A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  For seven weeks the voyagers followed the coast northwards, marvelling at its extent and growing increasingly excited at the significance of the discovery they were making. Banks and the other scientists had a wonderful time collecting botanical and zoological specimens though, in general, they found the coast rather barren. What neither they nor Cook realised as bays, headlands and inlets were noted and named on the charts, was that they were running into one of nature’s deadliest traps. North of the Tropic of Capricorn the Great Barrier Reef begins to converge with the coast. Shoals and arms of viciously beautiful coral gradually but inexorably close the gap. As Endeavour sailed northwards the watch officers had to contend with wildly fluctuating soundings – 20 fathoms, 17, 12, 22, 9! Just before 11 o’clock on the night of 10 June the ship came to a sudden, jarring halt. She was stuck fast on the reef – and at high tide.

  For the next twenty-four hours everything was desperate but organised action. Everyone, including the scientists, took turns at the pumps. The boats were launched in readiness to haul Endeavour off. Everything that could be spared, starting with the cannon, was thrown overboard. As the ship listed she took in more water. She failed to float off on the next high tide. In the afternoon the pumps were clearly losing the battle. If Endeavour did not float free on the next tide she might sink before the crew could get her beached. That night, at high water, with boats’ crews straining at the oars the ship was brought off. The sails were run up and Endeavour moved towards the land. But there was no suitable place near at hand to run her ashore and water was gushing in through the rent in her bottom. Only a broken-off lump of coral lodged in the gash was slowing the inflow. One remedy remained to be tried. An old sail was lowered over the bow with ropes at each corner, manoeuvred into position over the hole and lashed tight. It worked. Most of the water was pumped out. But it could only be a temporary measure; the stricken vessel had to be hauled onshore for proper repair. But the boats, sent out to find a suitable bay or inlet, had no luck. Then the wind rose again, making manoeuvring more difficult. It was five days before Cook could run the Endeavour into a small estuary and bring her bows out of the water for the carpenter and his men to get to work.

  But when the repairs were completed Cook’s troubles were not over. How could he get away? The wind was almost continuously onshore. And when he was under sail, how to extricate himself from the maze of shoals and reefs into which he had wandered? Boats were sent north and south to look for a channel to the open sea. The results were not encouraging. And if he did get free of the reef would he be able to make sea room away from the massive breakers pounding on the outer edge of the Great Barrier? The fifteen days following 29 July, when he was at last able to take advantage of a slight breeze from the land and leave the creek, were a severe test of his seamanship and captaincy. With the wind on his starboard quarter, he moved cautiously north-eastward, preceded by the pinnace. Frequently he was forced to anchor, then turning round, seek another channel. Cook was baffled, as he honestly recorded in his journal:

  I was quite at a loss which way to steer when the weather would permit us to get under sail. For to beat back to the SE the way we came as the master would have had me done would be an endless piece of work, as the winds blow now constantly strong from that quarter without hardly any intermission. On the other hand if we do not find a passage to the northward we shall have to come back at last.17

  When the wind rose, he had to put out all the anchors to hold Endeavour fast and, once, the ship spent three days swinging at her cables and surrounded by reefs and islands. As well as sending the boats out to reconnoitre, Cook made his own observations from the masthead and high points ashore. It was not until 13 August that he found a deep-water channel. Two days later his ship was almost smashed to pieces against the outer wall of the reef. At the last moment a cleft in that wall was observed and he slipped through into sheltered water with as much relief as he had earlier escaped seawards.

  By now he was developing a knowledge of his enemy. Though his respect for the reef never diminished, the confidence grew that he could outwit it. He had to do so if he was to explore Torres Strait, the gulf that he believed lay between New Guinea and New Holland. So he kept, now, as close to land as possible, always preceded by one or two boats and always anchoring at night. On 21 August he identified and sailed past the northernmost point of Australia and proved that it had no connection with New Guinea.

  Endeavour made a brief landfall on the island of Savu but it was under Dutch influence and Cook, like earlier British captains, experienced nothing but suspicion and hostility. So there was nothing for it but to go on to unwholesome Batavia, where Endeavour arrived on 11 October. Because she needed a thorough overhaul and there was no way of hurrying the Dutch shipyard workers, the ship and her complement were obliged to stay for two and a half months. The result was inevitable. Cook, who had prided himself that, up to this point he had lost only one man through illness, now had the chagrin of watching seamen, officers and scientists drop like flies. By early December, when the ship was ready, he had only a dozen men fit to sail her and he was obliged to hire nineteen fresh hands. Eventually, thirty men died of malaria and dysentery contracted at Batavia. Considering Cook’s remarkable record of having kept scurvy almost completely at bay this was a cruel irony indeed. Losing a third of his men through disease was something which weighed heavily on his mind and made him on his subsequent voyages redouble his already considerable efforts to ensure health and hygiene.

  The rest of the voyage proceeded much like most previous circumnavigations. The Cape provided an opportunity for the remaining sick to recuperate and for Cook to replace some of his missing crewmen. There was a brief stop at St Helena, but Cook did not choose to dally at Ascension. At noon on 10 July 1771 Nick Young, who had first sighted New Zealand, proved his keen eyesight again by pointing out Land’s End.

  A year and a day after setting foot on English soil, Cook went forth to circle the earth again. His voyage in the Resolution from 13 July 1772 to 30 July 1775 has been called the greatest maritime expedition of all time. His achievements were breathtaking: the first eastabout circumnavigation; the first penetration of the Antarctic Circle; the first voyage across the Pacific between New Zealand and South America. Perhaps even more gratifying to Cook than his many discoveries was the fact that, despite long spells at sea, not one of his 119 crew died or suffered seriously from scurvy; there was no outbreak of fever; and throughout the entire voyage only one man succumbed to disease.

  Even before his return to England, Cook had formulated the plan for a second venture which would complete the exploration of the southern Pacific and establish, once and for all, whether any continent lay to the east of New Zealand. With an alacrity which seems out of character for the Admiralty’s lumbering bureaucracy, Cook’s superiors agreed to such an expedition and, by the end of September, had begun to make preparations for it. One reason for their lordships’ enthusiasm was the evident success of the Endeavour’s voyage. The scientific establishment was ecstatic about the achievements of Banks and his colleagues. The profusion of specimens, data and drawings they had brought back would provide the members of the Royal Society with the raw materials for years of research. The popular journals made much of the geographical discoveries and other achievements of the voyage. Banks was received more than once by the king and fêted by London society. It would have been foolish not to ride this wave of national prestige.

  But, as always, there was another motive for promoting a second expedition with all despatch. Details of Bougainville’s voyage were now known and there seemed little doubt that the French would follow up his discoveries. Particularly worrying was the fact that he had stopped at Tahiti. This island had emerged as the obvious base for all further Pacific endeavours. It was centrally situated, possessed good harbours, an abundance of food, water and timber and was populated by a people almost unique among the Polynesians for their friendship. The thought of the French establishing a superior pr
esence there was intolerable. The Admiralty, therefore, wanted Cook to return to the scene of his former triumphs as soon as possible. They expressed the hope that all could be in readiness by the following March.

  Cook was promoted to the rank of commander and the Navy Board was instructed to provide him with two ships. It was probably Cook’s idea to revert to the old scheme of providing a consort vessel. His disastrous plight on the Great Barrier Reef would have been considerably eased with a second ship at his disposal which, if necessary, could have taken aboard all survivors of the shipwreck and sought another way out of the coral labyrinth. In the event, the reversion to a two-ship expedition did not work. Throughout Cook’s second voyage of thirty-six months his flagship and consort were twice separated and spent only twelve months together. There was no question, now, what kind of craft was best suited to a long voyage in the southern hemisphere. The Endeavour had proved herself beyond a shadow of doubt. The Navy, therefore, bought two more colliers from the same Whitby yard, the Marquis of Granby (462 tons) and the Marquis of Rockingham (340 tons). Both were comparatively new and in excellent condition. After refitting, they were renamed the Resolution and the Adventure. (An early suggestion to call them Drake and Raleigh was dropped as being unnecessarily provocative to the Spanish.)

  The projectors of the new voyage assumed that it would be conducted in the same spirit of cordial cooperation between scientific and naval establishments that had marked the cruise of the Endeavour. Accordingly, Joseph Banks’s offer to lead the scientific team was happily accepted. And that lit the fuse of a series of disasters which rocked the expedition and continued to trouble Cook long after its conclusion. Perhaps because of the adulation he was receiving, Banks had begun to develop autocratic tendencies. He took it upon himself to plan all aspects of his new venture and when anyone remonstrated with him he relied on his intimacy with the court and personal friendship with Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, to get his own way.

  Without reference to Cook – or to anyone else – Banks accumulated a prodigious amount of equipment and a large suite of servants and scientific assistants. Then he personally redesigned the Resolution to accommodate his luggage and personnel. A second deck had to be built and, atop that, a roundhouse. Cook suffered all this in the name of friendship and because Banks was so powerful but every visit to the shipyard caused him more alarm, particularly when he observed his flagship to be swarming with sightseers: ‘scarce a day passed on which she was not crowded with strangers who came on board for no other purpose but to see the ship in which Mr Banks was to sail round the world.’18 The result of the alterations was disastrous. Charles Clerke, one of Cook’s lieutenants, told Banks with brave directness, ‘By God, I’ll go to sea in a grog tub, if desired, or in the Resolution as soon as you please, but must say I think her by far the most unsafe ship I ever saw or heard of.’19 As if to confirm this judgement, the Resolution behaved so badly when she was moved from Deptford down the estuary that the pilot refused to take her beyond the Nore. Her increased superstructure made her so top-heavy that hoisting a single sail threatened to turn her right over. She was returned to her dock and work began immediately on stripping away her extra deck and cabins. Banks was furious. He performed an enraged war dance on the quayside. He wrote angrily to Lord Sandwich. He questioned Cook’s competence. He withdrew himself and his staff from the venture. If he thought that the Admiralty would go down on their knees to beg him to reconsider, he miscalculated. The scientific posts on the expedition were offered to others. And Banks went off on a hastily-planned visit to Iceland to salve his bruised pride.

  Before many weeks at sea, Cook may well have wished that Banks was back aboard the Resolution, baggage and all. For the man who replaced him as naturalist soon proved to be an exceedingly troublesome travelling companion. He was John Reinhold Forster, whom we have met briefly already as the translator of Bougainville’s journal. Forster was an impecunious scholar who, despite his undoubted abilities, which earned him, among other things, the patronage of Alexander Dalrymple and a fellowship of the Royal Society, never quite achieved that position in the academic world which he believed was his due. One reason was his inability to make himself agreeable to people who mattered. Indeed, he found it difficult to make himself agreeable to anybody. He was over-sensitive, censorious and argumentative. He was employed, and assisted by his talented son George, to study the flora and fauna of all seas and lands visited and to contribute to an account of the voyage which would be written on the Resolution’s return. The Forsters did their job well but the father managed to upset almost every single person aboard the flagship and, after his return, became involved in a bitter argument about the writing of the official account which eventually obliged Cook to undertake the task singlehanded.

  However, all that lay in the future when the two ex-colliers slipped out of Plymouth on a morning tide in the middle of the hot summer of 1772. They made a leisurely progress to the Cape of Good Hope, dropping anchor in Table Bay on 30 October. Cook allowed three weeks here for revictualling and bringing ships and men to peak condition for the regions of fog and ice into which they were about to enter. Lying nearby in the anchorage were two Dutch East-Indiamen bound for Batavia. Scurvy was rife on board these vessels but there was no trace of the disease on Adventure and Resolution. What secret, then, had Cook discovered which enabled him to combat this scourge so effectively?

  If by ‘secret’ we mean some sovereign antiscorbutic which could be kept fresh and potent for months on end, the answer is that he had no secret. It seems that he did not realise the value of fresh lemons and oranges, which were recommended by Dr James Lind, for these items do not appear on his lists of provisions. This is strange, for Banks had dosed himself with citrus fruit juice during the cruise of the Endeavour and Lind almost came on Cook’s second voyage. (He withdrew when Banks abandoned the expedition.) The reason for this blindspot may be that he placed no confidence in another substance with which the Admiralty provided him: rob. This was a syrup made from lemon and orange juice, boiled down and mixed with sugar. Cook was, of course, right: the necessary vitamins had been driven out during the process of concentration. However, he continued to use rob and anything else that varied the diet and might prove beneficial. This included portable soup, currants, sauerkraut, a decoction of malt and spruce beer; few of which items were, in fact, beneficial in cases of scurvy. Like other good captains, he supplemented the ship’s larder with fresh meat and vegetables whenever possible. In this he went further than most of his contemporaries by experimenting with whatever berries, grasses, leaves and roots were offered by even the most sparsely covered terrains. None of this set him apart as an innovator.

  What made him different was a thoroughness in matters of health and hygiene which was noticed by every officer and seaman who signed on with him. As Lieutenant Clerke observed:

  Our people all in perfect health and spirits, owing, I believe, in a great measure to the strict attention of Captain Cook to their cleanliness and every other article that respects their welfare.20

  Cook regularly inspected his men, their clothing and their accommodation. He insisted on proper ventilation and regular washing of hands and clothes. Above all, he forced everyone aboard, by a mixture of discipline and example, to take full advantage of a varied diet. One enemy of good health had always been the conservatism of the British sailor. He might grumble about an unbroken regimen of salt beef and ship’s biscuit, but he was suspicious of anything new and hostile to such unpalatable innovations as sauerkraut. Cook made a point of sampling every kind of meat and vegetable he encountered. If he believed something was good for his crew he had it served regularly at the officers’ table and ordered it to be consumed on the lower deck. Any man who infringed the rule suffered a cut in his rum ration. By his attention to detail James Cook combated the evils of ignorance and prejudice which were so often the midwives of disease.

  Leaving Cape Town on 22 November, the two ships struck southw
ards, to seek land in this uncharted region. Water was rationed, the crews were provided with extra clothing and warned to prepare for hardship. Soon the animals brought aboard at the Cape began dying of cold, so the survivors were killed and eaten. On 10 December Resolution and Adventure entered a sea strewn with towering, craggy icebergs. Three days later their progress was stopped by pack ice. Cook coasted it to the eastward and southward then found himself caught in a wide bay of ice. The obvious course was to tack out of danger but now snow and fog reduced visibility sometimes to zero. And carrying out the rapid manoeuvres necessary to avoid collision with the great slabs of frozen sea, was a nightmare. When the men braced themselves to haul on the lines they lost their footing on the slippery deck and cut their hands on the ice-crusted ropes. But the ships were sufficiently clear of the worst of the ice by Christmas Day for Cook to feast his men and allow them a few hours of drunken roistering and boxing bouts – much to the disapproval of Forster.

  Cook kept as close as he dared to the icefield and, as it broke up under the influence of the midsummer sun he made more southing. On 17 January he entered the Antarctic. Scarcely a day passed which did not reveal some new fact: the sea does not freeze at 32°F (0°C); icebergs are made up of fresh water (a very welcome discovery); the presence of birds in the high latitudes is not evidence of nearby land. Cook penetrated 75′ within the circle before being obliged to stand away to the north-east. Without knowing it, he had come within seventy-five miles of the Antarctic continent, a remarkable feat. It would be another forty-seven years before anyone actually saw Antarctica.