Long after carrying Capt. James Cook to the far side of the world, the naval vessel HM Bark Endeavour continues to inspire adulation, most of all in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand. In 1768, joined by nearly 100 crewmembers in addition to the prominent naturalist Joseph Banks, Cook, just shy of 40 years old, embarked from London for the South Seas in the first of three storied expeditions. Following a short, inhospitable stay in Rio de Janeiro, he spent months exploring Tahiti and mapping the coastlines of New Zealand's North and South islands. Besides returning with innumerable botanical specimens and a small menagerie of animals, Cook became the first European explorer to chart the eastern coast of Australia, a place he claimed for Britain upon going ashore at Botany Bay near the present site of Sydney.
To the unknowing eye, Endeavour had no business plying the open seas, much less traversing the globe. In her first life, as the Earl of Pembroke (launched 1764), she had been a collier, with a burden of 368 tons, carrying coal to London in convoys from Whitby, a major shipbuilding center on England's northeastern coast. A flat-bottomed barque with no pretense to elegance, she bore a rounded bow and a flush, or continuous, deck from stem to stern, with an ample hold. Nonetheless, barques, with their reinforced hulls, were built “to last rather than to dazzle.” Acquired by the Royal Navy for research and exploration at the urging of London's Royal Society, the ship was newly named Endeavour and fitted out with an extra deck, a sheathed hull and 22 guns. There was no shortage of sophisticated scientific instruments, from sextants to azimuth compasses, and of course the telescopes needed to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the sun, which was one of the expedition's goals. Of her mission, Cook, a reserved naval officer of enormous dignity, reflected, “A better ship for such a Service I never would wish for.”
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