Dan Snow's History Hit - Captain Cook 250 Years On

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

250 years ago today Captain James arrived back from one of the most remarkable voyages of exploration in the history of the world. The expedition took Cook and his crew through the Pacific making contact with the numerous island communities of that ocean and perhaps most famously being the first Europeans to make landfall on Australia. Whilst undoubtedly an act of skilful seamanship, this expedition would begin a process of colonisation that would have devastating consequences for indigenous communities and cultures throughout the Pacific region. In this episode, Dan is joined by the writer, historian and podcaster Peter Moore who has recently published his new book Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World. This makes him the perfect person to explain the purpose of the expedition, its successes and failures and to give us an insight into what was going on aboard HMS Endeavour. 

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's Monday morning. It's the Monday after the night before. England played in the final of the European Cup last night. The first time that has ever taken place in history. I hope you enjoyed listening to our preview of the final, the Italy-England history. Lots of comments on that, thank you very much. Pity me this morning as you go into work, no doubt feeling a bit worse for wear. I am up at the crack of dawn on HMS Belfast, filming another program for History Hit TV. If you haven't already subscribed to History Hit TV, now's the time to do it. You get a month for free when you turn up. Just go historyhit.tv and then you will be part of the world's best history channel.

We've got hundreds of documentaries, more coming out all the time, including one that I'm making at the moment on Second World War naval history, which I'll fill you in a bit more about when the time comes. But just this week, we've got Boudicca and her revolt against Rome, and we have got the programme I remember with Kat Jarman on the pursuit of the great heathen army, the great army of Danes crossing England. All very resonant, in fact. Perfect stuff for the current sporting climate. But today's an anniversary day in fact it's a big one folks 250 years ago today 250 years ago today on the 12th of july 1771 cook captain james cook arrived back from his first voyage landing at deal in kent he made his

way to london to talk to the Lords of the Admiralty about what was the most remarkable voyage of exploration in the history of the world. It forged links between the Pacific and Australasia that would, of course, endure with catastrophic consequences for many indigenous people and cultures in those islands. And it would begin a process by which those islands, those places, would be transformed first into European and American colonies, dominions, and into independent states. Profoundly important voyage of exploration. What was he doing? Why was he doing it? And what was going on in the HMS Endeavour? You can hear all about it on this podcast. I talked to the very

brilliant Peter Moore. He's written a biography really of the ship in particular of Endeavour but we talk of course about Cook and the ship and the expedition and we discuss just how this one voyage changed the world dramatically. Captain Cook is a subject close to my heart as people who have listened to this podcast before will know I did a project on Captain Cook when I was at primary school. It fired my love for history. It fired my love for history, it fired my love for the 18th century. I dressed up as Captain Cook, I took pictures proudly standing there in my cardboard tricorn hat. And then obviously later I've studied the effect of European arrival in New Zealand, Australia in particular, and how devastating that was for the indigenous populations. And recently I was able to talk to the Aboriginal historian on this

podcast and get a very, very different view of Cook, a very, very different view of that expedition, the one that I was taught in school and came to be fascinated by. It's, as ever on this podcast, a wonderful learning experience for me. Thank you. Thank you all for giving me the opportunity of keeping it all going. So everyone head over to historyhit.tv, sign up to World's Best History Channel, see me with my crushing hangover on HMS Belfast this morning. But before you do that, here is a very special anniversary Captain Cook pod. Enjoy. Peter, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Well, it's a great pleasure to be here. Nice to talk to you.

It's a big anniversary. Captain Cook and the Endeavour. Why did their Lords of the Admiralty send Captain Cook in this slightly curious ship over to the other side of the world? Yeah, good question to start with. It's not altogether simple, the answer. There was two reasons people have isolated over the years. Of course, it was a voyage of curiosity. people have isolated over the years. Of course, it was a voyage of curiosity. Some people might say they wanted to gather measurements and observations around this thing called the transit of Venus, which was a very important astronomical event. And that was going to feed in a kind of big data set, the kind of thing Chris Whitty would have liked if he'd been around in

1768. And it was going to help them compute the distance between the earth and the sun so they had to take measurements of this particular thing from all over planet earth and one place where this transit was going to be visible was right in the middle of what they called the south seas and we call the pacific ocean so they kind of in splendid 18th century style decided to send someone off and ostensibly that was a reason for Cook setting out in this tiny little ship with 90 or so people. The secondary motivation, of course, which we realise today is that it was a good excuse to do a bit of exploring and fed into this idea of expanding empire, which was really important in the 18th century. So I suppose the great lure in the mind was this idea of terra australis,

which isn't the Australia we think of today. They thought there was a great big landmass at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to kind of balance out the land that they knew existed in the Northern Hemisphere. So they were sent off to look for that. It was a weird ship, and arguably it was a weird choice of officer as well. I mean, Cook was born to illiterate parents. I mean, he certainly kind of laboring classes he'd worked his way up demonstrating there was some at least meritocracy in the georgian navy and the ship itself was a little bit eccentric wasn't it why were they both paired up and chosen well it was just a

combination of timing really so cook as you said was born the son of a day laborer up in north yorkshire and he had none of what they labourer up in North Yorkshire, and he had none of what they called back in those days hereditary honour. He didn't have that kind of great boost of a family name. And so he had to work his way up the hard way, served his apprenticeship in Whitby on the Colliers. Then at the point where he was just about to be given command of one of these, he decided he fancied expanding his horizons. So he was joining the period of the Seven Years' War. He was over in North America and he was working on surveys there. Later, he went into Newfoundland on the survey of that coast. These surveys, they had a

bit of a cyclical rhythm. So they'd send people out in the springtime to Newfoundland or wherever you're going, and you'd come back for the winter and you'd spend the winter maybe doing your maps in the Tower of London or something like that and they needed someone to urgently go out to do this transit observation and Cook hadn't gone off to Canada at that point he was kind of around and everyone just knew he was really, really good at his job. He had a kind of brilliant practicality. So that's the cork part of the equation. On the other side was the Endeavour itself. Because when I was a little boy and I used to spend time on the North Yorkshire coast, among pubs that were called the Endeavour and the Resolution, you'd imagine them to be great,

big ships of the line, kind of great glamorous things. And I was a bit disappointed, I have to say, when I found out aged nine or something that Endeavour was just a collier. Actually, a bark is the name of the ship that she was. Just a coal-carrying kind of Bedford rascal of the seas, if you like. It wasn't a glamorous ship, but great capacity. And they were really good for getting in close to the shore. And they were really, really durable. They're made out of this tough Yorkshire oak, which I thought was kind of an interesting little fact. And built like a brick. I mean, for once, you know, built very sturdily and not unused to taking the bottom or resting on the seabed if necessary.

When you look back at the voyage, the visual history of the voyage, there's signs of, or you can see it when it's careened or it's just like tilted on the riverbank. And it was good for running repairs like that. So it was strong enough in the hull that they could just let the tide go down beneath it and then they could repair it. But of course, like so many things in history, it was a bit of an accident just a few years before they'd sent Byron, who was a different naval officer, round to the Pacific. And he'd gone in a completely different type of vessel. And it was really just

that these colliers were available in the Thames. They were looking for them. Oh, there's this bloke called Cook. Oh, he knows how to do colliers. Because one of the great misunderstandings of history is that people always think that, well, Cook learned to sail on colliers. He obviously went to pick a collier because he had some kind of power and agency over what was happening during that point, but he didn't at all. It was just a complete accident of history. So there's this wonderful moment I often think of in the spring of 1768 when Cook found out he was going to the far side of the world in the ship that he learnt to sail in, which must have been quite a romantic moment for him, I think.

Yeah, because he was originally in the Merchant Marine, wasn't he? Taking coal from Newcastle down to London, volunteered for the Navy and entered as an ordinary seaman, rapidly got promoted. So his moment has come. He is in command of this expedition. He's got a weird crew on because he's got astronomers, but he's famously got joseph banks which is odd to have scientists naturalists astronomers on board absolutely very strange i mean if you go back maybe a generation before endeavor you get the start of international scientific expeditions. So things like La Condamine in South America is in the 1730s and that kind of thing. But this idea of embedding a scientific team within a voyage was quite strange. And you have to think of Joseph Banks, who you mentioned there is the real archetype for the

voyaging naturalists that come later on. So most famously Charles Darwin, of course, but also people like Hooker. And we could actually extend that right down to today with Sudeid Attenborough. This is the kind of person that Banks was, a real Labrador of a personality, racing around, was always interested in the next thing that was going to turn up. Banks had the advantage of being extremely wealthy. And so he paid. This is kind of what got him on, actually. He kind of knew people. He used to go fishing on the Thames at Chelsea with Lord Sandwich, who was in the Admiralty high up. And he got wind of this. And there's this nice sense of Banks buying his way onto

the expedition. Banks at this point was early 20s, I can't say for sure. But he went around and picked these various talented people to help him out. So a Swedish botanist called Daniel Solander. They found an artist called Sidney Parkinson, who's a real hero of this voyage for the amount of material that he left behind, sadly died on the way. And they created this team, among which I should point out, there were various collectors. Two black men went and they were part of Banks's retinue as well. So we shouldn't think of this as a completely white voyage. There were people from different places on the Endeavour, about 90 or so of them, I think, when they set out. And they set off in August of 1768.

He was still a lieutenant at that point. Captain Cook was Lieutenant Cook. And was it difficult keeping control? First of all, obviously difficult keeping discipline, keeping morale up on these long ocean voyages, but also with all these scientists and non-naval types on board. Was it an interesting challenge aboard? If you actually go down to the Endeavour replica,

which is in Darling Harbour in Sydney, you can see the geography of power is quite evident when you go in there. Now, Banks had Cook kicked out of the cabin that would usually be reserved for the most important naval person. So he had that because he was of higher status and had cook relegated to a little side room and i think that tells you quite a lot of the dynamics in a very stratified english society in the 18th century how do you make these things work well of course bligh later on in century in a very similar position doesn't make them work and gets kicked off his own ship century in a very similar position doesn't make them work and gets kicked off his own ship. Cook was very good with discipline. He had that sense that he needed at the time to be a good naval officer, when to give a bit of leeway and when to be a bit hard. He wasn't at this point

in his career established, so he had to win the respect of the people on the ship. And he, I think, performed that part of his orders spectacularly well. There was very little ill discipline. So for example, the leeway he gave them. So there's wonderful accounts of when they crossed the equatorial line. So the officers had to go through this ceremony of giving up all of their power and giving the power to the usual or the more ordinary members of the ship's company. And things like that show that Cook was kind of confident in a very quiet way. But I don't think it wasn't a shouter or a flogger.

He's a kind of like the PE teacher who gives you the cold and icy stare. That's what I think of Cook as, a bit like that. He's a bit of a cold fish, really, I think. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. It's the 250th anniversary of Cook arriving home. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. so he sails into the pacific and well it's the beginning of the greatest journey of exploration probably in british maritime history what does he get up to in the pacific well they go around cape horn as you say get into the pacific and they, I think the way that I've thought about these voyages, and I know others have as well, is in terms of the Apollo missions to the moon of the 1960s, 1970s, because there's a very similar sense of distance and isolation and human endeavour.

And obviously that's the word that was given to the ship. They make their way to Tahiti. Cook being Cook, they arrive there six weeks ahead of time, so they have plenty of opportunity to get to know the culture. This becomes a real kind of feature of the voyage, led predominantly by Banks, but in a different way by Cook himself, that they don't want to just go to somewhere and set up their telescopes and look at the sun or something like that. They want to understand it or at least get a flavour of it and capture what they can. This is a real high enlightenment moment. And Tahiti in 1769.

Goodness, what an encounter that must have been. And from the British point of view, the Pacific is the great unknown. It's a realm of great excitement and great potential in all sorts of different ways. From the point of view of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific, what on earth is happening? This great ship is turning up with these people who are wearing quite strange uniforms. who have these very strange rituals, who have this weird technology, who are making a fort on your island. So you can see there's potential for conflict. And I should say in Tahiti, which is the period name for French Polynesia, we now call it, the relations were remarkably congenial apart from a few moments.

call it. The relations were remarkably congenial apart from a few moments. And the transit is completed with reasonable success with the technology they had available to them. And then Cook goes south and he's looking for this Terra Australis. He opens his secret orders, as they called it at the time, and he's told to go south. He doesn't find anything down there, but he then goes further east and he comes into a place that he knows exists, but He doesn't find anything down there, but he then goes further east and he comes into a place that he knows exists, but he doesn't know what shape it is. And this is New Zealand. So he has an encounter of a very different type there with the Maori. There's a series of shootings which have proved problematic ever since and are still politically very divisive in a place called Poverty Bay. But he manages to have a full circumnavigation of the two islands of New Zealand. Much more interested in the north than

the south, I always think, because it's a kind of green volcanic space. So that interests them from a kind of agricultural point of view. But the chart that Cook lays down of New Zealand, they could use that in the Victorian age. It was that good. It was really accurate. They see things like the first haka. There's a moment when Cook has a hongi, which is a traditional Maori greeting where they're pushing your noses together. I think Meghan Markle was doing that recently. But anyway, Cook was doing it 250 years ago. And so there's lots of these moments which we look back on now with real wonder and imagine what sense of disbelief and uncertainty there must have been

on both sides. By that point, they pretty much completed the objectives of the voyage, but they're heading back. They've got to get this endeavour back, the ship. And he decides to keep going east rather than going back across the Pacific, because that would be hard work for the small ship. He wants to go east and north. And that's when he falls in with the landmass that he knew as New Holland. Today, we call it Australia, of course. And there's a series of landings in places like Botany Bay and then later on in Queensland. And there's another

encounter with a mysterious hopping creature that really catches them by surprise. Turns out to be the first kangaroo the British have set their eyes on. And they almost found it on the Great Barrier Reef. So that's nearly the end of them. And it's really a story of narrow escapes until they get up to Batavia and then they're back on the map and then they can sail back via the well-known trade routes across the Indian Ocean. What's Cook's response to these people that he meets, whether it's in Australia or New Zealand? Does he demonstrate the kind of superiority that we kind of come to associate with Europeans in the 19th century or is there a bit more parity there in how these cultures would look at each other?

Well, I think there's a few interesting moments that are worth thinking about for us all. So with the Aboriginal people of Australia, which really were the strangest and the most alien to the Western mind, because they just could not understand them. I mean, the sense of pleasure that they encountered in Tahiti and the sense of protection and defence that they found with the Maori was much easier for the British to deal with than this kind of slight sense of being ignored when they got to Australia, because the Aboriginal people just wanted the British to go away. So they'd kind of retreat and they'd watch them from a distance. And that was very alien to the British mind. There's a very famous bit in Cook's journal when he talks about happiness and whether these people who live in the north of Queensland are happier than we are

in Britain, because it's a kind of Rousseau idea. They're not weighted down with possessions and ideas of luxury and things like that. So that's quite an interesting bit of Enlightenment philosophy. Cook is not beyond reproach because he sows the seeds for many problems that come later. So, for example, the big one, which is the bone of contention in Australia right to today, is this claiming of Australia as a British territory under a doctrine like terra nullius, which means that it's uninhabited land. And how can you do that after you've been making surveys of the people for so long? So that's a

point of debate and a very divisive one too. In New Zealand, I was down in New Zealand in 2019 when they were talking about the 250th anniversary of Cook's arrival there. Again, it's a history that people are thoroughly exhausted with in some senses because it's all like founding stories that become a bit bent out of shape to fit a certain political narrative at a time. But there was this great moment in the north of New Zealand in Queen Charlotte Sound at the top of the South Island, one of the most beautiful parts of the world, where they had all these waka, the canoes of the Maori, were coming out to meet the replica Endeavour as she sailed in on a commemorative voyage. And there's lots of this happening at

the moment. In fact, I often find that we need to look more to Australia and New Zealand in our cultural debates at the moment, because we're stuck in a rut here in the UK, having quite divisive and polarised conversations about things that have been debated furiously in Australia and New Zealand for a long time. And often I think they're ahead of us in terms of finding a middle ground. But this is like historical dynamite, this voyage, because there's no doubt that Cook coming into the Pacific

was an absolute disaster for the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. In some islands, 90% of the population were killed through disease in the years that happened. Entire cultures disappeared. So it becomes offensive for them to talk about Cook and his voyages of discovery, because they say, well, we were here before. We've been here for hundreds of years before. And I think that's why it's such a rich and fascinating moment in our human story,

this one voyage. When Cook gets back, how instantly is the import of this expedition realised? Jack, how instantly is the import of this expedition realised? And has he turned into a national hero straight away? Now, Cook's process of becoming a national hero took a little longer because he had his two subsequent voyages. And it was only really after his death in Hawaii 10 years later in 1779 that he became this kind of avatar of empire, if you like. And I always separate in my mind very clearly between the biography and the legend of Cook. So you have James Cook, who was, as you pointed out at the beginning, the farmer's boy from Martin in Yorkshire. Then you have this Captain Cook, who's a bit like a cartoon character who appears on tea towels and things like that, and becomes a symbol. Even today, if you go to australia they

say well the first captain cook wasn't too bad it was all the captain cooks that came after him the problem so cook in 1771 when he arrived back 250 years ago now was kind of promoted to commander he actually would therefore be called captain on board as a courtesy of his title. So he was transmuted into Captain Cook at this point 250 years ago, but the real star of the voyage was Joseph Banks. Joseph Banks, the one you mentioned before, was the great hero because he had the pedigree, he was good looking. I mean, how cool is this to go to the other side of the world and come back with loads of plants and things that people haven't seen before. This was the talk of London. You had people like Franklin would go down to the quayside just to gaze at the Endeavour and try and pick up what they could

as it was being unloaded. So Banks, who later went on to become the president of the Royal Society, really milked this for all it's worth. And there's another story there, but I don't think we've got time for it today. Well, we can talk about Joseph Banks anytime, come back on the pod. But what about Endeavour itself? She did not go on the subsequent voyages. Oh God. Well, here's more tangled history

because Endeavour as a ship then goes through these kind of changes of identity. She was originally, as you say, a coal collier when she was called the Earl of Pembroke. Then she became this exploration vessel called Endeavour later she became a troop carrier and she ferried troops over to New York Harbour in 1776 that moment of amassing all those troops in New York Harbour well Endeavour was there but she wasn't called Endeavour and this is where lots of people lost their scent years ago she was called Lord Sandwich by this point.

I think she was probably renamed just to kind of, again, get a bit of interest out of the Admiralty. It was a bit of a ploy back in those days. If you wanted someone to take interest in your ship, you named them after. We could have the Matt Hancock ship today or something. Maybe that's not a good one for this week. But anyway, this ship was in New York Harbour, the same one that was in Tahiti in New Zealand and Australia. But I think it's

wonderful to think that George Washington might have looked out at her as well, or maybe Alexander Hamilton. She eventually was sunk in 1778 in Newport, Rhode Island, and they're getting very close to finding out exactly where she is now. And there's a wonderful marine archaeological project which has been ongoing for years. And it's real needle in a haystack stuff, but they've narrowed it down from 13 to 5, from 5 to 3, from 3 to 1. But narrowing down something to 1 isn't quite the same as saying that's definitively it. But they think they know where Endeavour is. And I think the last page on this story is yet to be written.

We'll see. Very exciting indeed. Well, thank you for coming on and taking us on this gallop through Captain Cook's voyage. He arrived back 250 years ago this week. What are his thoughts, by the way, on arriving back? Did he secretly think, can't wait to get back out there? Did he have agency? Was he allowed to choose? Did they send him anyway? No, he didn't. I think he was at home on the sea. He was one of these people. He wasn't

for a desk job. You can sense that he had a kind of restlessness. As I said, Cook is opaque to maximum levels of opaqueness, almost. You can never quite penetrate his motives. And he very rarely says anything which is clear enough to say, oh yes, that's what he's thinking. That's what he's trying to do. I think he was one of these people who was just driven just by some inner demon to keep going. And he decided that he was going to search the Pacific Ocean. And I mean, he is to this day, I think the person who's explored more of the earth surface than anyone else which is quite a thought amazing thank you very much for coming on talking about it what is your book called endeavor the ship and the attitude that changed the world

thank you goodbye everyone thanks for coming on thank you very much Thanks folks for listening to this episode of Danston's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating and review, obviously the best rating and review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb

with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our lewis and cat jarman we've got the ancients with our very own tristan hughes and we've got warfare as well dealing with all things military please go and check those out wherever you get your pods