That is,the modest but beautifully built coastal collier James Cook himself bought for the navy in 1768,because he trusted it for its keel,its shallow draft for seas of coral and ice. It is bark of our imaginings and disputes,ship of arguments and omens,and crucial wood to the fiery argument about who and what Cook was,and should he be honoured or repented of? Seeing the Endeavour in April 1770,the people of the Eora nation people called itturaga,an island. An island of returned-to-earth ghosts,who might be persuaded to leave again. As happened.
A pre-visualisational digital model of Lieutenant James Cook’s vessel the Endeavour,compared to an old sketch of the ship.Supplied
Although little post-colonial Aussies of my own and other generations were encouraged to see the hand of God in it (because God loved the British Empire,didn’t he,and reserved Australia for it?),it happened purely through British domestic issues that the ghosts returned 18 years later,and could never be charmed into returning to the sky. And how kinky is it that the Endeavour was scuttled to inhibit the movements of the American rebels,and that those same colonials,when they triumphed,reasonably refused to take what they would have called the swill of British jails. And thus a new penal territory must be found!
Though we now know the millennial story of humankind in Australia,the 1770 story,implanted in our civic imaginations in childhood,is not without large moment and reverberations in our psyches. For very belatedly the Endeavour,even acknowledging Australian contact with other regions of the earth during the long Aboriginal occupation,was a modest key that knitted Australia into modern world history.
So much for good and ill did flow from that 97-feet,eight-inch bark and its small,crammed crew. For a collier,it had weighty and notable people,who proclaimed it above all to be an instrument of research rather than of territorial rapacity.
Its richly talented passengers,apart from the genuinely estimable Cook himself,included the extraordinary and lanky Joseph Banks,a hedonist,a scientist,landlord of Revesby,Lancashire,and a personality generally not amenable to spaces as cramped as this. If you want to know what comforts were in it for Banks,a hint may be his britches were stolen when he was occupying a tent with Queen Oberea on Tahiti during the Transit of Venus.
A painting of Captain James Cook in naval uniform.Getty
There was Daniel Solander,friend of Linnaeus and of Banks;the especially recruited Charles Green,the assistant to the Astronomer Royal;Sydney Parkinson,Edinburgh Quaker and a remarkable artist;Alexander Buchan,landscape and seascape man. What a captain’s table that must have been. And all willing to risk death,not for empire but for enlightenment. Buchan was first to die,of an epileptic fit at Tahiti in 1769,and Parkinson and others would die in Batavia of scurvy and dysentery in 1771.
So the Endeavour,despite the HM in front,was not an engine of imperial real estate. At the end of his reconnaissance of the East Coast,Cook did claim it,he said,on Possession Island just off Queensland. The Indigenes of the island think he might have faked that and not got round to it. And if he did it,it was because like most Europeans he was a member of Empire. But again the Endeavour was thus an engine of inquiry and not an engine of real estate.
Again,Cook was not himself Mr Terra Nullius – many versions of that being were in our future. Cook says significantly that when he made the claim he was careful merely to claim the East Coast because everything to the west was subject to Dutch claim. The Dutch were what worried him,and it was to remove land from them rather than the Indigenes that he went,or claimed to go,to Possession Island.
Mind you,it would be criminal to deny that empires on whose behalf territorial claims were made always did get around to cheating the Indigenes.But there was no inevitability that the British would be involved in the next imperialist adventure to New Holland,or Terra Australis. Nor did Cook himself give the name Australia to the continent whose coast he partially charted.
And so small and chunky,an old coal carrier,a so-called “Whitby cat”,Endeavour in its earlier existence sailed as the Earl of Pembroke between Yorkshire to London,and went on to be an undistinguished wreck in North America. Cook was willing to take a ship designed for coastal British runs all the way to Antarctica,and there are bigger weekend cruisers sailing Sydney Harbour today!
I do enjoy this news of the “big E”,and get a weird post-colonial kick from it,but the discovery of His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour coincides with the Queen’s announcement that. Camilla is,as we all know,a good woman. Fine for the Brits.
But for us,even though Camilla is charming and well-read woman,it’s a bit of an imposition. There are many charming British women,but I am not required to call them Majesty! Respecting the monarch and wishing her a happy platinum celebration and good health,are we really to be asked to bow before Charles,himself not a bad poor British pilgrim but even so,to acknowledge these two fellow humans as the centre of our sovereignty and of the majesty and significance of our polity,Australia?
Because our constitution still says so,and the fault is ours,not that of the royals,that we have failed to put it right. Will we call at Possession Island or will we fudge it? Will Australia,too,become a murky wreck with “HM” emblazoned on it?
And as for the Uluru Statement from the Heart,let’s enshrine that above all. To me,the Endeavour calls from its murky waters in Rhode Island. For fraternity!
Thomas Keneally is a novelist and founding chairman (1991) of the Australian Republican Movement.