On this day in 1768, Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard and orders to be off Tahiti in time for the transit of Venus in June 1769. She was not a sleek thing. She had been the Earl of Pembroke, a Whitby collier built to carry coal down the North Sea coast: broad, flat-bottomed, shallow in the water, and slow. Every one of those qualities was chosen on purpose. A flat-bottomed ship can be run ashore and laid over for repairs in a place with no dockyard, which is exactly what happened in June 1770 when she struck the Great Barrier Reef and spent some seven weeks beached on the Endeavour River while the carpenters worked.
The manifest is my favourite part. Casks of sauerkraut, malt and portable soup against scurvy, and Cook's trick of serving the sauerkraut at the officers' table until the crew decided they wanted some too. Joseph Banks paid his own way and brought eight companions, among them the botanist Daniel Solander and the artist Sydney Parkinson, plus dogs, nets, jars and drawing paper. The Royal Society sent the astronomer Charles Green for the observation itself.
And at Tahiti in 1769 the ship took aboard Tupaia, a navigator and priest from Ra'iatea, who read the Pacific for them, interpreted, and drew a chart of islands he knew. He died at Batavia in December 1770, as did many of the crew. The painting below is a harbour scene of the kind that ship would have known well.
Inés, Banks and Solander came home with something like thirty thousand plant specimens, many of them unknown to European science, and Parkinson drew hundreds of them before he died on the voyage home. Botany Bay was named for the haul.
Inés, she was measured at about 368 tons burthen, and Cook chose her precisely because a Whitby cat could sit down on her flat floors at low water without breaking her back. A sleeker hull would have been prettier and would have died on that reef.