Captain Cook’s Famous Shipwreck Finally Found After 25-Year Search in Rhode Island
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In the still waters of Newport Harbor, Rhode Island, the long-lost bones of a ship lie buried in silt. For centuries, the wreck had no name. Now, after more than 25 years of international detective work above and below the waves, Australian maritime archaeologists are confident they’ve found one of the most storied vessels in history: HM Bark Endeavour, the ship that carried James Cook to the Pacific, New Zealand, and the eastern coast of Australia.
“This final report marks our definitive statement on the project,” said Daryl Karp, Director and CEO of the Australian National Maritime Museum, when the museum released its final report in June 2025. “It is the culmination of 25 years of detailed and meticulous archaeological study on this important vessel.” The Endeavour’s historic voyage began in 1768. Under the command of Captain James Cook, the ship circumnavigated the globe and made landfall on the continent the British would later call Australia.
To many, this expedition marks the peak of the Enlightenment’s spirit of discovery. “For others it symbolises the onset of colonisation and the subjugation of First Nations Peoples,” the museum’s final report noted, acknowledging the conflicting legacy that has grown around Cook’s journey and the imperial consequences that followed. That legacy is why the ship’s identity matters far beyond maritime archaeology.
Cook’s 1770 voyage mapped much of Australia’s east coast and ended with his claim of the eastern part of the continent for Britain as New South Wales. Eighteen years later, the First Fleet arrived to establish a British penal colony. In recent years, museums and historians have increasingly tried to tell the Endeavour story from both ship and shore: the astronomers, sailors and cartographers aboard Cook’s vessel, and the Indigenous communities who watched the ship arrive, saw their lands mapped and named, and later bore the consequences of British colonisation.
The Endeavour’s days of exploration were short-lived. Launched in 1764 as Earl of Pembroke, renamed Endeavour by the Royal Navy in 1768, and later sold into private hands, the vessel became Lord Sandwich before its final act in America. The ship was later used by the British during the American War of Independence.
In 1778, it was deliberately sunk — one of 13 vessels scuttled in Newport Harbor in an attempt to block the advancing French fleet.
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