Cooktown Revisited
In March this year I was able to realise a long-held wish to visit Cooktown. As a lifelong yachtsman, I was very interested to see the harbour and beach where Cook had found refuge and repaired Endeavour.
I had a little over a day to look round the town, harbour and museum, but in that time I began to feel that a modern-day reflection on the episode would be interesting to undertake and might also be of interest to other members.
Endeavour ran onto the Great Barrier Reef in the evening of Monday 11th June 1770. After 24 hours of intense anxiety and effort, she was re-floated. Having fothered a small sail over the hole in her bottom, Cook set about finding an appropriate harbour in which to beach and repair the ship. He sailed north and west towards the coast, which was only about twelve nautical miles from the reef, preceded all the time by two boats that sounded ahead of the ship and also looked for a satisfactory harbour.
On Thursday 14th a harbour was sighted that had insufficient depth (possibly the estuary of the Annan river in today’s Walker Bay), but later that evening another more suitable harbour was reported about six miles further up the coast. However, before it could be reached, the wind strengthened so much that Cook had to anchor about a mile off it on an uncomfortable lee shore until Sunday 17th, when the wind moderated sufficiently to allow him to up anchor and sail into the river.
The Endeavour River estuary is found in the south-west of a shallow bay bounded to the north by Indian Head and to the south by Monkhouse Point. The mouth is entered by sailing south-west into a narrow channel, keeping close to the south-east bank, where within a mile is the site where Cook landed Endeavour’s stores and a little further on she was beached.
June is a good time to visit Cooktown. It is situated in the tropical far north of Queensland, at latitude 15° 30', so it has only the two classical tropical seasons, wet and dry. June is well into the dry season, the weather is very pleasant, and even Cook described one day as “serene”. The temperature is around 70°F and there are only about 2 inches of rainfall. Perhaps, more importantly, the average wind speed is only about 10 knots, coming mainly from the east and south-east. These are good conditions for outdoor ship repairs. Had Cook arrived a few months earlier or later he would have had to cope with a great deal more rain and higher temperatures.
Cook described the harbour as “very convenient for our purpose” and the more effusive Banks recorded in his journal that it was “beyond our most sanguine wishes”. So, aside from the climate, what are the features that made the harbour so well suited to the task of repairing the ship?
First, the channel was sufficiently deep to allow the ship to get far enough into the river to gain shelter from the prevailing wind for, once inside the harbour, the channel runs almost due south very close to the south-east bank. Here it is protected from the prevailing south-easterlies by Grassy Hill, which Cook described climbing on the 19th to get a “perfect view” of the river and its surroundings. Cook’s chart of the harbour, which he “sent some of the young gentlemen” to take on the 30th June, shows between three and four fathoms of water in the channel, once over the bar. The ship was also protected from the west by a sandbank in the middle of the river.
Secondly, the channel had sufficient water, within 20 feet of the eastern shore, to allow Endeavour to be brought in close and a stage built, down which the stores could be unloaded directly onto the foreshore. Unloading the ship using the ship’s boats across a beach would have been hard and time-consuming work. Further advantages included sufficient flat, dry land for the stores and for a small hospital for the sick, edible greens, a source of fresh water, and firewood. There was also a good supply of fish and turtle with which to extend their dwindling food supplies
Today the Webber Esplanade runs along the foreshore where the stores were landed. There is now a small wharf, close to the shore where Endeavour must have been on the 18th, and a few buildings. However, there appears today to be slightly less water in the channel, as Australian Navy Chart 270 shows only 2.8 to 4.4 metres. A dredged channel over the bar allows the small fishing fleet passage with less risk of grounding. The Esplanade leads to the Milbi Wall, which tells the area’s history from the perspective of the local Page 38 Cook’s Log, vol. 33, no. 3 (2010)
Article by Nigel Rankin from
'Cook's Log', which is the journal of the Captain Cook Society, Vol 33, no.3; July - Sep 2010
