She left again, her crew increased to 420, on 29 December—the blockade was winter work as well as summer—only to meet a very hard gale of wind off the Isle of Wight on 4 January 1757, ‘which blowed away most of our sails’,

Palliser to Clevland, 6 January, 13 January 1757, Adm 1/2294; Palliser log, 30 January.

At the end of the day the prize's foremast also went by the board, and three of the Eagle's men died of their wounds; another died two days later. Eighty (notwithstanding Palliser's first count) were wounded. The French losses were fifty killed and thirty wounded. The Eagle herself had suffered badly, her masts and rigging and sails ‘very much shattered’, sails indeed ‘rent almost to rags’, almost all the running rigging shot away, her sides full of shot-holes, and stuck, like her masts and yards, with bars of iron.

Palliser to Clevland, 5 June, list of ‘Visible Defects’, Adm 1/2294.

The three ships put back into Plymouth together. Palliser found that his report made the Lords exceedingly happy, and he in his turn was made happy by their compliments. The prize was surveyed, found worth taking into the navy in spite of the 97 shot-holes through both her sides, and fitted out as a 64-gun ship under the same name. The Eagle, put into order again within a month, on 12 July sailed for Halifax across the Atlantic, to join Rear-Admiral Holburne, second-in-command to Boscawen, who was now blockading the formidable stronghold of Louisburg. His fleet, formidable too, was thwarted by foul weather as well as French daring; and by the end of September the Eagle, victim of a violent storm, had begun to stagger home across the Atlantic, leaking, with jury-masts and improvised sails, and men going down sick in tens and scores. She reached safety; but Palliser's days in her were almost at an end. He handed over the command in February 1758. He had been without two of his most valuable warrant officers for many months. Bisset, the master, had been appointed to the Pembroke, a ship still building, on 28 April 1757, and had a good deal to do with her even before she was launched. He thus missed the Duc d'Aquitaine affair. In this affair his mate, James Cook, stood an enemy's fire for the first time, and escaped cannonballs and bars of iron. As he, too, was given preferment, between it and the following cruise, he also escaped the wretched experience of that October Atlantic crossing. It might have seemed a question, briefly, not whether the master's mate might have preferment, but what preferment he should have: for about this time, as we may guess, Palliser received a letter from Mr William Osbaldestone, member of Parliament for Scarborough, written on the stimulus of John Walker of Whitby, suggesting that Cook might be commissioned. That is, the great principle of ‘interest’, spring of so much naval advancement, was being tried on his behalf, and broke down—the principle that what really counted in the profession was the influence which important persons, on the fringe of authority, could bring to bear on important persons in authority. Really important persons—a Lord of the Admiralty, perhaps—applied to by a noble earl, or the son of a noble earl, or an influential contractor to the navy, might quite light-heartedly lay aside a hallowed regulation to oblige some favoured child of grace. But Mr Osbaldestone was not one of the great members of parliament; Hugh Palliser, though he had done very well, was still only a naval captain, not at all the son of an earl, and he could not dispense with regulations or exert influence on those who could; Mr Osbaldestone and Mr Walker perhaps showed a little naïveté in applying to him. True, the war meant a great demand not merely for able seamen but (though a lesser one) for officers, particularly lieutenants, the rank at which commissions started. There were still, however, plenty of unemployed though qualified men to be employed; and the regulations had it that no midshipman or mate without at least six years' naval service could take his lieutenant's examination. An order had recently been issued for the strict enforcement of this regulation. Here was a mate with two years' service. Palliser was bound to reply as he did, that Cook had been too short a time in the service for a commission, but that a master's warrant might be given him, ‘by which he would be raised to a station that he was well qualified to discharge with ability and credit’.

Kippis, 4–5, ‘From the information of Sir Hugh Palliser’.

It is possible, too, or probable, that to this period belongs the first example of ‘sailing directions’ by Cook himself now extant—one of those ‘Descriptions for sailing in and out of Ports, with soundings, Marks for particular Rocks, Shoals, &c. with the Lattd Longd, Tides, and Variation of the Compass’, which ships' masters were encouraged in general terms to produce and produced not very frequently. These directions are for the ‘Harbour of Louisbourg in Cape Breton’.

The Ms is now in the Houghton Library, Harvard.

The cold and studious winter drew to its end. All masters and captains were now faced with the completion of the business that had begun the summer before in the reduction of Louisburg, a step towards which had been Cook's and Holland's work on the chart of the St Lawrence. Wolfe, an untried strategist, and as was later to be abundantly made clear, a woefully poor one, had been anxious to move straight on from Louisburg to Quebec, at the end of July—with a reduced army, without preparation, and with campaigning time running out; and surprisingly enough (if Holland is to be believed) he had had the support of Simcoe. Weak as the French at Quebec in reality were, this was still a hare-brained idea, and Boscawen was a much better judge of the possibilities. The attack on the city, nevertheless, all responsible persons agreed, should be pressed as soon as possible; and the reason for sending Durell to winter at Halifax with so strong a squadron was precisely to enable the campaign to begin in the earliest spring by depriving Canada of all hope of relief. The general strategy conceived by Pitt was one of attack from two directions. The first of these was down the upper St Lawrence, to be reached by way of the capture of the French wilderness forts, leading to an advance on Montreal: this operation was to be conducted by Amherst. The second was up the lower St Lawrence to Quebec, with the army and navy acting jointly. Wolfe was selected for the command of the troops, a planned twelve thousand, and he was given three good brigadiers. For the naval command Anson picked Saunders, a taciturn and first-rate though untried admiral—‘That brave statue’, as Horace Walpole later described him; ‘No man said less, or deserved more’—a man of infinite co-operative capacity, and of all the patience necessary for continued co-operation with the temperamental Wolfe. There was little doubt that the two forces would indeed co-operate as well as in the Louisburg operation. There was little doubt that the troops, as highly-trained and efficient as any British army, would do well if they could be brought effectively into contact with the French. There was the difficulty, to make effective contact. Two difficulties presented themselves, rather: one the British began by overestimating, the other by underestimating. The one was naval; the other was military—or, to be more precise again, a difficulty of combined operations in which the strategic object had perforce to be military. The one was bringing the army to Quebec. The other was bringing to battle the army that defended Quebec.

The one was the navigation, by a great fleet of line-of-battle ships and transports, of the noble four-hundred-mile estuary of the St Lawrence river, at the inner end of which, on the high abrupt cliff, the city and the fortress stood. That navigation the British were sure they could master, but they were aware of dangers, and they were prepared for losses. They were aware of dangers, because the French talked a great deal about them, and though French charts and sailing directions had indeed been captured by Boscawen there was no French chart, there was no chart at all that either a British or a French sailor would rely on. The chart produced by Holland and Cook could be regarded only as provisional. Saunders, in his orders to the masters of transports on 15 May directed them to ‘a plan or chart showing the route which His Excellency intends to make from Louisburg Harbour to the Island of Bic’.

Quoted by Kitson, 38.

There had been previous expeditions for the conquest of Quebec. The first was a New England enterprise commanded by Sir William Phips, the governor of that colony, in 1690. Having made its way successfully to the northern shore of the river before the city, it collapsed in inefficiency and indiscipline. The second, on a larger scale, in 1711, was wrecked on the rocky Egg island, close to the northern shore of the inner gulf, three hundred miles from its objective, on one of the numerous occasions in that age when the British navy did not know where it was. In 1759 it had a much better idea. Not all the French realised this; they tended to rely on the river to defend them. Some did not. Among them was the Marquis de Montcalm, commander-in-chief in Canada, who had a very clear appreciation of the real difficulties of the country, and a sufficiently pessimistic view of the prospect if adequate supply and fortification could not be secured before a hostile fleet and army appeared. At this moment Canada desperately needed food supplies from France. Montcalm wanted powerful batteries at Gaspé, to deny the British a base there; others at the Ile aux Coudres and on the northern shore facing it, to deny them passage through that part of the channel; on Cape Tourmente, to command the Traverse; and, in case a fleet still got through, on the western point of Ile d'Orleans and on Point Lévis or Levis, the elevated point on the other side of the Narrows from the city itself, where the river came down in a swift current to the Basin. He wished to block the Traverse by sinking ten large ships in it. None of these defensive measures was carried out. Few could be carried out, because of the lack of means. Something, it appears, could have been done on the Ile d'Orleans; Point Levis could certainly have had a battery. It was not given; none thought hostile ships could work their way through the Narrows into the upper river under the guns of Quebec, few thought of the possibility of hostile guns planted on the point and bombarding Quebec itself. When the crisis came, there were not enough ships to sink in the Traverse, and all that could be done with it was to take away the marks. Apart from this, the defenders considered, a fleet once in confined waters could be attacked by fire-ships, sweeping down with the current. What Montcalm could do effectively, where he thought danger most threatened—in the direction from which Phips had made his bungling attack of 1690—he did on the north shore of the river, east of Quebec, by a line of entrenchments and fortifications between the St Charles and Montmorency rivers with the village of Beauport between them. If ships could not get past the Narrows, and therefore past the high and steep cliffs which guarded Quebec on the west, then the only way round outside the city to embark on a siege by land, or to tempt its defenders to battle, would be from that eastern quarter. In the meantime, in November 1758, after the British fleet had departed from Louisburg, and at the last possible moment before the ice closed in on the river and made navigation completely impossible, he despatched his aide-de-camp Bougainville to France to plead for the supplies and munitions that were so desperately needed.

Graves reached Newfoundland in the second week in June, and anchored in Trepassey harbour, just west of Cape Race, the southeastern point of the country. Besides the 50-gun Antelope, he had under his command for the purposes of his government five smaller vessels, and his instructions provided for the deployment of them all in surveying as well as in police duties: ‘We have Ordered them to make Charts of all the said Coasts, with Drafts of the Harbours, noting the Depths of Water and Conveniences for fishing, and whatever Observations may Occur worthy of our Knowledge….’

Nmm, Graves Mss, Grv/106, Sect. 9.

The great difficulty of Pacific exploration was not merely the immense size of the ocean—‘a sea so vast that the human mind can scarcely grasp it’, as one of Magellan's chroniclers wrote

This was Maximilian Transylvanus, in a letter to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Salzburg in 1522.

Then there was the miscellany of trifles for winning the friendship of islanders and carrying on trade with them—nails, mirrors, fishhooks, hatchets, red and blue beads, scissors, even a few dolls.

An expedition is not merely a ship or technology or trade-goods, it is men. The men who served with Cook over the next ten or eleven years provide an interesting study in human nature and capacity, and some of those who joined the Endeavour were with him till the end. Officers naturally stand out with more prominence, though now and again a ray of light makes vivid, for good or ill, one of the able seamen or other inhabitants of the vessel whom casual fate in that century picked up and turned into circumnavigators. Of Zachary Hicks, commissioned as second lieutenant, it would be agreeable to know more. He was a Londoner, born at Stepney in 1739, and carried on board the seeds of tuberculosis—how acquired we do not know, but it was a plague to which seamen were not immune. He entered the navy at Ripon, which is some distance from Stepney, whether as a volunteer or a pressed man, and when, again we do not know—probably not pressed, as the records refer to him as a midshipman; he was in sloops as A.B., master's mate, and acting lieutenant from 1766 to 1768, and in March of the latter year was given a lieutenant's pay, two months before his appointment to the Endeavour on 26 May. It was an appointment which he held for precisely three years. At the age of 29 it seems that he was experienced and mature, a good sailor and officer, a man with a good eye when it came to discriminating between land and cloud-banks, one of forethought and independent judgment. He was one of those men who take responsibility without the chance to shine, the men who look after the ship; obviously thoroughly equal to his duties. What else might have happened to him one cannot guess; for he was doomed. When July was two-thirds past, the Admiralty concluded that another lieutenant would be an advantage, and appointed John Gore. He comes before us in the end much more clearly than does Hicks, because in the end we see and read more of him. Certainly neither was a ready writer. Gore was—probably—in his late thirties. He was American-born, had gone to sea in 1755 and served for five years as a midshipman in larger vessels than Hicks's sloops, in the Atlantic, the West Indies and the Mediterranean. He was a master's mate in the Dolphin under both Byron and Wallis, so that he knew already more about the Pacific and its islands than anybody else in the ship. Under Wallis he was one of the men who had taken over the chief responsibilities of the voyage, and he was indeed an excellent subordinate. He is a particular type of sailor—perhaps, if he were not an American, a particular type of Englishman; in eleven years more to be a captain through sheer force of survival, never an admiral; a man of commonsense, able practice, and ceaseless activity, without scientific learning, with some dogmatic fancies but no real imagination; a great sportsman who has gone after wild cattle on Tinian to provide fresh beef for the Dolphin, who will go after the wild duck in Tahiti, the kangaroo and the stingray in Australia; who is ready for any expedition into any country anywhere, of pleasure or of duty. A third man, quite different from these two, a lieutenant before the voyage was out, but for most of it indifferently A.B., midshipman or master's mate—the lines are indifferently drawn—was Charles Clerke. A farmer's son from Weathersfield in Essex, entering the navy in 1755 at the age of twelve, captain's servant and midshipman to be, he was now 25 and looking forward to a commission. A young fellow ripe for every sort of excitement, he was bound to be on the mizen-top of the Bellona when the mast was shot away in a celebrated action with the Courageux in 1761, bound to survive and crawl half-drowned up the chains. He too was in the Dolphin with Byron, but served in the West Indies during Wallis's voyage. He had enough mathematical ability to become a good scientific navigator, and was a good observer of natural phenomena. Brave as well as experienced, he was also, beneath a rattling exterior, a man with a profound sense of duty. What made him invaluable was his high spirits. Clerke was always cheerful, talkative, amusing, with some of the rollicking vices as well as the rollicking virtues; a generous spirit who made friends easily; tall, long-nosed, with an eye both roving and sparkling. He was with Cook on all the voyages; the development of his personality is remarkably interesting. The survival of a handful of his letters, in addition to his journals, gives one a certain sense of intimacy with him; it must be a difficult soul who, when all is over, does not feel some affection for him as well.

Other men came with Gore from the Dolphin, joining their new ship after only three or four weeks on shore—Robert Molyneux, Richard Pickersgill, Francis Wilkinson. They were young, nevertheless the first two, who had both been master's mates, were good hands at drawing a chart, and were to add something to the surveying strength of the Endeavour. Molyneux became master, Pickersgill and Wilkinson his mates. Molyneux undoubtedly had intelligence, though Cook was never to trust him completely; he was, like so many of his fellows, intemperate with drink, which was a defect in a master. Wilkinson was to keep an unusually articulate journal. Pickersgill was the most interesting of the three. Another Yorkshire-man, not twenty when the voyage began, he ended it as master; a good observer, able and amiable, a natural romantic, a little oversensitive, a little given to the grandiose concept and the swelling word, yet a successful subordinate, he was to do good work for Cook. At some latter stage he also went down before intemperance; and then, taken away into independent command, was struck by disaster. The bottle played havoc with too many of these young men, and we have to remember again what century it was. William Brougham Monkhouse, the surgeon, was another, though here one may possibly overstate the addiction. A Cumberland man, not without professional merit, he had been surgeon in the Niger for some years from 1763, and thus had been on the Newfoundland station; he was literate and accurate in observation, and one regrets that only a small portion of his journal has survived. He had a conscientious surgeon's mate in William Perry, who was to earn Cook's high regard. Whether we shall regard midshipmen—the ‘young gentlemen’—as officers is a moot point. They were petty officers, and in due course they would be able to take their lieutenant's examination, and under Cook they would get a very good training indeed. They would have to serve a good deal of their time as able seamen, if they were old enough. If not, they got to know the sea, like Isaac Manley, aged 12, son of a bencher of the Middle Temple, who appears first as the master's servant, is classed as a midshipman in February 1771, when vacancies exist; and long after his voyages with Cook becomes an admiral, and the last survivor of this voyage of the Endeavour. There are some more responsible and experienced young fellows, like Jonathan Monkhouse, the surgeon's brother; and Isaac Smith, Mrs Cook's cousin, aged 16, who had been for a season in the Grenville, and now is a ‘very expert’ help in surveying; and there are some rather odd young fellows as well.

There is not much that can be said collectively about the crew. It was a young crew: few of them had passed their thirtieth year, very few were as old as their captain. Few of them achieved any particular distinction, except of being black or parti-coloured, sheep; many got drunk, and stole liquor whenever they could; practically all went after women; a few tried to desert, more talked about deserting; some were rash, quarrelsome, disobedient or ‘mutinuous’—that is, they swore at the master; some were flogged. Granting the custom of flogging, and the regulations of the navy, they were not flogged excessively. Cook would have no scenes in the Endeavour like those he had witnessed in Halifax harbour. We may regard it as a triumph of administration that in that overcrowded ship there were so few unpleasant scenes avoidable by any human agency. On the whole that crew was to win the captain's respect in most of the situations to which destiny had called them from their separate corners of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. There were two or three from farther afield, like James Maria Magra from New York, and Antonio Ponto from Venice, and John Dozey from ‘the Brazils’. The British navy took what it could get; Cook, on this voyage, took what he was given. He did struggle over one matter: that was the ship's cook (there were other cooks: the captain had a cook, the lieutenants had a cook). ‘Honble Gentlemen,’ he expostulated to the Navy Board on 13 June, ‘The man you have been pleased to appoint Cook of His Majestys Bark the Endeavour, is a lame infirm man, and incapable of doing his Duty without the assistance of others; and as he doth not seem to like his appointment, beg you will be pleased to appoint another.’

Cook to Navy Board, 13 June 1768, Adm 106/1163.