A Maritime Endeavour

Sydney's National Maritime Museum is usually worth a look. It has its permanent stuff, but also special little exhibitions that can be quite interesting. Then it has its collection of floating exhibits, which I'd somehow never got round to exploring.

The special little exhibition the other day was 'East of India', about trade links between colonial India and Australia. There was a lot of it, because the early Australian colonies were six months away from Britain, but only six weeks from India. So where was the obvious place to supply them from, especially after the near starvation of the early years?

As for the floating exhibits, how could one go past The Endeavour, or more accurately the Endeavour replica. As replicas go, it's the most faithfully replicated such ship around, according to the volunteer guide. The timbers are Australian rather than British, but the size, shape, colour schemes: everything is spot on, I was told, because the original plans had still been available to work from.

You have to mind your head as you walk around the rather small vessel, the original of which had been converted from a coal carrier with a crew of 12 into a world-circling expeditioner with nearly 100 on board. They'd had to put in an extra deck between the top and bottom ones to house the extra people, and for a fairly large section you actually have to bend double to navigate it. Most of the crew in those days were probably quite short, but Captain Cook, and expedition sponsor and naturalist Joseph Banks were extremely tall men, even by today's standards. If you've seen the movie 'Being John Malkovich', you'll remember the scenes in the low-ceilinged floor 7½. It's worse than that on the Endeavour.

You get to see the whole ship, and get a fabulous feel for what it might have been like on that first three year voyage. Banks had the best living quarters, and these days, when the ship's in port anyway, it's all decked out with his botanical samples.