Cook rediscovered: fishing captain’s lost Endeavour from maritime graveyard
‘Under there lies the remains of a large ship with five cannons. That ship is the frontrunner to be the Endeavour.’
Kathy Abbass looks across Newport Harbour and points to a narrow strip of water between two red buoys that promises to surrender a lost jewel in Australia’s history.
“Under there lies the remains of a large ship with five cannons,” she says. “That ship is the frontrunner to be Captain Cook’s Endeavour.”
COOK E-BOOK: Read the full story of Cook and the Endeavour
On Monday, this marine archaeologist will instruct a team of divers to plunge into the deep to examine the bones of this and four other ghostly vessels that have kept their secrets since they were scuttled here by the British 239 years ago. It is the most important mission yet in the quest to discover the final resting place of the nation’s most historic ship.
“We are finally closing in on the Endeavour,” Abbass says. “We still need final proof, but we are closing in.”
The resting place of the stout-hearted Endeavour, which bore James Cook, botanist Joseph Banks and their hardy crew up the east coast of Australia and into history, has been an enduring maritime mystery. For much of the past 25 years, Abbass, backed by the Australian National Maritime Museum, has spearheaded a remarkable journey of discovery in Newport under the same waters that once carried Australia II to victory in the America’s Cup.
At a time when some historical revisionists are seeking to tarnish Cook’s legacy, Abbass and her team are close to a revelation that would shake the maritime world.
If so, it would close the circle on the story of Cook’s remarkable journey of discovery, chronicled this week in The Australian, a voyage that not only rewrote the history of Australia but recast the world’s knowledge of science, astronomy, navigation and more.
Abbass, the founder and lead investigator for the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, says the three-week exploration mission she will lead next week will be the most exciting yet because it will focus on only five ships that were sunk in a 400m zone, one of which is almost certainly the Endeavour.
“There is an 80 per cent chance we’ve got her now,” she says. “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.”
The search for the final resting place of the Endeavour is a drama worthy of Cook’s adventures, and one of which the explorer would no doubt be proud.
The fate of the Endeavour had long confounded historians because the ship disappeared from naval records after it was sold to private owner John Wilkinson in 1775 following Cook’s famous 1768-71 voyage.
In 1993, Abbass, a Newport local, began to research the history of 13 British transport ships that were scuttled in Newport harbour by the British in 1778 to protect the town from the French fleet during the American Revolutionary War.
She was not looking for the Endeavour, but the Endeavour found her. She knew the names of the scuttled ships and in 1999, while searching the national archives in London, she was stunned to find a document that revealed that one of the sunken ships — called the Lord Sandwich — had been Cook’s Endeavour. Suddenly, Abbass had an international story on her hands. Wilkinson had changed the Endeavour’s name to the Lord Sandwich and had chartered her to the British to carry troops in the US during the Revolutionary War. She had then served as a prison ship in Newport harbour before being scuttled.
Knowing the Endeavour was one of the 13 sunken ships in Newport harbour did not guarantee that it could be found or identified in a wide search area and after more than two centuries rotting away under a harbour. The search has been slow because Abbass’s RIMAP is a volunteer organisation relying on donations to fund sonar and diving expeditions.
By early last year it had painstakingly located nine of the 13 ships when Abbass made a second key breakthrough. “In the archives in Greenwich (England), I found a document that was a transport manager’s report which revealed where each of the ships was scuttled. It said there were five to the northwest of Goat Island and that the Lord Sandwich was one of them,” she says.
Armed with this new, specific knowledge, an expedition last year found four of the five ships. The coming week’s expedition, which involves 18 divers, including two Australians from the Australian National Maritime Museum, will across three weeks search for the fifth ship and more closely investigate the first four.
The divers will be looking for any clues that may identify the Lord Sandwich, and therefore the Endeavour. This could be based on the size of the remains — given that the Endeavour was a 300 tonne-plus ship — or on the type of wood or on artefacts that have not already been picked off by scuba divers over the years.
Abbass says she gets messages of encouragement from Australians all the time but she would “prefer cash donations” to RIMAP to fund the search effort and also a laboratory where any artefacts or pieces of the Endeavour can be scientifically examined to confirm her identity.
She says she was surprised to read about the recent controversy in Australia about Cook’s legacy, comparing it with the debate in the US about Confederate statues. “I’m aghast at what is happening in the US about revisionist history and what is politically correct and what’s not,” she says.
“But that’s all politics — it has nothing to do with what the history really was. I like what your Prime Minister said: that is Stalinist history if you are going to revise it like that. You can always reinterpret what it meant but what happened, happened.”
Evan Smith, the head of Newport’s tourism centre, says he thinks the town will become a magnet for Australians if the Endeavour is found. “Cook was without doubt, I think, the greatest explorer ever known, so if this was the Endeavour’s last place before she went down, what a fabulous story to tell,” he says. “For us, that would be a platform to say to ‘Please come to Newport’. Most Aussies that get here only have memories of the America’s Cup. The discovery of the Endeavour would be another incredible Australian story in Newport.”
Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.