The Day the World Discovered the Sun (13 page)

Slade's protégés spent the ensuing seventy-two days, minus time lost during a waterfront strike in early May, overhauling the modest bark into a ship that would be enshrined in British naval legend. Incorporation of spare crucial components like anchors and launch boats would
prove essential to the mission in due course. One longboat's ultimate destruction at the teeth of tropical marine worms only underscored the importance of
Endeavour
's proper sheathing and filling. Moreover, even tiny details like backup “gammoning rings” (holding in place the forward-thrusting spar—bowsprit—that in turn helps steady the front mast) and tight covering of the companionway (the quarterdeck's only below-deck access point) might have seemed inconsequential on the Deptford docks. But attention to such details ensured that when the main gammoning did indeed break (off the Brazilian coast) and when gale-force winds submerged the entire quarterdeck (near Cape Horn), the ship's “fittings” proved anything but trivial.
²⁴

According to one discerning lieutenant who would be circumnavigating the planet on
Endeavour
, the Royal Naval refit of the humble
Pembroke
made the forthcoming voyage “as well provided for . . . as possible, and a better ship for such a service I never could wish for.”
²⁵

The officer was one James Cook. A forty-year-old naval veteran of the Seven Years' War, Cook had first plied the North Seas working in colliers like the
Endeavour
. Now, after having made his wartime reputation as a supremely careful surveyor willing to brave dangerous assignments, Cook had earned the admiration of some of the military's chief officers, such as Navy secretary Sir Philip Stephens. With Stephens and Admiral Hugh Palliser lobbying for him behind the scenes, Cook soon emerged as the Navy's first choice for the mission.
²⁶
But the Royal Society's proposed captain, Dalrymple, would still not relinquish his commanding role.

So Admiral Edward Hawke took a more personal tack. At a Royal Society meeting in early April, Hawke publicly told Dalrymple that “such appointment would be entirely repugnant to the regulations of the Navy.” The Navy provided its own helmsmen, Hawke made clear. And those rare occasions when it didn't—such as the near mutiny Edmund Halley had inspired when he captained a 1698 overseas scientific mission—only reinforced the Admiralty's prejudice against civilians commanding military vessels. If Dalrymple was preparing for a standoff,
the Navy only saw it as a stand-down. Cook, newly raised to the rank of lieutenant, would captain the
Endeavour
. And that was that. But Dalrymple, the society's records note, “persisted in declining the employment of observer.”
²⁷
Lacking a vessel to captain, he would not sail at all.

On May 5, James Campbell—a naval officer and member of the Royal Society Council—suggested his friend Lieutenant Cook could fill dual roles, arguing that Cook was “a proper person to be one of the observers in the observation of the transit of Venus.”
²⁸
The society was already well aware of Cook's astronomical qualifications; his careful observations of a solar eclipse in Newfoundland two years before had been the basis for Cook's carefully detailed map of the island. Still, for the upcoming mission, Captain Cook would be second in command astronomically to the new primary observer of the Venus transit mission: Charles Green.

After Maskelyne had risen to Astronomer Royal in 1765, Green—the previous Astronomer Royal's assistant—found work somewhere else. Green had instead pointed his mathematical talents toward a public works venture to divert freshwater from the Coln River west of London toward the city's outer suburbs. No partisan to the counterfactual, Green had told his new employers that surveys of the terrain suggested the scheme wouldn't work. The venture collapsed.
²⁹

Meantime, in March, Green had married Elizabeth Long in London. And on the strength of his Barbados experience, Green earned an appointment to the post of purser for the Royal Navy's frigate
Aurora
. Despite their falling-out after the Barbados trip, the Astronomer Royal in the end favored talent over grudges. Maskelyne's lobbying assured Green the Royal Society's job of lead astronomer on Captain Cook's Venus transit voyage.
³⁰

Now with a ship and capable men to captain and lead its primary scientific missions, all the
Endeavour
lacked was a destination. Maskelyne's nebulous best guess was still its best hope.

On May 23, 1768, newspapers began headlining an incredible story. Letters from the newly landed explorer's ship HMS
Dolphin
posted
dispatches from a new Pacific paradise. “We have discovered a large, fertile and extremely populous island in the South Seas,” the letter read. “From the behaviour of the inhabitants, we had reason to believe [ours] was the first and only ship they had ever seen. . . . ‘Tis impossible to describe the beautiful prospects we beheld in this charming spot; the verdure is as fine as that of England; there is great plenty of live stock, and it abounds with all the choicest productions of the Earth.”
³¹

Rumors had been spreading that the
Dolphin
crew had brought back Patagonian giants. (The rumors proved to be false.) Stories of first encounters with the natives of the new island—Tahiti—did, however, withstand verification. “The first day they came along side [the
Dolphin
] with a number of canoes, in order to take possession of her. There were two divisions, one filled with men, and the other with women—these last endeavoured to engage the attention of our sailors by exposing their beauties to their view,” a correspondent wrote in the
London Magazine
. After describing an initial failed attempt at attacking the
Dolphin
, one that left the ship's captain Samuel Wallis no recourse but to open fire with her big guns, the peoples of this island “immediately showed the greatest desire of being at peace with us.”

“The natives,” the correspondent continued, “are in general taller and stouter made than our people and are mostly of a copper colour with black hair. . . . It does not appear that they know the use of any one metal whatever. When the grapeshot came among them, they dived after it and brought up the pieces of lead.”
³²

On May 27 the
Endeavour
's masthead first carried a white and red Royal Naval pendant, signifying an officer of His Majesty's fleet now commanded the ship. Lieutenant—the Royal Society more loosely termed him “Captain”—James Cook now was at the helm. Since taking charge of the ship, Cook had supervised
Endeavour
's final renovations,
had received ordnance downstream on the Thames (along a stretch of river called Gallions Reach), and had sailed to Plymouth for her final loading and staffing before setting out to sea.

The onboard scientific kit that Cook and Green were preparing constituted some of the finest portable astronomical instruments in the world. Royal Society member James Short—who'd essentially shrugged his shoulders when asked where to send the transit voyage—made the most sought-after telescopes in England. He furnished two for
Endeavour
. The Navy also provided Cook with a simpler scope with which he'd already become familiar on previous missions, while a British Museum scientist on the voyage would be bringing his own thirty-six-inch telescope to rival the two-footers Short had built. For measuring angles between objects in the sky, the society outfitted
Endeavour
with the best designs of dimensions both compact—brass sextant by Jesse Ramsden—and large—one-foot astronomical quadrant by John Bird.
³³
The Astronomer Royal's staff had been working overtime to supply
Endeavour
with
Nautical Almanacs
for both 1768 and 1769—enabling the quadrants and sextants to serve as precision longitude finders for at least the next year and a half. And for tracking the ship's heading, the Navy installed magnetic compasses from the shop of Gowin Knight, the nation's most celebrated geomagnetist.
³⁴
Similarly top-rated and redundant clocks, thermometers, micrometers, and stands rounded out a gear manifest that carried the pride of an increasingly technologically sophisticated nation. The Royal Society was also sending the
Nautical Almanac
computer William Wales and assistant Joseph Dymond to Hudson's Bay to observe the Venus transit. (This despite the fact that Wales had informed the society that he “prefer[red] a voyage to a warm climate.”) No less impressive than
Endeavour
's scientific instruments were Wales's James Short–designed telescopes as well as a pair of quadrants, three clocks, a barometer, and a thermometer.
³⁵

Royal Society fellows weren't the only ones pushing the technological limits of the day. The 1761 transit had captured the public imagination, and the 1769 sequel was becoming the hot new avocation of scientific
enthusiasts in both Old World and New. Another sixty British observers from Martinique to Philadelphia would also be reporting their transit measurements back to London and Paris to be weighed alongside the big-budget expeditions. All told, these secondary observers—with kindred floods of amateurs in Sweden, France, Russia, Germany, and Spain—created a booming new marketplace for instruments of exactitude. Some non-transit-related business, in fact, ground to a halt. The Scots explorer James Bruce, traveling at the time through Egypt to trace the source of the Nile, discovered that he couldn't replace an astronomical quadrant he'd lost in a shipwreck because, he wrote, “all the excellent instrument makers in Europe [were] employed by the astronomers of different nations then much engaged about the transit of Venus.” Bruce instead borrowed an old quadrant from the court of King Louis XV of France.
³⁶

Launching in a time of peace—and with a globetrotting mission like nothing before it
—Endeavour
drew on a talent pool equally as impressive as the gadgets being stowed in her holds. Senior lieutenants, medical staff, and midshipmen all brought with them years of expertise earned on the high seas. Four officers on Cook's quarterdeck had logged firsthand experience at
Endeavour
's destination. Cook's third in command, John Gore, had circumnavigated the planet twice—once on Wallis's “discovery” mission to Tahiti (or as they dubbed it at the time, St. George's Island) and once before under Commodore John Byron. Three of Cook's surveyors and navigators had also known St. George's Island—Robert Molyneux, Richard Pickersgill, and Francis Wilkinson. Molyneux, whom Cook described as “a young man of good parts but . . . given . . . to extravagency and intemperance,” was just one of the libertines who had found the South Pacific a welcome outlet for their vices.
³⁷

Legends of St. George's Island, having scarcely a month to warp into full-blown myths, had already pricked English ears. Molyneux, Wilkinson, Pickersgill, and Gore were all well qualified to launch whisper campaigns
among
Endeavour
's crew of the tropical—and sexual—paradise that awaited.

The musket balls HMS
Dolphin
had loosed on St. George's natives created a sudden aboriginal marketplace for all things iron. And St. Georgian women discovered a valued commodity they could trade with lonely English sailors. Before casting off, most of the
Endeavour
knew of the
Dolphin
's crew's encounters—tales that would later appear in print. “The [
Dolphin
's] carpenter came and told me every cleat in the ship was drawn and all the nails carried off,”
Dolphin
's master George Robertson recorded in his ship's journal. “I immediately . . . called all hands and let them know that no man in the ship should have liberty to go ashore until they informed me who drawed the nails and cleats—and let me know what use they made of them. But not one would acknowledge that they knowed anything about drawing the nails and cleats, but all said they knowed what use they went to.”
³⁸

Sex in exchange for nails. What Robertson soon euphemistically referred to as the “old trade” had effectively ripped the
Dolphin
to pieces. Only strictly enforced crackdowns and abstinence regimens saved
Dolphin
from falling apart in the harbor. But venereal disease had already begun to spread among the ship's hands like a strain of flu.

Lieutenant Cook ordered his ship's carpenter to stow an extra barrel of nails on
Endeavour
's voyage, just in case.

Prowess of more than one kind would soon be coloring the
Endeavour
's travels. A rich explorer named Joseph Banks would also be embarking in
Endeavour
with a complement of seven associates who shared Banks's enthusiasm for botanical discoveries and perilous adventure. Cautious family members and friends urged Banks to reconsider the voyage and instead undertake a grand tour of Europe. “Every blockhead does that,” Banks replied to one such appeal. “My Grand Tour shall be one round the whole globe.”
³⁹
It was an expensive Grand Tour too. Banks would ultimately funnel in £10,000 of his own money to
Endeavour
's round-the-world voyage.

By June, London newspapers had seized on the romantic—and perhaps perilous—prospects of the
Endeavour
's mission. “Several astronomers are going out in her to observe the transit of Venus over the Sun,”
The St. James's Chronicle
reported, “and some gentlemen of fortune who are students of botany are likewise going in her upon a tour of pleasure. Thus we see that a voyage round the world, or to the South Sea, which a few years ago was looked upon as a forlorn hope—and the very mention of which was enough to frighten our stoutest seamen—is now found from experience to be no more dreaded than a common voyage to the East Indies.”
⁴⁰