Endeavour in dry dock in 2002 - built like a barrel, to carry cargo, she also rolls like a barrel, most of the time; she is a very valiant vessel in rough seas and bad conditions but horribly uncomfortable for anyone with any tendency to suffer sea-sickness, that is - most normal people.
Endeavour is hard work. She always will be. There were a lot of improvements in the design, construction and operation of sailing ships in the 150 or more years after the Earl of Pembroke was built as a collier in Whitby, in 1764, and sold to the Admiralty and re-built and re-named Endeavour in for Captain Cook to navigate her to Tahiti and then to go on and venture into unknown lands and seek scientific information and, if possible, new colonies, rich new territories, to add to the British Empire.
The later ships had smaller sails and eventually a lot less need for manpower. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were steam-driven winches and mechanical devices which could help haul up the halyards and tension up the sheets. The big fast nineteenth century tea clippers like the celebrated Cutty Sark carried relatively small crews.
Working and living on Endeavour doesn't reflect any of these improvements, which is fascinating and something of a challenge if you are interested in how old ships worked and what the problems of managing them might have been.
N.A.M. Rodger's book, 'The Wooden World', is a delight to read and will tell you more about the eighteenth century British navy than you can possibly imagine or remember. It is the rock upon which most studies of that period are built.
If you read Rodger's book and go sailing on Endeavour (even for a few days) you will start to understand what Captain Cook and Nelson were up against and how they worked, lived and died.
Endeavour, with all sails set, in very light airs, somewhere in the Torres Strait in 2001.
On Endeavour, to set just one of the seven principal square sails on board takes about 20 people, which is more than one full watch by the time the lookouts have been posted, the wheel manned and the day's temporary galley assistant has gone to start his or her labours.
It takes more than forty minutes.
To set all the sails takes most of the ship's company much of a day.
Even furling one of the staysails can be hideously difficult when the ship is pitching and rolling.
There are ten staysails, spritsails and jibs to deal with in all. As we struggled with the main mast staysail, the most awkward sail on the ship, Bernard and I used to speculate repeatedly on what extremely wicked sins we must have committed in our previous lives to be made to suffer so, in penance!
The biggest square sails on Endeavour, the maincourse and forecourse, have more than a dozen lines attached, all of which need tending, hauling or belaying:
port and starboard sheets,
port and starboard tacks
port and starboard clews, bunts and reefs
port and starboard bowlines
port and starboard braces
port and starboard lifts
The main, foremast and mizzen mast topsails have halyards as well, to lift the topsail yards, which is the heaviest possible work on the ship. But the topsails do not have tacks, in opposition to their sheets.
Learning the ropes is one of the first things that voyage crew have to do when they come on board Endeavour. It's a real challenge. There are about 180 of them.
To my surprise (because I have a good memory for facts and documents and anything in writing) I found it very difficult to learn the ropes.
On the other hand, I always found it fairly easy to get to the right rope when we were actually working - it was the quizzes and line races on board which confused me. I could never put the names and positions of the lines satisfactorily together in my head though I could normally remember what they did and which way I had to run to reach them.
An unexpected difficulty and an odd confusion; but an additional insight into myself and my own weaknesses which, of course, is sometimes what the Endeavour experience is about - finding out about yourself and what you can do.
To raise the anchor by traditional methods, as we did on the BBC voyage in 2001, involved linking the anchor cable to a messenger cable attached to the capstan and recruiting twenty people or more to trudge round the capstan for two or more hours while10 or 15 other people attached the messenger cable, temporarily and repeatedly, to the anchor cable with the nipping lines, short pieces of rope cut and prepared just for that purpose.
The 'nippers' (the ship's boys) ran the nipping lines back and forth from the capstan back to the bows to re-cycle them.
Virtually the whole ship's company had to be involved apart from Caroline, the cook, and her assistant and the ship's officers.
It was an introduction to another age, an age when manpower was very cheap indeed, when machines built of wood and powered only by canvas, British naval vessels, could carry vast quantities of state-of-the-art firepower half way round the globe, sometimes safely, sometimes reliably, sometimes they got back home, and they could - because of their firepower, discipline and organization- take possession of great tracts of land in the Southern oceans, New Zealand and Australia, to name but two substantial tracts, with or without the agreement of the inhabitants.
I was very surprised that the BBC tv series "The Ship" did not show and discuss more of the extraordinary skills that the crew of the Endeavour replica, and the Captain of the Endeavour replica can deploy.
I was very impressed with all of them - as people and as craftsmen and women. They were remarkable.
The Captain when I sailed with Endeavour, Chris Blake, is a great man. He deserves his O.B.E.
The weird skills he deployed to motivate his (fast-changing) professional crews, to motivate and discipline his (paying) voyage crews as well, to keep the boat and its rigging in order - there are very few people in the world who could have kept all that together.
After that, he still had to sail the boat and to ensure it went in roughly the right direction, which he also did with great distinction and expertise.
The Captain losing his balance. It took me months to get this shot. It didn't happen often.
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