Later Service
While Cook was feted for his successful voyage, Endeavour was largely forgotten. Within a week of her return to England, she was directed to Woolwich Dockyard for refitting as a naval transport. She then made two routine return voyages to the Falkland Islands, the first to deliver provisions and the second to bring home the British garrison. She was paid off in September 1774, and in March 1775 was sold by the Navy to shipping magnate J. Mather for £645.
Mather renamed the increasingly decrepit ship Lord Sandwich and returned her to sea for at least one commercial voyage to Archangel in Russia. In late 1775, he was asked by the Admiralty to provide one of his ships to transport soldiers to North America to help defeat the colonial militia during the American Revolution. Mather offered to return the ageing Lord Sandwich to military service, but her condition was so poor that she was declared unseaworthy. After extensive repairs the ship was finally accepted as a troop transport in February 1776 and embarked a contingent of Hessian soldiers bound for New York and Rhode Island. Upon delivery of her human cargo, Lord Sandwich sailed to Newport, which had been occupied by British forces in December 1776. There she was retained at anchor and intermittently used as a prison ship under the British flag.
Read more about this topic: HMS Endeavour
Famous quotes containing the word service:
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
Of one whose promised thoughts of other days
Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)
“We could not help being struck by the seeming, though innocent, indifference of Nature to these men’s necessities, while elsewhere she was equally serving others. Like a true benefactress, the secret of her service is unchangeableness. Thus is the busiest merchant, though within sight of his Lowell, put to pilgrim’s shifts, and soon comes to staff and scrip and scallop-shell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)