'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?' | novelist Thomas Keneally on the claimed discover of the Endeavour
, scuttled in the American Revolutionary War in Newport Harbour, Rhode Island, is the Endeavour.
Although little post-colonial Aussies of my own and other generations were encouraged to see the hand of God in 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.
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.
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.
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