The Royal Society and the voyage of HMS Endeavour 1768-71

Abstract

On Thursday 9 December 1993 a splendid full-scale replica of HMS Endeavour was launched in the Fishing Boat Harbour, Fremantle, Western Australia, and towed to its fitting-out berth in the Port of Fremantle’s Inner Harbour. Its first sea trial, fully rigged, was on Thursday 16 March 1994. Though registered in Australia it now sails under the red ensign, as did the original Endeavour . It will be the centrepiece of the floating collection held by the Australian National Maritime Museum at Sydney, N.S.W., as one of the most complete and thorough reconstructions of an 18th-century ship and one of the largest wooden sailing vessels ever built in Australia. The project was initiated in 1987 by the Trustees of the Australian National Maritime Museum, and work began on the replica in January 1988, 200 years after the first British settlement was established at Port Jackson, Sydney, N.S.W. After five years of remarkably dedicated workmanship it was completed under a charitable Trust formed in August 1991 as HM Bark Endeavour Foundation. After a series of voyages round the Australian coast with periods as a museum display in some of the major ports, the ship will retrace the original homeward voyage through the East Indies and the Cape of Good Hope to berth at the King’s Landing by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, in Spring 1997. Various views of the replica are shown in figures 1-3. In the history of British exploration the names of HMS Endeavour and Captain James Cook R.N., F.R.S., are forever linked, tending to obscure other ideas as to the origin and purpose of the voyage which brought the ship and the man together for those three seminal years in the 18th century, 1768-71. Now that the Endeavour sails again, albeit as a museum replica but a very fine one, it is appropriate to look again at the record of how the original voyage to the South Sea came to be mounted and how it emerged from the thoughts of individual Fellows and the Council decisions of the Royal Society.