19th Sep 2018
Today's news is filled with the latest development in the long-running search for Endeavour in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island. It's big news and my congratulations to everyone who's been working on the project for so long. Before the announcement last week I was approached by several journalists for comment. Beneath, for...
more25th 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...
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