Word: endeavour
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...after which I suspended it and did not resume it till I was 24." This startling statement he leaves unexplained. No less tantalizing is his claim to inside knowledge of why British General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon and his besieged garrison were overwhelmed at Khartoum in 1885: "All the high endeavour . . . miscarried through the petty episode of Lord Charles Beresford's developing a boil on the bottom at the critical moment." At this critical moment in his anecdote, Jones drops the laconic footnote, "Private information," and rushes on in a mountain torrent of Welsh reminiscences...
...committee is working under the auspices of the American Foundation for the Preservation of the Christian Heritage and will endeavour to erect the city exactly as it was in the time of Christ. Eventually, replicas of Bethlehem and Nazareth will complete the 2,000 acre area which will be named Christialand...
...crew of Captain Cook. Under his nerveless, hypnotic brown eyes, the men heaved 50 tons of equipment overboard, worked the pumps until they dropped, and strained mightily at the capstan so that on the second high tide, the Endeavour was pulled free. Even then the ship would have sunk to the bottom if Cook had not been canny-and humble- enough to accept a timid midshipman's suggestion that he draw a dung-and-oakum-smeared sail under the ship and over a shattered spot in the bottom. Pressure clotted the sail to the hole, and the Endeavour...
...grocer's apprentice as a boy, he later manned coal barges, enlisted in the Royal Navy and worked his way up, most notably as a cartographer in Wolfe's campaign up the St. Lawrence against Quebec. Cook was 40 when he was chosen to skipper the Endeavour. By London's top scientists, the Fellows of the Royal Society and the Admiralty, he was handed a twofold mission: 1) he was to sail to Tahiti and observe the transit of Venus "over the disk of the sun"; 2) he was to search out "Terra Australis Incognita," a vast...
...Australia he made a more amusing error. Spotting a strange new hopping animal, he asked the aborigines about it, was answered with the word "Kanguroo" and never learned that the word meant "I don't understand you." After the near shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef, the Endeavour was badly in need of a drydock, and Cook put in at Jakarta (then Batavia). The two-month stay salvaged the ship but wrecked the crew. Seven men died of malaria and dysentery in the fetid port, another two dozen on shipboard as the Endeavour limped her solitary way around South...