25th Aug 2018
Today marks a quarter of a millennium since HM Bark Endeavour left Plymouth to begin her voyage to the South Seas. Precisely 250 years ago (in an hour or two’s time) Joseph Banks set down the first of his many journal entries: 25 August 1768 After having waiting in this place ten days, the ship, and every thing belonging to me,...
more9th Aug 2018
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id="2" gal_title="Endeavour book"] There’s nothing like a book deadline to accelerate time. It hardly seems a moment since I set to work in the British Library in the summer of 2015; or I was paddling about Endeavour Cove in Queen Charlotte’s Sound a few months later; or standing on the foreshore of the...
more27th Jun 2018
Women in (Georgian) politics A hundred years after women won the right to vote in Britain, here's a related snippet from a few centuries earlier. In the mid-1760s the public were exasperated by their politicians. The Treaty of Paris (1763) that brought an end to the Seven Years' War had left Britain in a seemingly commanding...
more11th Jun 2018
A brief post about an old book. It is the best part of a decade since I was writing about the misdeeds of the Oddingley farmers in the summer of 1806. But recently that murderous tale was brought back to mind when I chanced upon the above picture of a half-timbered 'pigeon house'. This building had long since vanished by the time...
more2nd May 2018
I have been quiet on here for some time but I have not been idle. I am just putting the finishing touches to a new book, Endeavour: the Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World. It is going to be published by Chatto in the UK on 23 August and in the US shortly after at a date soon TBC. In Endeavour I have tried to do two...
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