Isabelle Perol / James Cook
11 June 1770. Off the coast of New Holland, in the dead of night, the Endeavour strikes a coral reef and grinds to a halt, her hull torn open, leagues from any shore. To survive, the crew casts her guns into the sea and fothers the ship with a sail to plug the breach.This third and final volume of Cook’s authentic journal carries the reader from that night of dread to the return to England. The ship is careened for seven weeks on an unknown river, where Cook describes a leaping animal that Aboriginal people call the kangaroo. The Endeavour then threads back through the labyrinth of the Great Barrier Reef, comes within a hair of a second wreck, and escapes at last through the narrow Providential Channel. At Possession Island, Cook takes possession of the entire east coast in the name of New South Wales, then passes through the strait separating New Holland from New Guinea, proof that the two lands are indeed distinct.Then comes the longest of the perils. After a stop at Savu, where Cook bargains for buffalo and provisions, the Endeavour reaches Batavia, a Dutch city of stagnant canals where fever and dysentery take hold aboard ship. The crossing to the Cape of Good Hope turns into a running register of deaths: the ship’s surgeon, the astronomer Charles Green, the master Molineux and the faithful Tupaia fade away one after another. Cook makes it home, but he comes home in mourning, and his journal closes with the Postscript, in which he already turns his thoughts to Bougainville’s ships and to the discoveries still to come.This volume closes Cook’s first great voyage on one of the major demonstrations of eighteenth-century geography: proof that New Holland and New Guinea are two lands separated by a navigable strait. The taking of possession of New South Wales at Possession Island, on 22 August 1770, also lays the foundation for the British claim to the entire east coast of Australia, the starting point of the colonisation that would follow two decades later.The text followed here is Cook’s personal journal, written day by day aboard the Endeavour, distinct from the reworked account that editor John Hawkesworth would publish in 1773 for the general public. Here the human cost of the voyage appears without embellishment: of the roughly ninety-four men who left England, more than a third would never see their country again, most of them carried off by the fevers of Batavia rather than by the sea itself, a contrast Cook notes with striking sobriety.The first complete modern rewriting for today’s reader, making this account accessible without betraying anything of the voyage. Twenty original illustrations and redrawn maps bring the route to life, while a set of reference materials (glossary, chronology, index, further reading, editor’s note, afterword) and selected passages from the original text accompany the reading.
