Shipwreck may solve 250-year-old mystery
A SHIPWRECK lying off North America for more than two centuries may hold clues to one of Australia’s greatest mysteries.
IT’S is Australia’s most historic ship, but the mystery of where Captain James Cook’s Endeavour lies has been shrouded in secrecy for centuries.
As the 250th anniversary approaches of the famed explorer’s departure on the Endeavour from Plymouth on August 25, 1768 to claim this country for England, the mystery may about to be solved.
On a muddy sea floor off Rhode Island in North America, the famous ship is believed to be among the wrecks of 13 ships scuttled in Newport Harbour by the British military in 1778, The Australian reports.
A team of Australian divers will plunge into the murky waters of Newport Harbour next month to determine if the Endeavour is one of the thirteen.
They will be looking for particular characteristics of the Endeavour, originally a collier or coal-bearing ship and hand-picked by Cook for certain attributes.
At the time the Endeavour — sailing under another name — is believed to have been scuttled, Captain Cook was still alive.
But the much-lauded explorer was on another ship, Discovery, on his third and final Pacific expedition which ended with his murder in Hawaii in 1779.
The Endeavour had been sold following Cook’s triumphant 1768-1771 voyage to New Zealand and Australia’s east coast with botanist Sir Joseph Banks aboard, and it vanished from naval records.
Kathy Abbass of the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project has led investigations into the fortunes of the sturdy Endeavour, which was hand-picked by Cook and went on to serve as a troop carrier.
Bought by an English private owner and renamed the Lord Sandwich, the Endeavour carried British troops to the US in the American Revolutionary war.
The Lord Sandwich then became a prison ship in Newport Harbour.
When Abbass was researching the 13 ships scuttled in a blockade of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island to protect Newport from the French Fleet, she found a document which said the Lord Sandwich was Cook’s Endeavour.
“In the [British national] archives in Greenwich, I found a document that was a transport manager’s report which revealed where each of the ships was scuttled,” Abbass told The Australian.
“It said there were five to the northwest of Goat Island and that the Lord Sandwich was one of them.”
The Endeavour had been bought and renamed by shipowner John Wilkinson from Whitby, in northern England, the town in which the original ship was built as the collier called the Earl of Pembroke.
The ship was built from white oak, elm, pine in a flat-bottomed design which allowed her to sail in shallow waters and beached for cargo loading.
Divers including those from the Australian National Maritime Museum will have to look for the Endeavour’s distinguishing features, among which are its length.
The Endeavour has a broad, flat bow, a square stern, and a long boxlike body with a deep hold.
Although only 29.7m long, it is a larger vessel than those among which it was scuttled.
“There is an 80 per cent chance we’ve got her now,” Abbass said.
“The question is: which one is she, and how do you prove it?
“We know the Endeavour is more than 30 per cent bigger than the others … if we find all five and the other ships are much smaller, then it is likely that we’ve found her.”
Marine archaeologist James Hunter is among four divers flying to Newport in September in the hope of finally solving the mystery of Cook’s Endeavour.
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