Archaeologists confirm wreck site is James Cook’s Endeavour

Australian Community Media

The Australian National Maritime Museum released confirmation on June 4, 2025, that a shipwreck site known as RI 2394 in Newport Harbour, Rhode Island, is the remains of Captain Cook’s HM Bark Endeavour.

Transcript

00:00This video is brought to you by S.T.A.L.A.

00:30We will never find anything on this site that screams Endeavour.

00:42We will never find a sign saying Cook was here.

00:45We will never see a ship's bell with Endeavour crossed out

00:48and Lord Sandwich inscribed on it.

00:51It's an interesting process.

00:52Archaeology is an interesting process.

00:53And it's a process where we call the preponderance of evidence,

00:57where we've got a whole series of things pointing to RI-2394 as being HMB Endeavour.

01:05And so far, we've found lots of things that tick the box for it to be Endeavour

01:09and nothing on the site which says it's not.

01:16The National Maritime Museum became involved in the hunt for HMB Endeavour relatively early on.

01:21There was two historians in Australia, Des Lydie and Mike O'Connell.

01:25They had actually figured out that HMB Endeavour had become a vessel called the Lord Sandwich

01:32and had been lost off the coast of America during the American Revolutionary War.

01:39An historian in Rhode Island, a woman by the name of Dr. Kathy Abbas,

01:45she was investigating a series of shipwrecks in Newport, Rhode Island.

01:49Those wrecks were associated with the siege of Newport in 1778.

01:55One of those wrecks was a vessel called the Lord Sandwich

01:59and she had read the article by Des Lydie and she thought,

02:02hey, I wonder if it's the same vessel.

02:04And in 1999, an archaeologist from the National Maritime Museum, Paul Hundley,

02:09went across to Newport, Rhode Island to meet with Kathy Abbas

02:13and talked to her about the possibility of the museum becoming involved in the hunt

02:18for HMB Endeavour.

02:20And so that's where I got involved.

02:22In 2000, I went across the pool

02:24and we've been involved in the hunt for the Lord Sandwich wreck,

02:28ex-HMB Endeavour, in Newport since that time.

02:31And so that's where I got involved.

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