Chapter One
Land of Hopes and Dreams
August 1768
The summer had been one of the hottest on record. The Friday-night air was
muggy, or "close" as Londoners liked to say, when James and Elizabeth Cook spent
their last night together before Endeavour's departure. Through the open
bedroom window of their cramped brick row house, the mingled aromas of
fermenting juniper from the gin distillery next door and the open sewers of Mile
End Road below wafted past the thin curtains. He was thirty-nine, stoic and six
foot plus, with shoulders squared from leaning hard into many a rope. She was
twenty-six, a pretty, extroverted former shop girl hours away from losing her
husband, lover, companion, confidant, and soul mate for three years — maybe
forever.
Seventy miles away, HM Bark Endeavour waited for Cook at the mouth of
the English Channel, in the port of Deal. The week before she had been eased
from the clutter of Deptford Yard and guided down the Thames by a river pilot.
In the morning Cook would travel to Deal by coach. There he would discharge the
pilot and begin a voyage around the world.
The bedroom ... read full excerpt from: Farther Than Any Man: The Rise and Fall of Captain James Cook ebook
