HM Bark Endeavour

HM Bark Endeavour was formerly called the 'Earl of Pembroke' and was a small Merchant Collier built to transport coal around the coast of Britain. She was built in Whitby, North Yorkshire, and was obtained by the Royal Society of London for use in a scientific study to observe the 'transit of Venus across the sun' in 1769. She was renamed HM Bark Endeavour and underwent a major re-fit at Deptford on the Thames in 1768.

Her Captain for the voyage was to be a forty year-old experienced seaman by the name of James Cook who, until that time, had never commanded a vessel of his own. The voyage commenced on 8th August 1768 and took them down to Madeira, along the West Coast of Africa and across the Atlantic to South America, arriving in Rio De Janeiro (with some hostility from the Spanish Governor) on 13th November 1768. The next leg was to round Cape Horn into the South Seas and on to the small island of Tahiti, where she was to stay for the next three months observing the aforementioned eclipse of the sun by Venus.

Her official mission now completed, HM Bark Endeavour continued with her 'unofficial' tasks of charting the Southern Hemisphere. The Bark Endeavour moved from Tahiti to New Zealand, where she spent the next six months surveying and mapping the coast under constant harassment from the Maori population, who were clearly not enamoured by her presence. From New Zealand Bark Endeavour moved westwards to the coast of Australia, sighting land at 6am on 19 th April 1770. Putting into to a sheltered bay, her on board botanists were able to collect an astounding array of flora, so much so that Cook named the place 'Botany Bay'.

For the next four months Cook charted the coast of Australia, until Bark Endeavour ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef. After a tense 24 hours, making the ship as light as possible so that she could be re-floated by an incoming tide, she finally broke free but not without sustaining considerable damage. Due to her flat bottom, Bark Endeavour was put ashore on the beach of a river estuary, now named the Endeavor River, and spent the next two months undergoing repairs. She turned for home arriving, after several other stops, on 1th July 1771. Cook was to captain the Bark Endeavour on two subsequent voyages, sailing from pole to pole, until he, and four of his marines, were killed by natives on the Hawaiian Islands. Today he is justly recognised as one of the great navigators of the world.

The current Bark Endeavor is a replica, built to commemorate the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia. The building work commenced in January 1988 in Freemantle, Western Australia, but various financial difficulties delayed her completion until April 1994. She then embarked on her own world trip, calling at many ports along the way. We caught up with the Bark Endeavour at Greenwich in June 1997, and again in Ramsgate in 2003