While looking for Elizabeth Cook's will which is supposed to be downloadable from the State Library's website, I came across an article about the embroidered waistcoat on page 7 of their magazine, SL of August 2009.

Annette found a link that shows how this waistcoat front could be made up. It also demonstrates how plain Cpt Cook's waistcoat was to be.

http://www.vintagetextile.com/new_page_116.htm

Our guide of the Mitchell Library is a self confessed "Cook tragic." He invited us to join him at a meeting of the Captain Cook Society that will meet at the library Thursday, August 19, 2010 for a discussion about the eight days the Endeavor spent in Botany Bay.

Mitchell Library visit

We were given the delux, 30 minute tour of the library before our meeting with the curator. Very interesting and well worthwhile a more leisurely repeat tour, one day.

We were shown an embroidery of "the world" done by Janet Berry. It is similar to the one, purportedly by Elizabeth Cook at the Maritime Museum. But is done on printed silk satin. So the embroidery is covering some lines and the floral wreath outside the map. It, like the "E. Cook" had several tracts and tracks across the oceans by various explorers.










The waistcoat is done by a different hand than the embroidery at the Maritime Museum. Our opinion is that a professional embroiderer did it. The embroidery is complete. The cloth just needs to be made up. For the time it is a discrete waistcoat, suitable for a middle aged sailor without aristrocratic pretensions.

The stain is ink, they think. They believe that it was spilled on the cloth sometime after it came into their collection.




The tapa cloth is fine, but not as fine as silk satin so it must have been a challenge for the embroiderer to achieve such beautifully fine, even stitches. The cloth is beige and there is an underlayer of linen to support the embroidery. We couldn't tell if it was tambour work because the stitches were so even and tiny.