By this time, English, French, and Spanish explorers had been busily sketching in the map of the Pacific for more than three decades. The wealth generated from international trade helped finance a wave of government-backed expeditions animated by a spirit of inquiry into natural phenomena and human society. Central to their mission was the resolution of two outstanding mysteries of the Pacific: whether the vast and assuredly rich southern continent, Terra Australis, existed in temperate latitudes of the southern hemisphere and whether there was a western outlet for a Northwest Passage. Our retrospective admiration for the cultural and scientific outcomes should not obscure the commercial and diplomatic imperatives that underlay them. As much as they owed to Enlightenment sensibilities, these voyages were motivated by imperial rivalry and a desire to expand trade. The potential of commercial advantage was essential to the success of exploration. In 1642, the VOC had commissioned Abel Jansen Tasman “to discover the partly known and still unreached South and Easternland [Australia] for the improvement, and increase of the Comp[an]y’s general welfare.” Sailing from Batavia, Tasman reached Tasmania, New Zealand, Tonga, and northern Australia, but “no riches or things of profit but only the said lands and apparently good passage [toward South America] were discovered.” When a second voyage proved even less rewarding, the VOC summarily abandoned the effort.
In 1764–66, John Byron, a veteran of Anson’s agonizing circumnavigation in the Centurion, was ordered to search for the western outlet of the Northwest Passage, the expectation being that such a discovery worked toward “the advancement of the Trade and Navigation” of Great Britain. Insisting that his ships were not up to the task, he opted to cross the Pacific. Keeping between 20°S and the equator, Byron believed that a continental landmass lay somewhere over the horizon, and his report forced the Admiralty to turn its exploratory focus to the South Pacific. Shortly after his return, Samuel Wallis was sent out in HMS Dolphin to find “Land or Islands of Great extent … in the Southern Hemisphere between Cape Horn and New Zeeland … in Climates adapted to the produce of Commodities useful in Commerce.” The great accomplishment of this expedition was the European discovery of Tahiti, where the English spent six idyllic weeks recovering from scurvy and marveling at the people and climate.
By coincidence, two ships under Louis Antoine de Bougainville arrived at Tahiti a few months after the Dolphin’s departure. Bougainville’s expedition is notable for including the naturalist Philibert Commerson and his helpmate, Jeanne Baret, who disguised herself as a manservant. In addition to finding and taking possession of any places useful to trade and navigation, Bougainville was instructed to “examine the soils, trees and main productions [and] bring back samples and drawings of everything he may consider worthy of attention. He will note as far as is possible all the places that could serve as ports of call for ships and everything related to navigation.” Reports about the island paradise of Tahiti from participants in the two expeditions had a profound effect on the European imagination. Here was a society, in Commerson’s words, in “the state of natural man, born essentially good, free from all preconceptions, and following, without suspicion and without remorse, the gentle impulse of an instinct that is always sure because it has not yet degenerated into reason”—a manifestation of the concept of the “noble savage” then in vogue. As a greater familiarity with the realities of life in Oceania would show, these assumptions owed more to a loss of reason on the part of Europeans than to a lack of it among Polynesians.
Cook’s Voyages
The primary motive for Captain James Cook’s first voyage in Endeavour in 1768–71 was to observe the transit of Venus across the sun for “the improvement of astronomy on which navigation so much depends.” Edmond Halley had suggested the idea of measuring the transit of Venus from places remote from one another in 1716, and on Wallis’s recommendation Tahiti was chosen as Cook’s destination. Sailing with Cook were eight naturalists including Joseph Banks, aged twentyfive but already an advisor to George III and a member of the Royal Society, the expedition’s sponsor. As one colleague wrote to the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, originator of the binomial system of biological classification, “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.” During the expedition, they collected thousands of specimens of clothing, ornaments, weapons, fauna, and flora, including more than eight hundred species of plants previously unknown to science.
The Endeavour spent three months at Tahiti, where the transit of Venus was successfully observed. After six months in New Zealand, Cook abandoned his secondary objective, the search for Terra Australis, and sailed west hoping to reach the Indian Ocean via Tasmania. The onset of winter drove Endeavour north, and Cook put into Botany Bay, south of modern Sydney, so named for “the great quantity of New Plants” collected there over the next week. Skirting the Australian coast, the Endeavour was holed on the Great Barrier Reef and after six weeks of repairs sailed through the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea en route for Batavia.b Infestation by malaria-bearing mosquitoes that spawned in the heavily silted river and stagnating fish ponds had earned the Queen of the Orient a new nickname: Cemetery of the East. Shortly after reaching the port in robust health, seven of Cook’s company died and another twenty-three succumbed to diseases contracted in the Indies before the ship reached England in July 1771.
A year later, Cook sailed again with HMS Resolution and Adventure. Investigating the possibility of a Terra Australis lying south of Africa, the Resolution crossed the Antarctic Circle and Cook explored the fringes of the southern ice pack before rendezvousing with the Adventure in New Zealand. After cruising the South Pacific from Vanuatu to Easter Island, Cook discovered the uninhabited South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands southeast of Cape Horn. No less remarkable than this expedition’s extraordinary contribution to geographic knowledge is that thanks to Cook’s strict regimen for cleaning and airing the ship, only one of Resolution’s crew died from illness in the course of the three-year, seventy-thousand-mile voyage.
In July 1776, Cook was off again with the Resolution and Discovery, this time to find the Northwest Passage, for the discovery of which Parliament had pledged £20,000. After stops in Tasmania, Tonga, and Tahiti, in January 1778 Cook’s crews reached the Hawaiian Islands, probably the first Europeans to do so. After a brief stay, they sailed for Nootka Sound, the choice of which reflects the intensifying European interest in the Pacific Northwest. Published reports of Bering’s expeditions prompted Spanish authorities to establish missions in southern California in 1769 and to counter Russian and British designs on the region by dispatching expeditions of their own. Advised that Catherine the Great was planning to expand Russian claims in North America, in 1775 the viceroy of New Spain dispatched an expedition to Alaska, although it got no farther than Vancouver Island. Bruno de Hezeta passed the mouth of the Columbia River (later named for Robert Gray’s Columbia Rediviva), and the area was further explored by Spanish expeditions under Don Alejandro Malaspina and Dionisio Alcalá Galiano, and by the British under George Vancouver, who encountered both Galiano and Gray in Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands.
Cook continued along the coast to the Alaska Peninsula, crossed the Bering Sea and through the Bering Strait as far as Icy Cape, Alaska. Cook had covered a lot of new ground but, he wrote, “In justice to Behrings Memory, I must say he has deleneated this Coast very well and fixed the latitude and longitude of the points better than could be expected from the Methods he had to go by.” The British then spent six months in Hawaii, but a week after sailing a sprung foremast in the Resolution forced them to return. An argument between a group of Hawaiians and a shore party led to a skirmish in which four marines and Cook were killed. Command of the expedition fell ultimately to John Gore, w
ho returned to Icy Cape before abandoning the search for a Northwest Passage.
The Second Settling of Australia
When Cook embarked on his third voyage, Australia had barely begun to take shape on the world map and no one could suspect the profound consequences that his discoveries would have on the continent’s future. In 1781, James Mario Matra, a dispossessed loyalist, veteran of the Endeavour expedition, and correspondent of Joseph Banks’s, proposed the settlement of the area around Botany Bay as “an asylum to those unfortunate American loyalists to whom Great Britain is bound by every tie of honour and gratitude to protect and support,” and one that would be well positioned to threaten the Asian and transpacific interests of the Netherlands and Spain in the event of war. The idea of gaining a foothold in Australia was appealing, but Home Secretary Lord Sydney had other ideas about who should people it. The English had acted boldly on Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s idea of using North America as a dumping ground for convicts, which was enshrined as policy in the Transportation Act of 1717. Colonial legislatures attempted to prevent the landing of criminals in North America—about a thousand a year in the eighteenth century—but the practice continued until the Revolution, whereupon the British government began housing them in pestilential hulks in the Thames. In Sydney’s view, Australia was the solution to the convict problem.
In January 1788, eleven ships carrying 780 convicts sailed into Botany Bay after nearly thirty-six weeks at sea. Governor Arthur Phillip soon shifted his settlement about ten miles north to the future site of Sydney. “We got into Port Jackson early in the afternoon, and had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbor in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security,” and where the land was also better. Given the rough material with which he had to work, Phillip was inordinately optimistic about the fledgling colony’s potential. “We have come today to take possession of this fifth great continental division of the earth, on behalf of the British people, and have founded here a State which we hope will not only occupy and rule this great country, but also will become a shining light among all the nations of the Southern Hemisphere. How grand is the prospect which lies before this youthful nation.” The first free settlers other than marines and their families did not reach Australia until 1793, yet the practice of transportation continued until 1868, by which time more than 160,000 convicts had landed in Australia.
Ships and Navigation
Exploration was now understood as a distinct discipline rather than an incidental benefit of commerce or hostilities, but there was as yet no such thing as a ship designed for the purpose. Most vessels so employed were warships of modest size—frigates or smaller—good for cruising close inshore, but big enough to carry naturalists, their libraries and equipment, supplies for the ship, and the specimens collected on the voyage. This lack of occupational specialization was typical of the age. While local traditions yielded vessels with distinct characteristics reflective of their environment and occupation—colliers, fishing smacks, mast ships—in fact many seagoing ships could be used in any number of trades. Because there were no passenger ships per se, passenger overcrowding and its associated ills remained a serious problem. A very few well-off people could pay for some privacy in a tiny cabin, but most people were carried belowdecks like so much live cargo.
External factors had an effect on the economic efficiency of the shipping industry, but until the advent of theoretically sound refinements to hull design and route selection, passage times between many ports remained almost unchanged; between the 1710s and 1780s, ships took about thirty-five or forty days to sail between New England or New York and the West Indies—an average speed of less than two knots. Mathematicians, physicists, and others began to weigh in on the issue of hull design in the seventeenth century, but their work was not widely embraced outside of France, and the education of ship constructors—the people charged with actually building ships—remained practical and informal until the spread of formal education and literacy toward the end of the century. Nonetheless, shipwrights were neither fearful nor incapable of innovation.
New rigs like the two-masted brigantine—square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft-rigged on the main—required smaller crews than vessels of comparable size and as a result soon dominated the routes between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America.c About twentyfive meters in length, and with a capacity of about 160 to 170 tons, these were less expensive to build and man than three-masted, full-rigged ships and had a greater carrying capacity for a given length than schooners, the North American ship par excellence. Apparently developed in the southern colonies in the early part of the century, when they were known as “Virginia-built,” with small crews and high speed, fore-and-aft-rigged schooners were favored by merchants, smugglers, privateers, slave traders, pilots, and fishermen, and used as naval dispatch boats and to patrol against other schooners, which in most cases were faster than square-rigged warships. Initially no more than twenty to twentyfive meters long and rigged with two masts, by the end of the 1800s schooners with between three and six masts were commonplace in the lumber and coal trades on both coasts of North America, and the design was widely copied in Europe, Africa, and Asia.d
Average ship sizes in the Americas changed little in the eighteenth century, but the eradication of piracy meant that extra crew to man the guns were no longer needed, which left more space available for paying cargo and increased the tonnage-to-crew ratio, a standard measure of economic efficiency. A fifty-ton Boston ship typically carried a crew of seven in 1716; half a century later, the number was five. Comparable figures for New York vessels were eleven and seven. Jamaica ships carried one gun per 18 tons in 1730, and one gun per 162 tons forty years later; for Virginia vessels, the ratio rose from one gun per 29 tons to less than one gun per 1,000 tons. Falling insurance rates were another indicator of the decline in violence against ships; on most routes in peacetime rates were about 2 percent. Further economies were realized by faster turnaround times in port, which resulted from the construction of facilities for warehousing, chandlery, banking and insurance, and provisioning, especially in colonial North America. Centralized warehouses saved merchant-captains the trouble of sailing port-to-port in search of cargo. This was a vast improvement over the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, for instance, where collecting a cargo of tobacco usually entailed sailing from wharf-to-wharf along a river and haggling at each stop.
The art of navigation improved even faster than ship design in the centuries of European expansion thanks to scientific advances, the construction of more sophisticated and finely tuned instruments, and the spread of literacy and book learning. In many respects, seamen were already well equipped with instruments to determine vessel speed, latitude, depth of water, and direction. The most significant breakthrough with respect to the last was Edmond Halley’s solution to the problem of correcting for magnetic variation in compasses, which he solved in the course of two voyages to the South Atlantic in the 1690s. (A third cruise, in the English Channel, resulted in publication of the first chart of tidal currents.) Establishing latitude remained a function of measuring the altitude of various celestial bodies against the horizon, although the instruments became simpler, lighter, and more accurate as manufacturing techniques improved.
Determining longitude was considerably more problematic. Using dead reckoning over weeks or months at sea could give only a rough approximation of longitude—one’s position east or west of a prime meridian running between the poles—and miscalculations led to the loss of countless ships. An early method of fixing longitude based on celestial observation required precise timekeeping and could not be adopted until the development of an accurate timepiece. The quest for a more reliable technique began in earnest following the loss of three ships of the line and their 1,400 crew on the Scilly Islands in October 1707. Seven years later, Parliament enacted a £20,000 reward “for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea.” This was hardly the
first offer of financial incentive, which had been proposed by Spanish, Venetian, and Dutch authorities as early as the sixteenth century. Moreover, the French Academy also provided an award for scientific advances beneficial to navigation and commerce, and there was considerable collaboration among French and English theoreticians and instrument makers. Initially the focus was on calculating time by lunar distances—determining the time at a prime meridian by measuring the angular distance between the moon and a star or planet and checking the result against tables in a nautical almanac. The real breakthrough, however, was the work of a clockmaker named John Harrison whose first marine chronometer (or clock), known as H1, was tested at sea in 1736. This and two successors were too big to be practical—H1 weighed about thirty-two kilos—and in 1761 he completed work on H4, which measured twelve centimeters in diameter and weighed just over a kilogram. Another clockmaker named Larcum Kendall was commissioned to make a facsimile of the H4, which James Cook took with him on his second circumnavigation. Cook was unstinting in his praise and assured the Admiralty that “Mr Kendal’s Watch has exceeded the expectations of its most Zealous advocate and by being now and then corrected by Lunar observations has been our faithfull guide through all the vicissitudes of climates.” Lunar distances were widely used to determine longitude until the price of chronometers came within reach of the average navigator in the 1800s.
A separate problem from determining one’s place on the globe was how to represent it on a chart. The second-century Ptolemaic concepts of latitude and longitude were understood by a few European mathematicians, but they were not reintroduced to European cartographers until 1450, when Ptolemy’s work was translated into Latin. A little more than a century later, Gerard Mercator published a world map entitled a “New and More Complete Representation of the Terrestrial Globe Properly Adapted for Use in Navigation.” Mercator’s breakthrough was to devise a projection in which meridians and parallels intersect at right angles, and a straight line drawn between two points represents a line of constant bearing, called a rhumb line or loxodrome, and intersects all meridians at the same angle. Although the shortest route between two points on the globe is a great circle, this requires constant course corrections, which was virtually impossible prior to the development of electronic aids to navigation in the twentieth century. While somewhat longer than a great circle, the virtue of the rhumb line was the ease with which it could be followed by a navigator. On long courses where the difference between a great circle and a rhumb line was significant, the course could be divided into a series of shorter rhumb lines entailing occasional changes in compass heading. How Mercator came up with his projection is not entirely understood, and although Edward Wright devised a mathematical explanation that could be easily followed by other cartographers and navigators in 1599, the Mercator projection was not widely used until the 1700s, when it was embraced especially by marine surveyors.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 70
