When Captain Cook set off on his original voyage, all he had to record his epic was a quill pen ad parchment. More than 200 years later it was a different story, as Steve Pratt discovers

There wasn't a breath of wind. The sea was tranquil. And Captain Cook's Endeavour was going nowhere, becalmed in the middle of the wide open sea. The silence was broken only by the voice coming over the ship's emergency satellite telephone. What they heard left the crew in a state of shock as news came through of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre.

For director and cameraman Chris Terrill, the events of September 11 had an awful relevance to the project he was filming - BBC2's documentary series The Ship, which retraces one leg of Cook's voyage to Australia.

"Physically, sailing the ship was demanding. Emotionally, the trickiest moment was being becalmed for a week, totally on our own in the middle of the sea. Then to get this news and not know if the world was at war," recalls the Durham University graduate.

They returned to a very different world after six weeks at sea in the replica of HM Bark Endeavour, and Terrill sees a parallel with Cook's adventure.

"He was away from home for two years. During the voyage he got hold of English newspapers, themselves a year old, and found out there had been riots in the streets and people trying to get rid of George III, and that the American colonies were revolting," he says.

"It made us think that we'd only been away for six weeks and the entire world had changed. What must have it been like for whose who were on voyages for years at a time?"

The ship's company, which included several New Yorkers, held a memorial service on deck and decided to continue the voyage once the wind picked up.

Ironically, one of Terrill's aims was to view history through exploration and discovery rather than war and carnage. Associate producer Simon Baker says that Cook's explorations and the existence of a working replica of Endeavour made it an ideal story for investigating this country's maritime history.

"A lot has been written about Captain Cook but we wanted to put flesh on the bones of history and bring it alive in a way the audience can connect with, that you can't get from history books," he says.

"We could use our trip as a springboard to look at the achievements of the original voyage. We could sail the same waters, see the same landscapes, and come to fresh conclusions about Cook's journey."

Award-winning film-maker Terrill, who studied anthropology and geography at Durham, has an impressive list of TV credits, ranging from The Cruise and Soho Stories to HMS Brilliant, set aboard a Royal Navy warship during the Yugoslavian war, and Tito's Story, about an autistic Indian boy with a gift for writing poetry.

The 41 volunteer sailors, who joined the Endeavour's working crew, were recruited through advertisements in the press and on websites. The appeal was for people to join a voyage on an 18th century ship without mentioning the exotic destination. "I wanted adventurers not holidaymakers," says Terrill.

He's emphatic he didn't want to make a reality show like Frontier House, in which participants live like their ancestors. "There was never any intention for us to be 18th Century people," he says.

"I don't believe in that approach to history. You can't abandon your own mindset. I thought it would be better to make a virtue of the fact that we were 21st Century people interested in history.

"Very often, reality shows go for arguing, bitching and squabbling because that seems to make good television. For me, seeing a group of strangers coming together in the way we did is also very good television - and has a positive message as well.

"Cook's voyage was recorded by quill and parchment. I do the same with a modern camera."

Joining the volunteers was a team of British and Australian historians as well as scientific specialists, including a botanist, botanical artist and astronomer. They had to pull together with everyone else, taking their turn at tasks, whether it was scrubbing decks or taking the watch.

"They learn from books and documents, so essentially their approach to history is intellectual, with minds and brain power. Here, they had to approach with their heart, getting a much better sense of Cook and his crew. These world experts didn't change their minds. They just had a much better appreciation in a very subjective way."

The six-part series interweaves reconstructions of Cook's voyage with the adventures of the modern sailors coping with the physically demanding duties of crewing the ship, from tarring ropes to climbing the 130ft mast, and living in cramped conditions on a ship just 100ft in length.

"It's the story of two adventures, separated by time but united by geography," says Terrill. "We were in the same space that Cook was in. We sailed at the same time of year so we had the same winds. There was the sense that we were accompanied by ghosts.

"The challenge was getting from A to B sailing an 18th Century tall ship. What I got out of it, along with everyone else, was the satisfaction that we managed to do that.

"It was just an adventure but Cook's crew were out there years at a time. We had maps, they had nothing. The surprise was the extent of the achievement of our 18th Century counterparts. This was a bigger deal for those guys than going to the moon because they didn't know what to expect."

The modern-day sailors had a few shocks too. "Being a seaman in the 18th Century was no joke. There was an awful lot of work to do. The ship is a blotting paper of human labour," says Newcastle-born Jonathan Lamb, professor of humanities at Vanderbilt University in the US.

Adjusting to life on Endeavour took time. "You thought about going to romantic places and sitting in your cabin writing it up. The reality was different," he says.

"At the end of the meal on the first night we had to wash up on deck with sea water, and no one knew how to get the grease off the plates. At breakfast next morning, everything was coated with salt beef grease."

Simon Baker adds: "It was a steep learning curve. We had to throw away our preconceptions. For the first few days people were so unused to living in such circumstances with no privacy. All they had to store their belongings was half a tea chest.

"But I loved going up the rigging and unfurling the sail, and the sense of comradeship you have with people on your watch."

For Lamb, some of the best moments were stepping ashore, visiting places on Cook's tour. "One island had not changed at all since Cook's time. To be in a remote spot gave one a sensation of what Cook and his crew must have felt like when they landed for the first time," he says.

* The Ship begins on BBC2 on Tuesday at 9pm.

* The Ship: Retracing Cook's Endeavour Voyage, is published by BBC Books, and a CD of music from the series is released on BBC Music