we reached down to untie thick knots around the sails. Fumbling with the rope, I tried to focus tightly on my hands rather than let my gaze drift to the blur of water below. At one point I glanced straight ahead at the foremast watch, performing the same task: six protruding rumps, legs dancing spastically on the foot line, arms and torsos lost in a tangle of rope and sail.
When the job was done, we scuttled back to the fighting top, grinning at one another with nervous relief. My hands were shaking from adrenaline or cold, probably both. Dangling backward over the fighting top, I felt with my feet for the futtock shrouds and scrambled down to the deck as quickly as I could. For the first time all day I had a moment to rest, so I settled atop a life raft.
“No sitting on the boats!” a crewman barked. I headed toward the stern and tripped over the ankle-high tiller line, barking my shin and flopping onto the quarterdeck. I’d just got upright when another crewman said, “Mate, I wouldn’t stand on that coiled line, unless you want to be hanging up in the rigging by your foot.”
Finally finding a safe perch, I slumped on the deck, tired but exhilarated. A hard morning’s work completed, a fear partly overcome. (The topmost yard, perched at twice the height of the one we’d just visited, remained to be conquered.) I was hungry and ready for a nap. I glanced at my watch. Only ten o’clock. “Mainmast to cleaning stations!” Todd yelled.
Dispatched below to scrub the galley, I swept the floor, wiped tables, washed dishes. This, at least, I knew how to do. Leaning on my broom, I asked the cook, a New Zealander named Joanna, what was on the lunch menu.
“Food,” she replied.
I glanced at the stove. “Gingerbread men?”
“I use a lot of ginger, calms the stomach,” she said. “I don’t use many other spices. You don’t want foods with strong odors, in case they don’t stay down.”
The first mate charged down the stairs. Trailing his finger under the table I’d just wiped, Geoff barked, “What’s all this rubbish here?” I followed him with a cloth. “And what’s this, a bloody dust ball?” I swept the floor again. Finishing the inspection, he frowned and said, “I rate this a pass. I expect better next time.” As soon as he’d gone, Michael, my Samsonesque watch mate, muttered, “I thought a tugboat was bad, but this is a floating gulag.”
Then Geoff’s voice bellowed again from deep inside the ship. “Who is hammock fifteen? Hammock fifteen report here immediately!” I wearily ran through the numbers I’d been assigned since coming aboard: muster order, peg number, hammock…fifteen. Perhaps, I thought dreamily, the first mate was ordering me back to bed.
Geoff hunched over the hammock storage area with the rest of mainmast gathered round. Before us lay my bedding, which I’d clumsily stowed hours before. Geoff poked at it with his foot, like a detective probing a badly bundled corpse. “We’ve just got a message,” he said, “your mother’s not going to be here to make your bed today.” While the rest looked on, I fumbled several times before finally stowing the hammock properly.
When Geoff returned to the quarterdeck, Todd gave me a sympathetic pat on the back. “Sit down and relax,” he said. “Grab a cup of tea or ten minutes of shut-eye.” Most of us raced to the toilets, which we’d been trying to find a moment to use all morning. I’d just reached the front of the line when a cry came from above. “All hands on deck! We’ve got wind! Hustle!”
This time we manned “sail setting stations,” another bewildering cobweb of lines called clews, bunts, and reefs. “The best way to remember which is which,” Todd said, “is by saying to yourself, ‘Clews, Bunts, Reefs. Can’t bloody remember.’” Then the arcane orders started up again. “Hold cro’jack!” “Belay starboard side braces!” “Haul away port bunt!”
Yards shifted; sails tightened and filled. The ship suddenly went silent except for the luffing of sails and the gentle slap of waves against wood. I gazed to starboard and saw Seattle’s Space Needle in the distance, rising above a jungle of office towers. Traffic crawled across a bridge. Monday morning and we were free from all that, out here on the water. My spirits lifted.
A mop and bucket thudded against my chest. “Time to swab the deck,” Todd said.
The Endeavour set sail on August 26, 1768, from Plymouth, the same spot from which the Pilgrims embarked. That day’s London Gazette gives some flavor of the Hogarthian world the sailors left behind. A front-page story, headlined “A Rogue Dispatched to His Maker,” described the hanging and gibbeting of a highwayman as pickpockets worked the jeering crowd. Another item reported on a hangman whipping a thief in the street for stealing two loaves of bread.
There was also a story about a lecture titled “On the Perils of Travel in Tropical Climes,” during which a “much traveled Gentleman” caused women to swoon by claiming that natives “believed their gods would be more pleased if they spilled the blood of a white child.” Two small items of overseas news made the front page. John Adams, known for his “encouragement of insurgency,” was on his way to Boston. And a “Young Genius” by the name of Mozart had been appointed maestro at the age of twelve.
The Endeavour’s departure merited only a brief mention. James Cook wrote just as tersely in his own journal. “At 2 pm got under sail and put to sea having on board 94 persons,” he wrote. “Sounded and had 50 fathoms Grey sand with small stones and broken shells.”
Cook wrote with similar dispassion three weeks later, when he observed: “In heaving the Anchor out of the Boat Mr. Weir Masters mate was carried over board by the Buoy-rope and to the bottom.” This is all we learn about the death of Alexander Weir, a thirty-five-year-old Scotsman from Fife. Cook expended as much ink—and expressed more regret—when several dozen chickens washed overboard in a storm the same month.
This seeming callousness reflected the grim reality of eighteenth-century naval life. Fresh poultry was scarce at sea. A drowned man could be easily replaced. On the day of Weir’s death, Cook “Impress’d into his Majesty’s service”—that is, legally kidnapped—a twenty-year-old sailor from a passing American sloop (Americans were then still British subjects). This man would also die during the voyage, as would thirty-six of the Endeavour’s original company of ninety-four. The ship’s 40 percent casualty rate wasn’t extraordinary for the day; in fact, Cook would later be hailed for the exceptional concern he showed for the health of his cr
ew.
A sailor’s life was as anonymous as it was cheap. Most of what’s known about the Endeavour’s sailors—or “the People,” as Cook called them—derives from the sparse details in the ship’s muster book. As a group, the crewmen were young, many still in their teens and one aged just twelve. They hailed from all over: east London, Ireland, the Orkneys, New York, Venice, “the Brazils.” Some sailors doubled as shipboard tradesmen: barbers, tailors, butchers, poulterers. Once at sea, they rarely appeared in the ship’s log as individuals unless they’d been flogged, deserted, or died.
We know much more about the officers, several of whom kept journals. The aptly named John Gore was a trigger-happy American, a seaborne Hawkeye who would prove very skillful at shooting birds, kangaroos, and occasionally people. He had sailed the Pacific twice before and would do so two more times with Cook. Another Pacific veteran, Charles Clerke, was a waggish twenty-seven-year-old who had written a paper published in the Royal Society’s journal, claiming that Patagonians in South America were so tall that Europeans reached only to the giants’ waists. “At drinking and whoring he is as good as the best of them,” one colleague wrote. Clerke would mature into a sober commander by the time he buried his superior off the coast of Hawaii a decade later.
But it is James Cook and the botanist Joseph Banks who dominate the Endeavour’s story and give the voyage its most unexpected dimension. The two men were fifteen years apart in age and hailed from opposite ends of the class system: Cook of peasant stock, with little schooling; Banks a nobleman’s son, educated at Harrow, Eton, and Oxford. Their characters could hardly have differed more: Cook was a family man and naval careerist, Banks a rakish dilettante who regarded the voyage as a bold version of the traditional ruling-class tour of continental Europe. “Every blockhead does that,” he told friends. “My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.” Their status on board also seemed a recipe for strife. Cook had absolute command over the ship and its crew, while Banks, who had all but bankrolled the voyage, ruled a small fiefdom of artists, scientists, and servants largely exempt from naval duties and discipline.
