Captain Cook's Merchant Ships: Freelove, Three Brothers, Mary, Friendship, Endeavour, Adventure, Resolution and Discovery

By Stephen Baines

While the story of Endeavour is widely known, Captain Cook sailed with eight ships, which began their lives as merchant vessels. This detailed illustrated history tells the story of these vessels and the people who sailed in them. In placing these ships and people in the personal, political, social, financial, scientific and religious contexts of their times, this book provides a comprehensive and readable account of the ‘long eighteenth century’. Using contemporary sources, this gripping narrative fills a gap in Cook history and attempts to catch something of the exciting, violent, gossipy but largely untaught and unknown period through which these vessels and their people sailed literally and figuratively between the old world and the new.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9780750965491

Reviews for Captain Cook's Merchant Ships

[drmaf-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An interesting if somewhat dry account of the working histories of the various merchant vessels that Cook sailed on in his nautical career. The title is somewhat misleading, since Cook himself features rarely in the story, it is more of a an account of the merchant shipping industry in and around Whitby in Yorkshire where Cook learnt to sail and where the ships he used in his voyages mostly originated. Famously, Cook's exploration vessels were all converted merchant vessels, and this book describes the origins and previous histories of all his ships. I found it fascinating, but less nautically interested readers may find it hard going. Nevertheless an original and very worthy addition to Cook scholarship.