14 Wooden explorers
Without the ships there would have been no European expeditions to the Pacific. The wooden vessels that carried the explorers both facilitated and limited European activities in the region. Changing technology facilitated navigation, the preservation of sailors’ health, and the increasing significance of science in European objectives, but the wooden bubbles that carried Europeans across the Pacific were fallible. Many voyages did not return, and those that did had often narrowly escaped disaster, highlighting the significance of their wooden life support systems. Ships might not qualify as explorers (they lack agency), but they were essential to the European exploration of the Pacific and mapping of the outline of the Australian continent.
Shifts in European ship building technology were essential in allowing Europeans to sail the Pacific. The European discovery of the Americas hinged on the development of ships able to cross the Atlantic and able to endure the difficult conditions of the seas around the southern tip of South America. While the Dutch presence to the west of the Australian continent did not require them to cross the Pacific, that presence also depended on ships able to brave the Atlantic and to cope with the seas around the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of the African continent.
The caravels that took to the Atlantic at the end of the medieval period were heirs to a range of European ship building traditions, and of navigational tools that had become common in Europe. They drew on sturdy engineering first developed for the ships that plied the North Sea, made use of rudders rather than steering oars, and included sails with a lateen rig that allowed them to sail at an angle to the wind. The compass and the astrolabe may have come to Europe by way of the Islamic world, but they had been widely adopted by European navigators by the time Europeans began to explore the Pacific.
As European shipbuilding and navigational technology improved, European naval interests pushed into the Pacific. James Cook’s Endeavour voyage occurred early in a new phase in European Pacific voyaging, as the relevant technologies became more reliable and voyages more frequent. But even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries voyages to the Pacific remained risky, and the technologies that supported them continued to limit what it was possible to dare and to achieve.
The Endeavour offers a compelling example of the ways in which vessels were central to European exploration. The ship was selected for its Pacific voyage because of its physical attributes: it was able to sail in comparatively shallow water and had room for stores, meaning the ship and could traverse waters of uncertain depth and could voyage independently of regular resupply. These attributes also meant the ship was comparatively slow and unwieldy, factors that limited its ability to travel where its captain wished it to go. Ultimately, the Endeavour could only s