Introduction: Marine Materialities, Oceanic Humanities, and Eighteenth-Century Seas

Late on the night of June 11th, 1770, Captain James Cook ran aground.HMS Endeavour was traveling north along the east coast of a continent Cook called New Holland when the ship "Struck and stuck fast" upon the "edge of a reef of Coral rocks." 1 The reef that damaged the Endeavour formed and still forms part of a vast system, known nowadays as the Great Barrier Reef, that ranges across some 133,000 square miles of the Coral Sea and is sometimes described as the world's largest living organism.Its life, and the many layers of sediment and skeletal remains that constitute that life's substructure, famously, but reversibly, altered the conditions of Cook's expedition.In the words of the Goorie and Koori poet Evelyn Araluen's recent rendition of the event, this left "The ship in violent cry, / The night in roar, the hull in tear on the Coral Sea." 2 Historians of the voyage have tended to interpret the crisis averted at what would come to be named "Endeavour Reef " as proof of Cook's extraordinary resourcefulness, and even as a kind of premonition of Britain's successful establishment, not long thereafter, of its Australian colonies.But the partial wreck of the Endeavour can be remembered in other ways.The "greatest grief " wrought by the collision, supposes Araluen in her prose poem "The Last Endeavour" (2021), "was this":