Peter Moore’s story of the naval barque Endeavour likewise conjures up the tangible. The woodenness of Endeavour, with which, in 1768–71, James Cook sailed to the end of the earth, is for Moore a recurring theme, from original forest trees to final wreckage. In its range, Moore’s book is altogether more ambitious than Esterly’s, but there is also something like the same attention to skill and striving throughout. Note the subtitle. Moore expands on the story of a particular ship with an argument about the word ‘endeavour’, one of the buzz-words of Enlightenment English. In Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), ‘endeavour’ is defined at exceptional length. As Moore says, the Dictionary itself, as a venture in words, was a remarkable combination of striving and skill.

Comparing book and ship suggests another dimension to ‘endeavour’, though Moore leaves it implicit. From Johnson’s Dictionary to Cook’s expeditions, endeavour was a long-term business. It involved perseverance – nine years for the Dictionary and several years each for Cook’s three voyages.

Endeavour began as a collier (a coal transport) built and based at Whitby, not far from Cook’s birthplace in Yorkshire. Using this connection, Moore quotes Henry Taylor, master of another Whitby collier, on the virtues of good seamen, especially ‘[t]he power of emulation, united with sobriety and an ardent application’ – application not only to the task at hand but also, through endurance, to long voyages fraught with risk and hardship. To those virtues, Cook himself added an extraordinary adventuring ambition and also, as his biographer J.C. Beaglehole put it, a rare ‘analytical and detective energy’. As with the carvings at Hampton Court, Cook’s work in bringing Endeavour to a pitch of achievement was a matter of both body and mind.

Also, the voyage of 1768–71 was a scientific expedition. Endeavour carried a team of skilled men headed by Joseph Banks of the Royal Society, who were to set up a temporary observatory on Tahiti so as to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, besides other research, largely botanical. Endeavour had been refitted partly to make room for collected specimens. For scientific ambition, this voyage compares, say, with more recent trips to Mars, and yet once again, like seamanship, the scientific effort involved the engagement of intellect with the palpable world.

Besides body and mind, there was a third element, though it too is only implicit in Moore’s story. The late-eighteenth century abounded in new novels, but the best-sellers of the time were sermons, and the most popular sermons, like the new novels, offered a new understanding of character. The best-sellers of all were the sermons of the Scottish minister Hugh Blair, in which Blair wrestled with the issue of human character, including the way character worked in the long term. He made integrity into a leading Christian virtue, not just moral integrity but integrity of purpose, that firmness, he said, ‘which … gives vigour and force to [a man’s] exertions on every great occasion’. All this fed into the new fascination with ‘great men’, men who seemed to rival even God in their rearrangement of Creation. Note again the subtitle of Moore’s book. To this point, changing the world had been the preserve of the Almighty.

Issues of spirituality run right through the book, including the spirituality of personification. Things are persons. In its making, Moore says, a ship like Endeavour passed through three phases of personification and each was differently gendered. The original oak was masculine. ‘Alive in the countryside, trees were regarded as a symbol of male strength … stoic, weathered, constant.’ The tree was cut down. ‘As a living tree, he [had] stood in the landscape. As timber it lay in the yard.’ But then, as a ship, ‘she was built, a graceful figure, made eloquent out of the products of the earth’ – ‘eloquent’ through having an independent voice – and not only eloquent, but strangely skilled, agile and determined in ‘her’ own way, so as to work the elements in some predetermined fashion.

Painting by Thomas Luny of the Earl of Pembroke, later the HMS Endeavour, leaving Whitby Harbour in 1768 (photo via Wikimedia Commons)

The mystery of personification recurs throughout, in connection with human skills. Moore makes a good deal of the way in which the travellers by Endeavour engaged with and tried to understand the people they found in the Pacific, so that this is not just a story of discovery and achievement – of English endeavour – but also of things beyond discovery. The travellers wonder at their own unusual power, but also at things their minds could not reach. Here, the story concentrates on Joseph Banks and his team. Moore spends some time on their dealings with the Tahitian people, especially Tupaia, who insisted on joining Endeavour for the return voyage but who died in transit. They called Tupaia – ‘a sort of high-priest’ – ‘Man of Knowledge’ and ‘an extraordinary genius’. He learnt to use watercolour well, but he showed his genius mainly in reading the intricacies of the sea.

Tupaia was to be very useful in piloting Endeavour along the Australian east coast, and he impressed Cook with his detailed knowledge of the geography and peoples of the central Pacific. For Cook, Tupaia’s appeals to the spirit of the waters, in prayer from the stern windows, might have made little sense. But this seaman of the Enlightenment did glimpse a type of maritime expertise, including a familiarity with the movements of sun, moon, and stars, beyond anything ‘we’ had in Europe, ‘a simple elegant [knowledge] system’, Moore calls it, which made Tupaia’s people unafraid of long sea journeys.

In the end, Endeavour was converted to a troop carrier in the British effort to suppress the American Revolution. In other words, a medium of endeavour became an enemy of endeavour, an irony Moore does not remark on. This is, nevertheless, a wonderful book, a perfect pleasure to read, and an expression itself of great skill.