A voyage on a tall ship, 1769

Eight bells: on a sailing ship, the end of a four-hour watch, struck on the ship's bell when the last half-hour glass runs out. A night in September 1769 aboard Endeavour, a small Whitby coal ship sent around the world, told to you, a young sailor on the middle watch: the bottom of the world and a summer snowstorm, three months on Tahiti, a planet crossing the face of the Sun, a navigator who knew more of the ocean than anyone aboard, and a long search for a continent that was not there... Inside: a goat that sailed around the world twice, sauerkraut at the officers' table, a knotted line that gave us the word knots, the black drop, a gallon of rum for the first to see land. James Cook and Tupaia will be there too. Chapters: The ship · The captain · The watch · Below deck · The food · The bottom of the world · The island · The black drop · Tupaia · The empty ocean · Land. Sources: the journals of James Cook and Joseph Banks, the Royal Society's transit of Venus records. Read by a synthetic voice; script written and fact-checked by the show's team. Additional sounds: Joseph Sardin, BigSoundBank.com (CC0).

The script

A small wooden ship is alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

There is no land in any direction for more than a thousand miles. Above it, the stars of the southern sky... stars no one in England has ever seen from home. Below it, water more than two miles deep. And on its deck, in the dark, a few men are keeping watch, as the ship rolls slowly on the long swell, heading south, toward a continent that may not exist.

Embers of History. Episode five... a voyage on a tall ship, in the year seventeen sixty-nine.

This story is read by a synthetic voice. If these stories keep you company at night, follow the show... it helps others find it.

It is September, seventeen sixty-nine. The ship is called Endeavour. She belongs to the Royal Navy of Great Britain, and she left England more than a year ago.

And you are one of her crew.

You are twenty years old. You grew up in Whitby, on the cold coast of Yorkshire, where the ships that carry coal to London are built, and you went to sea at fourteen. You have sailed up and down the North Sea more times than you can count.

You had never crossed the Equator before this voyage. Now you have crossed it, rounded the bottom of the world, and spent three months on an island that most people in England have never heard of.

How do we know what it was like? Because on this voyage, people wrote everything down. The captain kept a journal every day. So did a young gentleman scientist on board, and several of the officers. An artist drew what he saw. And all of it came home, and has been kept, and read, ever since.

Chapter one. The ship.

She is not a beautiful ship.

She was built in Whitby, in seventeen sixty-four, to carry coal. Her name then was the Earl of Pembroke. She is broad and deep and flat-bottomed, like a barrel with a bow, about thirty metres long. She is slow. But she is strong, she carries a great deal, and she can sit on a beach at low tide without falling over... which, on the far side of the world, with no harbour to repair her in, could save every life on board.

The Navy bought her for exactly those reasons, renamed her, and sent her around the world.

There are about ninety-four people aboard.

Sailors, most of them, like you. A dozen marines, soldiers who serve at sea. The officers. A surgeon. A cook with one hand. An astronomer, with his instruments packed in careful boxes.

And a party of gentlemen who are not sailors at all.

At their head is a young man named Joseph Banks... twenty-five years old, very rich, and in love with plants. He has paid for his own place on the voyage, and brought with him a Swedish botanist named Daniel Solander, two artists, four servants... and two greyhounds.

The sailors are not sure, at first, what to make of the gentlemen. They spend their days fishing things out of the sea with nets, and drawing them, and putting them in jars. By now, more than a year later, you have grown used to it. You have even started to bring Mister Banks things you find.

And there is a goat.

She is not an ordinary goat. Before this voyage, she had already sailed around the whole world once, on another Navy ship, giving milk to the officers all the way. Now she is going around a second time.

When she finally comes home, she will be given a silver collar, and a famous writer in London, Samuel Johnson, will write a little verse in Latin in her honour. She will spend the rest of her life in a meadow, retired.

For now, she lives on the deck, in a small pen, and eats whatever she can reach.

Chapter two. The captain.

The commander of the ship is a lieutenant named James Cook.

He is forty years old, which is old for a lieutenant. He did not come from a family of officers. He was the son of a farm labourer in Yorkshire, and he began, like you, in the coal ships of Whitby. He joined the Navy as an ordinary seaman, and rose by being very, very good at his work.

Above all, he is a surveyor. He spent years mapping the coasts of Canada, every bay and rock and depth, so carefully that his charts were still being used a hundred years later. He taught himself mathematics and astronomy at night, after his duties.

He is tall, quiet and plain-spoken. He is careful with his men's health, which, on a ship of this time, is unusual.

You do not speak to him often. But you trust him. On a ship this far from home, that matters more than anything.

Chapter three. The watch.

The night is divided into watches.

The crew is split into two groups, and they take turns. Four hours on deck. Four hours below. Day and night, for as long as the voyage lasts. Nobody sleeps a whole night through. You learn to fall asleep the moment you lie down, and to wake the moment you are called.

Time on the ship is kept with a sandglass that runs for half an hour. Each time the sand runs out, the glass is turned, and the ship's bell is struck. Once after the first half hour. Twice after the second. And so on, until eight bells, at the end of the watch... when the next watch comes up from below, rubbing their eyes, and you go down to your hammock.

Tonight you have the middle watch, from midnight until four in the morning. It is the quietest watch, and the hardest to stay awake in.

There is not much to do. One man is at the helm, steering by the compass, lit by a small lamp. One is in the bows, watching ahead. The officer of the watch walks slowly back and forth on the quarterdeck. The rest of you sit wherever you can find shelter from the wind, ready to be called if the sails need changing.

Every hour or two, someone heaves the log.

It is a flat piece of wood on a long line, knotted at regular spaces. The wood is thrown over the stern, and it stays nearly still in the water while the ship moves away from it. As the line runs out, a man counts how many knots slip through his fingers before a small sandglass runs out.

That number is the ship's speed. That is why, to this day, a ship's speed is measured in knots.

Tonight, it is five knots. A gentle wind. A good, steady night.

Chapter four. Below deck.

When your watch is over, you go below.

The space where the crew sleeps is dark, low and crowded. The ceiling is so low that a tall man cannot stand straight. Hammocks hang from the beams in rows, side by side, almost touching. The Navy allows each man a space about fourteen inches wide... the width of a man's shoulders. When the ship rolls, all the hammocks swing together, like one great creature breathing.

It smells of tar, of wet wool, of old wood, of the bilge far below, and of ninety men who have not bathed in a long time.

And yet, after four hours on deck in the wind, there is no better place in the world than a hammock.

Chapter five. The food.

Every day, at noon, a meal.

The men eat in small groups called messes... six or eight men around a board hung between the guns, sharing what the cook sends up.

It is the food of the Navy, the same on every ship. Biscuit... hard, dry bread, baked months or years ago, so hard it must be soaked before you can bite it. Salt beef and salt pork, kept in barrels of brine. Dried peas, boiled into a thick soup. Oatmeal porridge in the mornings. Cheese and butter, while they last. And to drink, beer at first, and when that runs out, a measure of spirits mixed with water.

On three days a week, there is no meat at all. The sailors call them banyan days.

There is one more thing that Captain Cook insists on.

In the hold, there are barrels of something new: pickled cabbage, from Germany. Sauerkraut. Thousands of pounds of it.

Long voyages kill sailors. Not storms, most of the time, and not battles. A sickness. It is called scurvy. Gums swell and bleed, old wounds open again, men grow weak and tired and then die. Nobody yet understands exactly what causes it. But some people believe that certain foods help to keep it away.

So the sauerkraut is served every day. At first, the men will not touch it. They have never eaten it, and sailors distrust anything new.

So Cook does something clever. He has it served at the officers' table, every day, and lets the men have it only if they want it.

Soon, the men are asking for it. If the gentlemen eat it, it must be good. Cook writes about it in his journal, with a small, dry satisfaction.

Wherever the ship stops, he also sends men ashore to gather fresh greens and fruit. And on this voyage, so far, nobody has died of scurvy.

Chapter six. The bottom of the world.

The ship left Plymouth in August, seventeen sixty-eight.

She sailed south, past Madeira, where she took on wine, across the Equator... where the men who had never crossed it before were dunked in the sea, by tradition, from the end of a yard... and on to Rio de Janeiro, on the coast of Brazil.

Then south again, down the long, empty coast of South America, into colder and colder water, until, in January, seventeen sixty-nine, they reached Tierra del Fuego... the land of fire... at the very bottom of the continent.

It was summer there, and still it snowed.

The gentlemen went ashore to collect plants, and were caught on the hills by a sudden storm of snow. Two of Mister Banks's servants did not come back. Everyone on board remembers that night.

And then they rounded Cape Horn... the southern tip of the Americas, the most feared stretch of water in the world, where the wind blows around the whole globe with nothing to stop it, and the waves grow to the height of houses.

For Endeavour, it was kinder than anyone expected. Strong winds, grey seas, cold days. But no disaster.

They came around into the Pacific Ocean... the largest thing on Earth. Bigger than all the land on the planet put together.

Chapter seven. The island.

For two and a half months, they sailed northwest across the Pacific.

And then, in April, there it was. An island. Green mountains rising from a blue sea, wreathed in cloud, with a white line of surf around the coral reefs, and beyond the reefs, still blue lagoons and long beaches lined with palms.

Tahiti.

A British ship had found the island only two years earlier. Some of the men on Endeavour had been on that ship, and they had told everyone else about it, over and over, all the way from England.

Canoes came out to meet them, filled with people, holding up green branches as a sign of peace.

The ship anchored in a wide bay, and stayed for three months.

The island was warm and green, full of breadfruit and coconuts, pigs and fish. The people who lived there were skilled, proud and curious. They were great sailors themselves, and had been for centuries, crossing hundreds of miles of open ocean in their double canoes, finding their way by the stars and the swells and the flight of birds.

For the men of Endeavour, after months of salt beef and biscuit, it was like arriving in a dream.

It was not always easy. Things went missing from the ship, and from the camp ashore... which, among the islanders, had a different meaning than it did among the British. There were misunderstandings, and once, while Cook was away from the camp, an islander who had snatched a musket was shot dead. Cook was furious. He made strict rules for how his men must behave, and tried hard to keep the peace. For the most part, he did.

Chapter eight. The black drop.

But why had the ship come all this way, to this one island?

Because of a planet.

Only twice in more than a century, the planet Venus passes directly between the Earth and the Sun. From the Earth, it looks like a small, perfectly round black dot, crossing slowly over the face of the Sun. It takes about six hours.

These crossings come in pairs, eight years apart. One had happened in seventeen sixty-one. The next would come on the third of June, seventeen sixty-nine. After that, there would not be another for more than a hundred years.

Many years earlier, the astronomer Edmond Halley had shown that if people in places far apart on the Earth all timed the crossing very carefully, the differences in their times could be used to work out the distance from the Earth to the Sun. It was one of the great unsolved measurements of the age.

So observers were sent all over the world... to Norway, to Hudson Bay, to California, to Russia. And Endeavour was sent to Tahiti.

On the point of land beside the bay, they built a small fort, with walls of earth and wooden posts, to protect the instruments. The sailors named it Fort Venus.

On the morning of the third of June, the sky was perfectly clear.

Cook, the astronomer Charles Green, and Daniel Solander watched through their telescopes, each timing the moment on his own. The air was hot... by midday, over forty degrees in the sun. You stood guard at the edge of the fort, keeping the curious away.

But when the moment came, something strange happened.

As the black dot of Venus touched the edge of the Sun, it did not make a clean, sharp contact. It seemed to stretch, like a drop of ink clinging to the edge of a glass, joined to the Sun's edge by a thin dark thread. For many seconds, no one could tell exactly when it had touched.

The three observers wrote down different times. They differed by many seconds.

It was not their fault. Observers all over the world saw the same thing. It came to be called the black drop. Because of it, the measurement of the distance to the Sun, from all that work, came out close... but not as close as Halley had hoped.

Still, it was close. Closer than anyone had known before.

Chapter nine. Tupaia.

When the ship left Tahiti in July, someone new came with it.

His name was Tupaia. He was a priest, and a navigator, and a man of great learning among his own people, from the island of Raiatea, near Tahiti. He had chosen to come.

He knew the sea. He could name dozens of islands across hundreds of miles of ocean, and say which direction they lay in and how many days' sailing it took to reach them. With Cook, he drew a chart of them... his knowledge set down on paper in the European way.

He guided the ship through the nearby islands. He spoke with the people of each island on the ship's behalf. He painted pictures, too... of the islands, of the people, of the Europeans trading with them.

The gentlemen call him Mister Banks's guest. To the sailors, he is something new. A man who knows more about the ocean than any of them, and who is crossing it with them, in the dark, into waters that even he has never seen.

Chapter ten. The empty ocean.

Then the second part of the voyage began. The secret part.

Before leaving England, Cook had been given sealed orders, to be opened only after Tahiti. In them, the Admiralty told him to sail south, in search of a great southern continent.

For centuries, mapmakers had drawn it at the bottom of the world: a vast land, filling the southern part of the globe, to balance the land in the north. Nobody had ever seen it. But many were sure it must be there. Some said it would be rich and warm, with great cities.

So the ship turned south, into the empty ocean.

And that is where you are tonight.

Week after week, the ship sails south and then west, through grey swell and long rolling waves. The air grows cold again. The men put back on the warm jackets they had packed away. Albatrosses follow the ship for days, gliding over the waves without a single beat of their wings.

There is no continent. Only sea. Day after day, only sea.

Cook marks their position on his chart each noon, and the empty space grows. The great southern continent, wherever it is, is not here.

On the quarterdeck, the officer of the watch looks at the sky.

Below, the gentlemen are asleep. The goat is asleep. In the great cabin, the captain may still be awake, writing his journal by candlelight, or bent over his charts.

In the bows, a man is watching the dark ahead. There is nothing there. There has been nothing for weeks.

But Cook has promised a gallon of rum to the first man who sees land. And the surgeon's boy... the youngest on the ship, twelve years old, named Nicholas Young... has been climbing the mast every day to look.

Chapter eleven. Land.

It comes on the sixth of October, in the early afternoon.

Nicholas Young, up the mast, sees it first. A line on the horizon, to the west, that does not move like a cloud.

Land.

Within hours, everyone can see it. High hills, green and folded, with smoke rising from them. It is not the great southern continent. It is a country that a Dutch sailor had found more than a century earlier, without ever stepping ashore. The Dutch called it New Zealand.

Cook names the headland Young Nick's Head, after the boy who saw it first. It still has that name today. And Nicholas Young gets his rum.

What came next is a longer story.

The first meetings with the people of that shore... the Māori, who had lived there for hundreds of years... went badly, and people died. That, too, is part of this voyage. Over the following months, with Tupaia speaking for them, the ship sailed all the way around both islands of New Zealand, and Cook drew a map so careful that its outline is close to the one we use today.

Then on, west, to a coast that no European had charted... and the long, dangerous passage inside a great reef. And home, at last, in the summer of seventeen seventy-one, nearly three years after the ship had set out.

But that is a story for another night.

Tonight, it is still September. The ship is still alone, rolling slowly south through the dark. The stars are bright. The wind is gentle. Five knots. The sand is running in the glass.

Somewhere ahead, beyond the edge of the dark, there is land. Nobody on board knows it yet.

A small wooden ship, alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

And in a little while, the sand will run out, and the glass will be turned, and the bell will be struck, eight times.

They had a word for it. Eight bells. The end of the watch.

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