Endeavour

This is a wonderful book, a perfect pleasure to read, and an expression itself of great skill.

Alan Atkinson, Australian Book Review

Moore’s richly detailed book is an engrossing love letter to a word, an attitude and a ship: it is an endeavour that honours Endeavour, without denying the death and destruction that followed in her wake.

Ruth Scurr, The Guardian

Moore considers the existence and meaning of Endeavour from every possible angle, meditating on the significance of the name as well as examining the materials — Eng­lish oak, mostly — from which it was made. Indeed, the first chapter begins with a vivid description of the life cycle of an acorn. Moore’s brilliant book is proof of his contention that there is something special about this ship. Moore writes: “There is an ­enduring magic about ­Endeavour’s story that continues to propel people into ambitious projects. It is almost as if the force of the untethered, freewheeling, Georgian society to which the ship belonged is so powerful that it is capable of reaching generations, transferring, and ­making more endeavours of new people in ­different times or places.”

Simon Caterson, The Australian

Fascinating and richly detailed ... Peter Moore has brought us an acute insight into the ship that carried some of the most successful explorers across the world. A fine book that’s definitely worth exploring.

Michael Palin

Peter Moore’s elegant and entertaining new book offers us a fascinating biography of the Endeavour, using it as a window onto the broader world of the mid-18th-century English Enlightenment. Endeavour is a deeply satisfying book. It represents an intelligent, diverse, fresh and challenging approach to writing the history of exploration. Paying homage to the remarkable lives of a single vessel, Peter Moore also gives the Endeavour a new lease of life long after its sinking.

Robert Mayhew, Literary Review

What a truly remarkable book this is. Those who think they know the story of Captain Cook and the Endeavour are in for an exhilarating shock. This is a brilliant biography of an idea as well as a ship. By focusing on the Endeavour from the acorn to the grave, as well on the kaleidoscope of people and culture connected with her, Peter Moore has brought us a book that is entirely fresh and original. In lucid prose, he shows how this stalwart, unpretentious, little coal bark came to embody the Age of Exploration, of Enlightenment, of Empire, and of Revolution. Among other surprises, we learn of the layered significance of the ship’s naming and of the wild populist riots that influenced it, of the crucial navigational genius and political tact of Cook’s Polynesian guest, Tupaia, and of how the ship, now renamed, featured heroically in British attempts to defeat the rebellious American colonists and in twentieth-century American attempts to explore outer space.

Iain McCalman, author of Darwin’s Armada and The Reef-A Passionate History.

Endeavour is a dazzling combination of science and adventure, lyrically evocative descriptions of lush tropical landscapes and salt-stung seascapes, and a portrait of an age of “magnificent geniality”. Take the goat that sailed with Cook, having already been once around the world with Samuel Wallis aboard the Dolphin. The ship was a jolly jack-tar, and the goat “never went dry during the whole voyage”. So a grateful nation rewarded it “by placing her in good English pasture for the rest of her life”, while Dr Johnson wrote a lavish encomium to her — in Latin, obviously. Endeavour is an absolute joy from start to finish, and surely my history book of the year.

Christopher Hart, The Times (UK)

Pays brilliant tribute to what was arguably the most significant ship in the history of British exploration.

Nick Rennison, Daily Mail

Moore’s approach is lavishly digressive… A rollicking yarn.

Lewis Jones, Sunday Telegraph

Endeavour was more than merely the first English vessel to reach New Zealand and Australia's east coast. She was also a floating laboratory, a vast seed-bank and an international observatory...the spirit of Enlightenment under sail.

The Economist

Endeavour is an extraordinary book about an unlikely ship that defined an age... Like the age it recounts, it is a book of energy, creativity and self-confidence

Gerard DeGroot, The Times (UK)

[An] extraordinary story… [and] a fascinating period of history

Chris Burns, Yorkshire Post

Moore has found himself the perfect symbols and focus for that ‘mini epoch’ of push, ambition and… ‘endeavour’ that coincided with the ship’s chequered 14-year existence

David Crane, Spectator