Eileen (volunteer) got in touch with Christopher Shaw; renowned bookbinder and restoration expert who features on the BBC show The Repair Shop to see whether he would be interested in restoring the book. The team from ‘The Repair Shop on the Road’ decided to feature the book on their programme! Dom Chinea and his filming team arrived on June 7th 2025; spent the day talking to Rob Williams (Archivist) at Whitby Museum and Dennis Buck (Cook Curator) about the book and what their hopes were for the project.
On July 28th they returned with the book for ‘The Big Reveal’ and the programme aired in March 2026.
The Big Reveal
Click this link to catch up with the episode on BBCiPlayer.
Now that the repairs are complete, we can continue our research and try to learn more about this copy, and to continue to gather evidence as to who might have written it.
So what is this book?
The intriguing story of ‘A Journal of a Voyage Round the World in his Majesty’s Ship Endeavour’
The Captain Cook curator at Whitby Museum, Dennis Buck, together with library volunteer Eileen Shone, realised that we held a very special book in our library. Of the many accounts of the first voyage of Captain James Cook to the South Pacific, this one was never meant to exist. The ship Endeavour set out in 1768 on a scientific mission (albeit with a secret agenda around strategic land acquisition), returning to England in 1771. An official account of the voyage was to be written, based on the journals of senior people on board – Cook himself, and naturalist Joseph Banks, and including the journals of other commanding officers exploring the area – Byron, Wallis and Carteret. It took the collator and author, John Hawkesworth a couple of years to finish and publish the official account, in June 1773.
Before the restoration project
All crew members on these voyages were instructed to hand any journals of their own to the Admiralty after the ship docked. However, someone did not! In 1771 a mere two months after the ship made land, ‘A Journal of a Voyage Round the World’ was published by De Hondt and Becket in London. The author’s name is never mentioned in the book, for obvious reasons! This was a punishable work! The first printing contained a page opposite the title page dedicating the work to ‘The Right Honourable Lords of the Admiralty, and to Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander’. These Honourable Lords and gentlemen immediately threatened legal action against the publishers. To be on the safe side, the Admiralty also had a newspaper article published which read:
“Admiralty-Office, Sept. 17. 1771. To prevent the public being imposed upon by any spurious account which may be published of the late voyage of his Majesty’s bark the Endeavour, my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty are pleased to give notice, that an authentic account of that voyage will be published as soon as the materials can be properly ranged, and the necessary maps and drawings can be carefully engraved.”
PH. STEPHENS.
Before the restoration project
The publisher, Thomas Becket, then revised the book nine days later to include a rebuttal to that announcement, highlighting the word ‘spurious’ and claiming to be innocent of the charge. Essentially he’s stating that he’s going to carry on printing the book anyway! The public were desperate to hear about the voyage, which had sailed in 1768 and been away for three years. So this surreptitious publication would have been hugely anticipated and a guaranteed moneyspinner for Becket and De Hondt, and presumably for the anonymous author.
TO THE
Right Honourable the LORDS of the ADMIRALTY,
AND TO
Mr. BANKS and Dr. SOLANDER.
MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN,
“NO consideration whatever could have induced me to publish THIS JOURNAL but a consciousness of its being properly authenticated, both from the veracity of the gentleman from whom I had it, and in the opinion of my best literary friends. As your Lordships have been pleased, by advertisements in the papers, to caution the public not to be imposed upon by any SPURIOUS account, I hope I shall in this particular stand exempted from such a charge. I did not mean to interfere with the interest of any one concerned in the voyage, but took THIS JOURNAL upon the judgment of my friends, and with that right which is in common with my brethren. I was the more induced to it from the agreeable manner in which it is written, as well as by the honourable mention that is made of those ingenious gentlemen, Mr. Banks and Dr. Solander: and I am convinced that it is the production of a gentleman and a scholar, who made the voyage. I therefore am persuaded that this publication will be an acquisition to the public, and a credit to,”
My LORDS and GENTLEMEN,
Strand, Sept. 28, 1771.
Your most obedient, humble servant,
THOMAS BECKET.
Is it any good?
For the public at the time, this probably didn’t matter. Any information about this greatly anticipated voyage of discovery would have been hungrily read. Reviews from the great and good were scathing. After reading the book, a naval correspondent of Banks, Captain Bentinck, said of it:
“As to Mr Becket and his Catch-Penny, the subject is so interesting that there is no putting the book down, at the same time that the inaccuracy with which it is wrote makes it most tiresome and indeed the most provoking reading I ever met with.”
We suspect that our anonymous author was a midshipman on the voyage, a junior or trainee officer from a professional family, whose duties would have involved him with both the senior officers and the crew. The author is clearly literate, well-spoken and has knowledge of navigation and the handling of a ship. Yet he also rather revels in the mischief that the crew and officers got up to. As such it’s a very different view of life on board to the later, official accounts, with their focus on the science, the flora and fauna, and ultimately on future colonisation.
Two examples of this different perspective really stand out. On page 90 there is an account of some sailors found stealing potatoes from the natives. When brought before the Captain one of them cheekily points out that they were only doing what the Captain and his officers had already been doing, for which insolence three of the sailors are punished for several days! This paragraph appears in our printing of the book, but was removed in later editions.
The second example, on page 57, describes the Transit of Venus – the scientific experiment coordinating precise astronomical measurements taking place from several locations across the globe, and the main reason for the voyage at the outset – in a single sentence. The rest of that paragraph talk about a dispute between two officers which results in a duel! The author was clearly not invited to take part in the science, but it reads very much like he was fine with that!
He writes about the fishing techniques of the indigenous peoples, their customs, their language, what they grew and ate, and an inordinate amount about what the native women were wearing. On balance, yes, it is an interesting read, largely because it tells a part of the story which is studiously ignored by the official publications, namely what fun it was! The narrative seems to end very abruptly, with a very poignant last line:
“(We) ‘arrived in the Downs on the 15th of July, after nearly three years absence, and with the loss of near half our company.”
The Whitby Lit and Phil copy
Our task now is to try to understand when, on the timeline of various printings and reprintings, our copy was produced. Different copies around the world (many in Australia and New Zealand) have some subtle, and not so subtle, variations. Our copy has a misprinted page number – page 130 is incorrectly labelled as page 124 which does not appear in other copies. We have a three page glossary of words from the Otahitee language at the back, other versions have it at the front. Our copy does not have the controversial dedication to the Admiralty, nor Becket’s retort to the rebuttal for that. Our copy has the paragraph about Cook stealing potatoes, missing in other copies. We would like to see how the printing changed over time and to place our copy correctly on that line.
Who might be the author?
The primary candidate is currently one James Magra (later Matra) who was an American, and a midshipman on that famous voyage. He was a close friend of botanist Joseph Banks, which goes some way to explaining the similarities between this account and Banks’ own, including the Otahitee glossary. The Americans started to fight for independence from British rule around the time of this voyage (The Boston Tea Party happened in 1773) and by 1883 Magra became a key evangelist campaigning for the foundation of a British colony at Botany Bay in Australia, partly to act as a home for Americans who had been loyal to the King in those days of revolution. In 1775 he petitioned the King to have his name reverted to his birth name of Matra, in order to claim an inheritance. No doubt this, and the earnings from the journal, would have been very useful in these political manoeuvres. He was clearly a resourceful, well-spoken and literate man, and a potential author for our journal. To this day there is a ‘Matraville’ and a ‘Magra Islet’ in Southern Australia. All we know about his time on board the Endeavour is that Cook described him as ‘one of those gentlemen, frequently found on board the King’s Ships, that can very well be spared, or to speake more planer good for nothing’…
Find the next blog post about the Cook journal by clicking here.
By Rob Williams (Archivist)
The book currently features in the Fantastic Archives and where to find them exhibition at Whitby Museum. This exhibition will run until when the museum closes on November 29th and was made possible with a National Lottery Heritage Fund project.
