Vue de la Riviere D’Endeavour sur la Cote de la Nouvelle Hollande ou le Vaisseau sur mis a la bande.

Rare engraving from the French edition of the accounts of Cook’s first voyage. published (1774) the year after the English edition (1773).

The title in the English version was:

[A view of Endeavour River, on the coast of New Holland, where the ship was laid on shore in order to repair the damage which she received on the rock.]

The first engraved view of the Australian east coast from the official accounts of Cook’s first voyage and one of only a handful of C18th images of the Endeavour. The Endeavour a converted collier, was chosen by Cook because of it’s flat-bottomed design which allowed it to sail in shallow waters and to be beached for loading and unloading. Here it is shown careened for repairs near present day Cooktown. On Cook’s seminal chart of the east coast he gives the name, The Labyrinth,  to the maze of reefs now named the Great Barrier Reef.

Cook’s own account of the Endeavour striking the reef 10 June 1770;

‘before ten, we had twenty and one twenty fathom, and this depth continuing, the gentlemen left the deck in great tranquillity, and went to bed; but a few minutes before eleven, the water fhallowed at once from twenty to feventeen fathom, and before the lead could be caft again, the fhip ftruck, and remained immoveable, except by the heaving of the furge, that beat her against the craggs of the rock upon which she lay.’. Cook Journal I, 3,545-

References Beddie 659, p.124, BOCC 650 EOA Pg 38-50 ill pg 47 (English edition),  AAOF Plate 19 (English edition), 

Reference; Beddie 660, p.124

From Hawkesworth, Relation des Voyages Entrepris par ordre de Sa Majeste Britannique Actuallement Regnante:…..