A  Story Each Day

From June 11th  2018 follow Peter’s voyage on the Endeavour with a story posted every day telling of the same day 250 years ago.

• Join the world of Peter Kenny Hibbs, a small illiterate, illegitimate,  poor English country boy who sailed on the “Endeavour” with Captain Cook and his crew around the world,visiting the East Coast of Australia in 1770.

• But Peter was the only one who came back to these shores,  as an able seaman on the First Fleet, to stay for good, sailing the Hawkesbury river for the first time with Governor Phillip and crossing the oceans to the Cape of Good Hope and to Tahiti to pick up food for the starving young colony.

• After being shipwrecked on the “Sirius” on Norfolk Island, Peter helped build the ship the “Norfolk” while farming and raising a family with Mary Pardeaux, a convict girl from the second fleet.

• As master of the Norfolk, Peter sailed around Tasmania, confirming it was an island and having some coastal features named after him. Soon after he, Flinders and an indigenous man, Bongaree, went scouting the east coast of future Queensland.

• After half a century at sea and five decades as a farmer, fathering seven children and raising all kinds of livestock, Peter died at the Hawkesbury being 90 years old, having survived at least three shipwrecks, navy battles, storm, famine, diseases and living ten years longer than the last surviving Endeavour crew member.

• Peter Kenny Hibbs had seen the changes in Australia during its first 77 years of British encounters and settlement, from 1770 to 1847. He is a father of this nation, leaving many descendants and an amazing legacy.

• Follow every day the lives of Peter Hibbs, Captain James Cook, his crew, Joseph Banks and his party on HMB Endeavour, from the moment Peter went aboard the ship and joined in the preparation for the voyage on June 11th 1768 until their arrival back in England three years later on July 13, 1771.

• Find major facts and minor fiction about all the crew members and people they met in foreign lands. Not just the officers, the rich and those who survived.  Also enjoy the ever present goat

• See the world they shared as if observed by HMB, an imaginary albatross who carries the souls of drowned sailors, a kind of spirit who keeps an eye out for this little boy on a real, dangerous, epic voyage which changed the world forever.