Endeavour Galleries, National Maritime Museum, London 

Visitors definitely see beautiful displays and famous tales in the Endeavour Galleries, but cleverly integrated co-curation and deft interpretation ensure audiences don’t have to dig too deep to gain a different side to stories they know. 

The galleries’ footprint is not so vast that you can’t manage all four in a single visit. The designer Casson Mann has created sufficiently distinct experiences 
to encourage exploration, which should avoid museum fatigue.  

Pacific Encounters forgoes the easy marketing of a Captain Cook-centred narrative. From the start we are told that Pacific voyagers “read the stars, the wildlife and the swell of the sea” for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. 
This curatorial dunking in the Pacific is reinforced by two adjacent objects: a Marshall Islands stick chart (a navigator’s map of criss-crossed slender wooden sticks and shells) and a gigantic 17th-century floor globe – Pacific and European expertise side by side. 

The luminous paintings of the young naval artist William Hodges show the landscapes reached on James Cook’s 18th-century voyages through English eyes. But equally present are the lost stories: a portrait of Mai, the first Pacific Islander to visit Britain, is shown face to face with Cook. A Tahitian navigator called Tupaia was crucial to Cook’s successes, but no portrait of Tupaia exists so the museum commissioned one.  

Captain Cook Was a Pirate, an arresting artwork by artists from Savage K’lub – a multi-disciplinary collective – is composed of adornments made from materials introduced to the region by the British. A modern Fijian canoe fills a vast expanse of the gallery and exemplifies a resurgence of traditional crafts, navigation and performance, revealed here by Pacific makers through art, film and images. 

Powerful presentation 

The museum’s original Lutyens-designed 1930s marble rotunda creates an elegant bridge into Sea Things with its riot of eye-catching colour and playful digital participation. More than 600 objects invite you to “share stories and find your connection with the sea”.  

There is visual buzz aplenty, but this room wants you to interact, too, and uses every bell, whistle, hands-on and digital tool in a museum’s kitbag. “Do you speak like a sailor” is a great “lift the flap” tour of well-known sea-based sayings. I note that “Flake out”, “All sewn up” and “Chock a block” have particularly good origins. 

Most powerful is the installation by the sculptor Eve Shepherd who worked with young people to develop bronze busts representing characters that history leaves out. Sound and light projections create a conversation with a circle of elderly marble generals and her new figures, including a genderless Person of the Sea.  


This light-touch, dynamic presentation demonstrates how museums can commemorate anyone they choose. Polar Worlds moves us into an ice cave whose white walls hold canvases depicting vast frozen regions of danger and penguins. 

 The exploration stories include Captain Robert Scott’s ill-fated 1911 south pole expedition, told through surviving objects that include a patched animal-fur sleeping bag. The contrast between Scott’s pearl and diamond tie pin, worn at fundraising dinners before he left, and the snow boots recovered after his death is painful. 

Digitised explorer diaries are masterpieces of British understatement. Examples include “Mr Ford fell over a precipice and broke his leg in two places. Fetched him home in a rather frozen state” and “No previous explorers have been within 200 miles of this forsaken spot. I don’t blame them.”  

The gallery also shows the reality of life at the poles today. The lack of Inuit diaspora  communities made co-curation challenging, but local artists and voices are present, including Sammy Kogvik, the Inuit hunter who found the wreck of Sir John Franklin’s HMS Terror in 2016. 

Vivid poetry from local primary schools creates an imaginative trail throughout the space, and debates on who owns the Antarctic are generated in a central interactive, where actors on screens encourage voting.  
I’m pleased to say that the galleries convey that climate change is not up for debate. 

Tudor and Stuart Seafarers is, at first glance, the most traditional of the galleries. Showing Britain’s emergence as a maritime power with the Spanish Armada, Anglo-Dutch wars and exploration of the Americas, it is a “highlights” precursor to the nearby Atlantic gallery.  

Velvet backdrops create a sense of the wealth extracted from these ventures, as do large scented jars of spices and tobacco. A case of ship models creates a glowing atmosphere that spills out across the room, as its spot-lit gold-leaf backing reflects onto the gilt frames of portraits. 

Well-placed screens are packed with images and information, from 16th-century maps of India and Iceland to the diary of the 17th-century sailor Edward Barlow, whose extraordinary illustrations of his global travels flicker into animated life as you scroll. 

This celebration of British maritime history is undercut with the word “exploitation” in the introduction. Co-curation and indigenous voices are embedded here, too: the historians from the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe tell their devastating story of early encounters and an animated 1562 transatlantic voyage of the slave trader John Hawkins ends with blood and gold pouring onto a map of Europe. 

The brilliance of these new galleries makes it feel almost churlish to note that they lack a bit of punch. Although I felt informed and engaged by my visit, I also wanted to feel more uncomfortable about the global impact of empire. The careful pacing of these galleries doesn’t deliver this yet. 

But it is clear that there is institutional ambition to continue the work and that the British narrative cut through with global voices can offer inspiration to museums across the world. 

 
 

Emma Shepley is a freelance curator