The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (95 page)

In 1764–66,
John Byron, a veteran of Anson’s agonizing circumnavigation in the
Centurion,
was ordered to search for the western outlet of the Northwest Passage, the expectation being that such a discovery worked toward “
the advancement of the Trade and Navigation” of
Great Britain. Insisting that his ships were not up to the task, he opted to cross the Pacific. Keeping between 20°S and the
equator, Byron believed that a continental landmass lay somewhere over the horizon, and his report forced the
Admiralty to turn its exploratory focus to the South Pacific. Shortly after his return,
Samuel Wallis was sent out in
HMS
Dolphin
to find “
Land or Islands of Great extent … in the Southern Hemisphere between
Cape Horn and New Zeeland … in Climates adapted to the produce of Commodities useful in Commerce.” The great accomplishment of this expedition was the European discovery of
Tahiti, where the English spent six idyllic weeks recovering from
scurvy and marveling at the people and climate.

By coincidence, two ships under
Louis Antoine de Bougainville arrived at Tahiti a few months after the
Dolphin
’s departure. Bougainville’s expedition is notable for including the naturalist
Philibert Commerson and his helpmate,
Jeanne Baret, who disguised herself as a manservant. In addition to finding and taking possession of any places useful to trade and navigation, Bougainville was instructed to “
examine the soils, trees and main productions [and] bring back samples and drawings of everything he may consider worthy of attention. He will note as far as is possible all the places that could serve as ports of call for ships and everything related to navigation.” Reports about the island paradise of Tahiti from participants in the two expeditions had a profound effect on the European imagination. Here was a society, in Commerson’s words, in “
the state of natural man, born essentially good, free from all preconceptions, and following, without suspicion and without remorse, the gentle impulse of an instinct that is always sure because it has not yet degenerated into reason”—a manifestation of the concept of the “
noble savage” then in vogue. As a greater familiarity with the realities of life in
Oceania would show, these assumptions owed more to a loss of reason on the part of Europeans than to a lack of it among Polynesians.

The primary motive for Captain James Cook’s first voyage in
Endeavour
in 1768–71 was to observe the transit of Venus across the sun for “
the improvement of astronomy on which navigation so much depends.”
Edmond Halley
had suggested the idea of measuring the transit of Venus from places remote from one another in 1716, and on Wallis’s recommendation Tahiti was chosen as Cook’s destination. Sailing with Cook were eight naturalists including
Joseph Banks, aged twenty-five but already an advisor to
George III and a member of the
Royal Society, the expedition’s sponsor. As one colleague wrote to the Swedish naturalist
Carl Linnaeus, originator of the binomial system of biological classification, “
No people ever went to sea better fitted out for the purpose of Natural History, nor more elegantly. They have got a fine library of Natural History; they have all sorts of machines for catching and preserving insects; all kinds of nets, trawls, drags and hooks for coral fishing.… All this is owing to you and your writings.” During the expedition, they collected thousands of specimens of clothing, ornaments, weapons, fauna, and flora, including more than eight hundred species of plants previously unknown to science.

The
Endeavour
spent three months at Tahiti, where the transit of Venus was successfully observed. After six months in
New Zealand, Cook abandoned his secondary objective, the search for
Terra Australis, and sailed west hoping to reach the
Indian Ocean via
Tasmania. The onset of winter drove
Endeavour
north, and Cook put into
Botany Bay, south of modern
Sydney, so named for “
the great quantity of New Plants” collected there over the next week. Skirting the Australian coast, the
Endeavour
was holed on the Great Barrier Reef and after six weeks of repairs sailed through the Torres Strait between Australia and
New Guinea en route for Batavia.
^b
Infestation by malaria-bearing mosquitoes that spawned in the
heavily silted river and stagnating fish ponds had earned the Queen of the Orient a new nickname: Cemetery of the East. Shortly after reaching the port in robust health, seven of Cook’s company died and another twenty-three succumbed to
diseases contracted in the Indies before the ship reached England in July 1771.

A year later, Cook sailed again with
HMS
Resolution
and
Adventure
. Investigating the possibility of a Terra Australis lying south of Africa, the
Resolution
crossed the Antarctic Circle and Cook explored the fringes of the southern
ice pack before rendezvousing with the
Adventure
in New Zealand. After cruising the South Pacific from
Vanuatu to
Easter Island, Cook discovered the uninhabited
South Georgia and
South Sandwich Islands southeast of
Cape Horn. No less remarkable than this expedition’s extraordinary contribution to geographic knowledge is that thanks to
Cook’s strict regimen for cleaning and airing the ship, only one of
Resolution
’s crew died from illness in the course of the three-year, seventy-thousand-mile voyage.

In July 1776, Cook was off again with the
Resolution
and
Discovery,
this time to find the
Northwest Passage, for the discovery of which Parliament had pledged £20,000. After stops in Tasmania,
Tonga, and Tahiti, in January 1778 Cook’s crews reached the
Hawaiian Islands, probably the first Europeans to do so. After a brief stay, they sailed for
Nootka Sound, the choice of which reflects the intensifying
European interest in the Pacific Northwest. Published reports of Bering’s expeditions prompted Spanish authorities to establish missions in southern
California in 1769 and to counter
Russian and British designs on the region by dispatching expeditions of their own. Advised that
Catherine the Great was planning to expand Russian claims in North America, in 1775 the viceroy of
New Spain dispatched an expedition to
Alaska, although it got no farther than
Vancouver Island.
Bruno de Hezeta passed the mouth of the
Columbia River (later named for
Robert Gray’s
Columbia Rediviva
), and the area was further explored by Spanish expeditions under Don
Alejandro Malaspina and
Dionisio Alcalá Galiano, and by the British under
George Vancouver, who encountered both Galiano and Gray in Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands.

Cook continued along the coast to the
Alaska Peninsula, crossed the Bering Sea and through the
Bering Strait as far as Icy Cape, Alaska. Cook had covered a lot of new ground but, he wrote, “
In justice to Behrings Memory, I must say he has deleneated this Coast very well and fixed the latitude and longitude of the points better than could be expected from the Methods he had to go by.” The British then spent six months in Hawaii, but a week after sailing a sprung foremast in the
Resolution
forced them to return. An argument between a group of Hawaiians and a shore party led to a skirmish in which four marines and Cook were killed. Command of the expedition fell ultimately to
John Gore, who returned to Icy Cape before abandoning the search for a Northwest Passage.

When Cook embarked on his third voyage, Australia had barely begun to take shape on the world map and no one could suspect the profound consequences that his discoveries would have on the continent’s future. In 1781,
James Mario Matra, a dispossessed loyalist, veteran of the
Endeavour
expedition, and correspondent of
Joseph Banks’s, proposed the settlement of the area around Botany Bay as “
an asylum to those unfortunate American loyalists to whom Great Britain is bound by every tie of honour and gratitude to protect and support,” and one that would be
well positioned to threaten the Asian and transpacific interests of the Netherlands and Spain in the event of war. The idea of
gaining a foothold in Australia was appealing, but Home Secretary Lord
Sydney had other ideas about who should people it. The English had acted boldly on Sir
Humphrey Gilbert’s idea of using North America as a dumping ground for convicts, which was enshrined as policy in the
Transportation Act of 1717. Colonial legislatures attempted to prevent the landing of criminals in North America—about a thousand a year in the eighteenth century—but the practice continued until the Revolution, whereupon the British government began housing them in pestilential hulks in the Thames. In Sydney’s view, Australia was the solution to the convict problem.

In January 1788, eleven ships carrying 780 convicts sailed into Botany Bay after nearly thirty-six weeks at sea. Governor
Arthur Phillip soon shifted his settlement about ten miles north to the future site of Sydney. “
We got into Port Jackson early in the afternoon, and had the satisfaction of finding the finest harbor in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride in the most perfect security,” and where the land was also better. Given the rough material with which he had to work, Phillip was inordinately optimistic about the fledgling colony’s potential. “We have come today to take possession of this fifth great continental division of the earth, on behalf of the British people, and have founded here a State which we hope will not only occupy and rule this great country, but also will become a shining light among all the nations of the Southern Hemisphere. How grand is the prospect which lies before this youthful nation.” The first free settlers other than marines and their families did not reach Australia until 1793, yet the practice of transportation continued until 1868, by which time more than 160,000 convicts had landed in Australia.

Exploration was now understood as a distinct discipline rather than an incidental benefit of commerce or hostilities, but there was as yet no such thing as a ship designed for the purpose. Most vessels so employed were warships of modest size—frigates or smaller—good for cruising close inshore, but big enough to carry naturalists, their libraries and equipment, supplies for the ship, and the specimens collected on the voyage. This lack of occupational specialization was typical of the age. While local traditions yielded vessels with distinct characteristics reflective of their environment and occupation—colliers, fishing smacks, mast ships—in fact many seagoing ships could be used in any number of trades. Because there were no passenger ships per se, passenger overcrowding and its associated ills remained a serious problem. A very few well-off people could pay for some privacy in a tiny cabin, but most people were carried belowdecks like so much live cargo.

External factors had an effect on the economic efficiency of the shipping industry, but until the advent of theoretically sound refinements to hull design and route selection, passage times between many ports remained almost unchanged; between the 1710s and 1780s, ships took about
thirty-five or forty days to sail between New England or New York and the
West Indies—an average speed of less than two knots.
Mathematicians, physicists, and others began to weigh in on the issue of hull design in the seventeenth century, but their work was not widely embraced outside of France, and the education of ship constructors—the people charged with actually building ships—remained practical and informal until the spread of formal education and literacy toward the end of the century. Nonetheless, shipwrights were neither fearful nor incapable of innovation.

New rigs like the two-masted brigantine—square-rigged on the foremast and fore-and-aft-rigged on the main—required smaller crews than vessels of comparable size and as a result soon dominated the routes between Europe, Africa, the
Caribbean, and North America.
^c
About twenty-five meters in length, and with a capacity of about 160 to 170 tons, these were less expensive to build and man than three-masted, full-rigged ships and had a greater carrying capacity for a given length than schooners, the North American ship par excellence. Apparently developed in the southern colonies in the early part of the century, when they were known as “
Virginia-built,” with small crews and high speed, fore-and-aft-rigged schooners were favored by merchants, smugglers, privateers, slave traders,
pilots, and fishermen, and used as naval dispatch boats and to patrol against other schooners, which in most cases were faster than square-rigged warships. Initially no more than twenty to twenty-five meters long and rigged with two masts, by the end of the 1800s schooners with between three and six masts were commonplace in the lumber and
coal trades on both coasts of North America, and the design was widely copied in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
^d

Average ship sizes in the Americas changed little in the eighteenth century, but the eradication of piracy meant that
extra crew to man the guns were no longer needed, which left more space available for paying cargo and increased the
tonnage-to-crew ratio, a standard measure of economic efficiency. A fifty-ton Boston ship typically carried a crew of seven in 1716; half a century later, the number was five. Comparable figures for New York vessels were eleven and seven.
Jamaica ships carried one gun per 18 tons in 1730, and one gun per 162 tons forty years later; for Virginia vessels, the ratio rose from one gun per 29
tons to less than one gun per 1,000 tons. Falling insurance rates were another indicator of the decline in violence against ships; on most routes in peacetime rates were about 2 percent. Further economies were realized by faster turnaround times in port, which resulted from the construction of facilities for warehousing, chandlery, banking and insurance, and provisioning, especially in colonial North America. Centralized warehouses saved merchant-captains the trouble of sailing port-to-port in search of cargo. This was a vast improvement over the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, for instance, where collecting a cargo of tobacco usually entailed sailing from wharf-to-wharf along a river and haggling at each stop.