Captain James Cook’s Lost Ship Found 250 Years Later

Captain James Cook’s long-lost ship was discovered 250 years later off the coast of Rhode Island. The Australian National Maritime Museum confirmed that the remains of a shipwreck in Newport Harbor, Rhode Island, that they had been trying to identify since 1999, match that of Cook’s lost ship, “HMS Endeavour.” “This Final Report is the culmination of 25 years of detailed and meticulous archaeological study on this important vessel,” said the museum’s director and CEO, Daryl Karp, about the project. Cook sailed around the globe in “Endeavour” in the 1700s before it was then sold and repurposed as a transport vessel during the American Revolutionary War, ultimately sinking in 1778. Researchers at the museum compared the wreckage to the ship’s historic plans, finding that certain parts of the vessel, from the placement of certain timbers to the size of the ship itself, were either “absolutely identical” or only a few “millimeters” off. James Hunter, an archaeologist at the museum, said that artifacts that would provide “immediate identification” had most likely already been removed from the ship, but that “what has been recovered up to this point is indicative of an 18th-century time frame.” Another archaeologist at the museum, Kieran Hosty, said that “so far we found lots of things that tick the box for it to be ‘Endeavour’ and nothing on the site which says it’s not.”