Palliser, as he was to prove, was no ordinary man. A brilliant seaman and naval tactician, held in the highest regard by his superiors, he was eventually to become Governor of Newfoundland and a Lord of the Admiralty. Even so, he might have been entirely forgotten today, his tiny niche in history obliterated by Cook’s great shadow, were it not for the fact that it was Palliser who first recognised Cook as a man of genius and destiny, who proclaimed this loud and long to all in authority who would listen and who, as his years drew in, long after Cook’s place in history was assured, was still happily proclaiming his belief in Cook’s destiny. Palliser must have been a man of quite extraordinary perception.

  Cook remained on the Eagle from the summer of 1755 until the autumn of 1757 – the Seven Years’ War had begun early in 1756, but the declaration of war did no more than regularise an already existing situation. Except for occasional urgent refits – the weather in the Channel and the Bay of Biscay caused far more damage to the English men-o’-war than the French did – the Eagle spent almost all of this time blockading the French coast. It was a rather hum-drum and monotonous existence enlivened only by the first – and last – sea-fight of any importance in which Cook was to engage. In late May, 1757, they engaged a large French vessel, 1500 tons and fifty guns, off Ushant – an East Indiaman by the name of Duc d’Aquitaine. The French vessel, in a running fight lasting forty minutes, was crippled and captured: but the Eagle itself was so badly damaged that it had to return to England for repairs.

  For our understanding of Cook, the significance of this period lies not in the occasional skirmishes with the enemy but in the fact that it was then that Cook polished and honed the skills, those very special skills, that were to serve him so well in the years to come. True, he was still no cartographer, his years of surveying and chart-work were yet to come: but that he had fully mastered his knowledge of ships and the sea is shown clearly by the fact that in just over two years he had advanced from able seaman to master’s mate, to boatswain and finally to master, the person in charge of the actual running of the ship and the senior non-commissioned officer on board. At the same time, he pursued his studies in navigation and mathematics (in necessary conjunction with astronomy) and as he had already been fully qualified in those subjects before he had joined the Navy the standards he had now reached must have been quite exceptional.

  The mastering of those subjects was, of course, an essential prerequiste for the years in the Pacific that still lay far ahead – without them he could never have gone and the Admiralty would most certainly never have chosen him. But no less essential for the future was his exposure and conditioning to naval life itself, so different from the careless and rather slipshod way of life found aboard the colliers. Here each man was a specialist, a man trained to rely upon himself and to rely upon others, a man into whose mind it was firmly and permanently inculcated that he was a vital link in a chain and that the one unforgiveable sin, under times of stress – and Cook and his men were to undergo a much greater degree of stress in the Pacific than they had ever been subjected to in the Atlantic – was to be the one who broke that chain. Much has rightly been said about the harshness of naval discipline at the time, but overmuch misplaced emphasis has been laid on the contention that only an iron discipline could produce a highly trained crew. Only bad crews, badly officered, require this brutal kind of discipline, while good crews, good officers, all highly trained, need only the discipline that comes from within: it is clear, now and later, that this was the kind of crew Cook had in mind.

  On 27 October 1757, Cook joined the Pembroke, a sixty-four gun ship, as master. It was his twenty-ninth birthday. For most of the winter his new ship carried out the blockade in the Bay of Biscay. In February, 1758, they sailed for Canada.

  The war was going badly for the British on the North American continent. General Braddock’s army had been savagely handled by the French and Indians and it was considered imperative and of the utmost urgency to take the pressure off the British colonial forces in what is now the eastern seaboard of the United States by launching an attack against the French in the north, the main objective being the centre of their military power, Quebec.

  There is no evidence that Cook took any active part in the first part of this operation which consisted in the reduction of the powerful fortress of Louisburg which guarded the gateway to the St Lawrence. This fortress fell to General Wolfe, who was to die the following year in the taking of Quebec, after bitter fighting and a lengthy siege. But Cook had a role to play in the Quebec campaign itself, not a major one, perhaps, but one which was essential for the success of the operation.

  This took place some ten months after the surrender of Louisburg: Wolfe’s army, though victorious, had been badly mauled and had to await reinforcements from England while the Navy was glad of the opportunity to refit its ships during the winter at Halifax. But by May of 1759, advance units of the British forces had penetrated up the St Lawrence to within a few miles of Quebec.

  Here they encountered a major but expected difficulty. Navigation on the river at this point becomes difficult to a degree. Up to this point normal deep-water traffic follows the northern shore, then switches across river to the south to approach the basin of Quebec itself. The stretch of water where the crossing is made is known as the Traverse and as far as river navigational hazards are concerned it can have few equals in the world: it is a confusing and highly treacherous maze of rocks and shoals and shifting sandbars, a navigator’s nightmare if ever there was one. If, that is to say, the channel through the Traverse is not accurately buoyed.

  On this occasion, May 1759, it wasn’t. It had been, but the French, understandably enough, had removed every last buoy. It fell to the lot of Cook and the masters of one or two other vessels to re-chart and re-buoy the passage, a difficult and arduous task lasting several weeks, a task that was made no easier by the fact that Cook and the others worked mostly under the range of French guns, that they had to work frequently at night and that the French had the infuriating habit of coming out from shore in canoes during the hours of darkness and cutting away buoys which had to be replaced the next day – after, that is, fresh soundings had been taken.

  But by June all was ready and in that month the entire British armada of over two hundred ships safely made the passage of the Traverse without a single casualty. There is little question that the bulk of the credit belonged to Cook: in official despatches he was now being referred to as ‘Master Surveyor’. As a mark of the esteem in which he was already held it may be mentioned that Wolfe consulted him about the placement of several ships before Quebec – a general seeking the advice of a man who wasn’t even an officer. But Wolfe, doubtless, recognised an expert when he saw one.

  After the siege and capture of Quebec – Cook took no physical part in any of this – most of the naval vessels were sent home for a refit, including the Pembroke, but Cook had to wait another three years before he saw England again for he was transferred to the Northumberland, flagship of the commander-in-chief, Lord Colville – a certain indication that he was now regarded as the ablest master in the fleet.

  For the next three years, at the personal request of Admiral Colville, Cook continued to chart, firstly, the St Lawrence and then the coast of Newfoundland. That he was eminently successful in the execution of his duties is clear from three things. In January 1761, Lord Colville directed the storekeeper ‘to pay the master of the Northumberland fifty pounds in consideration of his indefatigable industry in making himself master of the pilotage of the River Saint Lawrence’. The following year Admiral Colville sent Cook’s charts home to the Admiralty urging that they should publish them and adding: ‘From my experience of Mr Cook’s genius and capacity I think him well qualified for the work he has performed and for greater undertakings of the same kind’ – a prophetic opinion if ever there was one. Finally, Cook’s charts appeared in the North American Pilot in 1775 and were to remain the standard works of navigational reference for those waters for over a century.

  Cook returned home in November 1762. In December he married a certain Elizabeth Batts. This has been the cause of much eyebrow-raising among historians over the years for whatever else Cook may have been, dashing and impetuous he was not and the thought of this steady, calm and careful man engaging in a whirlwind courtship does not find easy acceptance. On the other hand, to say that Cook wasn’t much given to talking about himself is to put the matter in a very restrained fashion indeed and for all we know to the contrary he may have known her from the time she could walk. In any event, speculation is pointless for Mrs Cook, regrettably, forms no part of the story of Captain Cook: regrettably, for to have known more about her would have given us a deeper inferential insight into Cook’s character. But we know nothing about her, just as we know nothing about any of their children. They remain shadowy and insubstantial figures, people without faces on the far periphery of Captain Cook’s life. They are only names.

  The next five years of Cook’s life were comparatively uneventful, devoted in the main to endless studies and the steady increase of his already vast store of knowledge and experience. In the spring of 1763 he returned to Canada where he spent the summer surveying and charting the east coast: in the winter he returned to England where he spent the next few months working up his charts for publication. This pattern was repeated for the next four years during which he was given the command of his own schooner to help him in his work – a command, be it noted, not a commission.

  It is a quite staggering reflection that when Cook left Canada for the last time in 1767, he was still a non-commissioned officer. It is also a staggering reflection on the Lords of the Admiralty of the time that, because of their innate snobbish conviction that officers and gentlemen are born and not made, Cook did not quite qualify for a commission. He had been in the despised Merchant Service, he had sailed before the mast in the Navy, he was poor and his origins were obscure. There could have been little doubt left in the Admiralty by that time that in Cook they had the greatest seaman, navigator and cartographer of the generation. But a commission? Hardly. Hardly, that was, until they realised that to send a naval vessel to circumnavigate the globe, in the greatest exploratory voyage ever undertaken, under the command of a non-commissioned officer wouldn’t be quite the thing to do. For one thing, it would redound most dreadfully upon the alleged competence of those who did hold commissions and, for another, it would not look good in the history books. So, belatedly, they made him a lieutenant.

  TWO

  THE VANISHING CONTINENT

  The Lords of the Admiralty made Cook a lieutenant for the excellent reason that he was not only the automatic but the only choice for the task they had in mind. For the task, that is, that they had privately in mind, for the Admiralty, then as now, could be a very devious lot indeed and their publicly announced plans bore little relationship to their true intentions.

  Ostensibly, the Admiralty had no direct involvement in the forthcoming voyage. Ostensibly, they were merely and generously providing transport to an as yet undecided destination in the Pacific for a group of astronomers who wished to observe a transit of Venus – that is, the passage of Venus between the sun and the earth on 3 June 1769. The astronomers were members of the even then prestigious Royal Society. There had been a previous transit of Venus in 1762 but the observations achieved had ranged from unsatisfactory to useless. This observation that the Royal Society now hoped to make was expected to be of the greatest value in the advance of astronomical navigation. (The results of 1769 were to turn out to be no better than those of 1762: unknown to the astronomers of the day the instruments then available lacked sufficient delicacy and precision for the task.)

  Behind this ostensible reason for the voyage lay the Admiralty’s secondary reason. France was trying to spread her influence and annex what territories she could in the Pacific and Britain was determined not to let her have the field to herself, which, in retrospect, was rather mean of Britain because it had just driven the French out of both North America and India and already owned one-eighth of the known world. But they were an acquisitively-minded and expansionist people in those days and the more they had the more they wanted. Already, in pursuance of this land-grabbing policy, the Admiralty had despatched, in the previous four years, two expeditions across the Pacific, one under Commodore Byron, the other under Captain Wallis. Neither had much luck. As usual, Byron – the famous Foul Weather Jack – managed to get himself completely lost in the Pacific, which is, admittedly, no very difficult thing to do, and arrived home more by good luck than anything else without having discovered anything. Wallis, an extremely competent sailor, was beset by vicious weather throughout, but he did discover Tahiti. The Admiralty had it in mind that Cook might have better luck.

  But behind the Admiralty’s secondary reason lay its primary reason, which was given to Cook in highly secret instructions that were known to half of London in a very short time: those instructions said, in effect, that he was to go and see if he couldn’t find a new continent.

  There was, at that time, a widely-held belief that there existed a very large continent in the southern hemisphere, a continent that girdled the globe, not an Antarctica, but a temperate continent that reached up almost to South America and New Zealand, and that occupied most of the south Pacific. Some geographers had even drawn fanciful maps of the region – it has to be remembered that, even just over two hundred years ago, man’s ignorance of those regions was total. The main protagonist of this idea was one Alexander Dalrymple, also, by coincidence, an astronomer of the Royal Society. His belief in this idea was obsessive to the extent that it became the corner-stone of his life: he was never to forgive Cook for destroying his dream.

  On the basis of this three-pronged plan, then, it is clear that the Admiralty had no alternative to Cook. To penetrate into the unknown waters beyond the roaring forties where weather conditions such as not experienced anywhere else in the world might well be encountered, called for an outstanding seaman, and this Cook undoubtedly was. It called for a man who always knew where he was – and if Cook with his navigational qualifications didn’t know where he was then no one else in the world was very likely to either. It called for a cartographer who could accurately dilineate the coastlines of as yet undiscovered lands and in this capacity Cook had no equal. Finally, and ironically, it called for a man who had the qualifications to command this purportedly Royal Society expedition. Those Cook had also: not only was he a very capable astronomer but he had actually covered a transit for the Royal Society while in Canada.

  It is worth noting, in the passing, that Alexander Dalrymple, who appeared to have a certain amount of belief in himself, was of the opinion that he should be given command of the expedition, an illusion swiftly and sadly shattered when Sir Edward Hawke, First Lord of the Admiralty, thumped a table and swore that he would sooner lose his right hand than give command of a King’s ship to one who had not been bred in the Navy.

  That the Navy had, in fact, selected Cook for the command long before they either asked him or made their choice public is quite clear from the fact that the vessel they had already chosen for the expedition was the type of ship that Cook knew best – a Whitby collier. She was a vessel in which, today, the more intrepid might venture to sail from Dover to Calais, provided, that is to say, that the weather forecast was good. The Earl of Pembroke, as the vessel was then known, was as unimpressive as she was unprepossessing. For the great task ahead she was ludicrously small, with wide bluff bows, a raised poop and a square stern. Her maximum speed with all sails under the best of conditions would be about seven knots. However, she was very strongly built and, like all Whitby colliers, had remarkable sea-keeping qualities. She was renamed the The Endeavour Bark but was never thereafter called anything except Endeavour.

  The Endeavour was very wide in the beam – almost thirty feet which seems a quite extraordinary width for a vessel of just over a hundred feet in length – and she had every need to be. Apart from carrying a complement of close on a hundred souls, room had to be found for an immense amount of stores and equipment. The question of food alone, one would have thought, presented an almost insuperable problem – enough to tide ninety-four men over an estimated minimum period of two years. (The basic elements of the diet were salt pork and biscuits – two commodities to which weevils became rapidly and incurably addicted – and preserved sauerkraut which Cook was to use so successfully in his fight against that medical scourge of the tropics – scurvy.)

  Then they had to have a complete carpenter’s shop and a complete blacksmith’s shop. They had to carry vast reserves of sails and ropes, for both could be expected to wear out several times over in a voyage of this duration. They had to have arms and ammunition, ammunition not only for the hand-guns but also for the twelve swivel guns that the Endeavour carried. They had to carry considerable stocks of goods for trading with the wide variety of natives they expected to meet, they had to have a complete range of medical equipment – the Endeavour carried a full-time surgeon – and in addition they carried with them a very large store of scientific impedimenta which was essential for making an accurate observation of the transit of Venus. There were no wide open spaces aboard the Endeavour.

  The complement of the Endeavour formed as motley a collection as the cargo they had to take along with them. As his second in command, Cook had Zachary Hicks, many years his junior but an accomplished seaman. His second officer, John Gore, had already been round the world with Wallis, who had but recently returned to England. There were about forty able seamen, a handful of midshipmen, twelve marines, clerks, servants – eight of them – and the scientific party appointed by the Royal Society.