Joseph Shank joined Adventure on 28 November, 1771, at Deptford as First Lieutenant. He was discharged at the Cape of Good Hope on 19 November, 1772.
Adventure, commanded by Tobias Furneaux, was Cook’s companion vessel on the Second Voyage. Shank was relatively old for such a voyage, being aged about 42 when the ships set sail in 1772. Things soon went wrong for him. During the voyage south in the Atlantic, Shank became ill, forcing him to leave the voyage. Cook sent him home from Cape Town in November 1772.
Shank’s involvement with Cook was very limited. However, there are several interesting things associated with Shank and his family worth investigating.
Shank was born about 1730, the son of Joseph and Mary Shank. Joseph Shank senior was a merchant seaman with his own vessel. The younger Joseph Shank followed his father to sea, and joined the Royal Navy. In Joseph junior’s will, written in 1757, he described himself as a mate on board His Majesty’s Ship Buckingham. He became a lieutenant on 29 January, 1759. Little else is known about him until he was chosen to sail in Adventure.
Joseph and Mary Shank had at least one other child, Robert, who became a notary public based at the Royal Exchange, London. Robert married Jane Honychurch in 1753, and they had two children. Mary Shank died about 1752, leaving Joseph (Captain Shank as he was known), a widower. The captain became friendly with a married woman, and they began living together at Shank’s house in Worcester Street, Wapping, between Old Gravel Lane and Broad Street, and next door to the “Shepherd and Shepherdess” public house. What was strange about this arrangement was that Daniel Looney, another seafarer and the husband of the woman, lived with them in the same house when not at sea. This woman’s name was never stated, but it may have been Elizabeth, as a Daniel Looney married Elizabeth Callow on the Isle of Man in 1745.
Robert Shank was very critical of the Looneys, describing them as very common. He tried to persuade his father Joseph to leave them. He failed in doing so, and things reached a head on 7 November, 1761, when an argument occurred in the Worcester Street house, and Daniel Looney shot Joseph Shank, killing him. Looney was arrested, and tried at the Old Bailey. After being found guilty, he was hung on 9 December, 1761. Robert Shank testified at the trial, mentioning that after being told that his father had been shot, he had gone to see his brother-in-law, William Honychurch. In Robert’s testimony at the trial, he stated that William lived near the Bell Dock in Wapping, so he would have been a neighbour of Elizabeth Batts and her family who were living at the Bell Alehouse.
We do not know when William Honychurch and his wife Elizabeth moved to live in Mile End, but his will dated 1787 described him as a gentleman of Mile End. Living in Mile End they would have been neighbours of James and Elizabeth Cook (née Batts) when they lived at Assembly Row. It was Elizabeth Honychurch, who wrote to Frances McAllister (née Wardale) in America telling her about Elizabeth Cook’s move from Mile End to Clapham. Elizabeth Honychurch died in 1795, and was buried with several other members of the Shank-Honychurch family at St. Margaret’s Church at Lee, just south of Greenwich.
Lieutenant Joseph Shank died in 1782. It is not known where he died or where he was buried. His brother, Robert Shank, was named executor and sole beneficiary in Joseph’s will. Nobody else was mentioned in the will.
John Robson
Originally published in Cook's Log, page 5, volume 47, number 2 (2024).