Wreckage of Captain James Cook’s famous ship, the Endeavour, has been found, researchers say.
Sydney:
The wreck of Captain James Cook’s famous ship, the Endeavour, has been found off the coast of the US state of Rhode Island, Australian researchers said Thursday.
However, their research partners in the United States call the announcement premature.
The Endeavor, which sailed the British explorer on a historic voyage to Australia and New Zealand between 1768 and 1771, was sunk in Newport Harbor during the American Revolutionary War.
It lay in obscurity for more than two centuries.
“Since 1999, we’ve been investigating several 18th-century shipwrecks in a two-square-mile area where we thought Endeavor was sinking,” Kevin Sumption, director of the Australian National Maritime Museum, told a media briefing on Thursday.
“Based on archival and archaeological evidence, I am convinced it is the Endeavor.”
But the Rhode Island Marine Archeology Project said it was too early to draw that conclusion.
In a statement, project director DK Abbass said the announcement was a “breach of contract”, adding that “conclusions will be determined by proper scientific process and not by Australian emotions or politics”.
A spokesman for the Australian museum said Abbass is “entitled to her own opinion on the vast amount of evidence we have collected”.
The museum does not believe it has committed a breach of contract.
Sumption was among a team of archaeologists who announced in 2018 that they believed Endeavor’s remains were at the Rhode Island site, but said more analysis needed to be done then.
The Endeavor was the ship that sailed Cook from England to Tahiti and then New Zealand before reaching Australia in 1770 and charting the eastern coast of the continent.
By the time the ship sank in Newport Harbor in August 1778, it had been renamed the Lord Sandwich and was used by the British to hold prisoners of war during the American Revolution.
The British sank the ship, along with others, to prevent a French fleet from sailing to Newport Harbor to support the Americans.
This was just a few months before Cook’s death in Hawaii in February 1779.
After two centuries at the bottom of the harbor, only about 15 percent of Endeavor is intact, according to the Australian National Maritime Museum.
“The focus is now on what can be done to protect and preserve it,” Sumption said on Thursday.
(This story was not edited by DailyExpertNews staff and was generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)
