Deal to try to find Captain James Cook’s Endeavour in Rhode Island

SYDNEY: -- NEARLY 250 years ago, Captain James Cook ran aground on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef during a voyage to the South Pacific to observe the planet Venus.

His ship was HMS Endeavour, an ugly and awkward little vessel that improbably helped him become the first European to chart Australia’s east coast.

Today, schoolchildren in Australia learn about the Endeavour’s historic 1768-71 voyage.

But few people give a second thought to what ultimately happened to the ship.

A marine archaeologist in Rhode Island thinks she knows.

Dr Kathy Abbass has been working for years to find its remains at the bottom of Rhode Island’s Newport Harbour.

This week, she is signing an agreement with the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, which has pledged to help her in hopes of locating the wreck in time for the 250th-anniversary celebrations of Cook’s voyage.

Full story: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/deal-to-try-to-find-captain-james-cooks-endeavour-in-rhode-island/story-fnjwl1aw-1227083842023


-- News.com.au 2014-10-08

I am totally confused. The headline starts US: Then the article talks about the ship running into the Great Barrier Reef and Australia. Next it talks about Dr Kathy Abbass who I think is an American archaeologist with the US Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project. There is a Newport Harbor in Rhode Island USA.

No, I haven't been drinking. The article says:

"Dr Kathy Abbass has been working for years to find its remains at the bottom of Rhode Island’s Newport Harbour."

Does this actually say that Dr. Abbass was working at the bottom of the Rhode Island harbor?

So where is the wreck? Off the Great Barrier Reef, or in Newport harbor USA?

I thought it wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef.

I am totally confused. The headline starts US: Then the article talks about the ship running into the Great Barrier Reef and Australia. Next it talks about Dr Kathy Abbass who I think is an American archaeologist with the US Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project. There is a Newport Harbor in Rhode Island USA.

No, I haven't been drinking. The article says:

"Dr Kathy Abbass has been working for years to find its remains at the bottom of Rhode Island’s Newport Harbour."

Does this actually say that Dr. Abbass was working at the bottom of the Rhode Island harbor?

So where is the wreck? Off the Great Barrier Reef, or in Newport harbor USA?

I thought it wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef.

Google and Wikipedia are your friends

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Endeavour

Largely forgotten after her epic voyage, Endeavour spent the next three years shipping Navy stores to the Falkland Islands. Renamed and sold into private hands in 1775, she briefly returned to naval service as a troop transport during the American War of Independence and was scuttled in a blockade of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, in 1778. Her wreck has not been precisely located, but relics, including six of her cannon and an anchor, are displayed at maritime museums worldwide.

I had to look it up as I had no idea what happened to it either.

I am totally confused. The headline starts US: Then the article talks about the ship running into the Great Barrier Reef and Australia. Next it talks about Dr Kathy Abbass who I think is an American archaeologist with the US Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project. There is a Newport Harbor in Rhode Island USA.

No, I haven't been drinking. The article says:

"Dr Kathy Abbass has been working for years to find its remains at the bottom of Rhode Island’s Newport Harbour."

Does this actually say that Dr. Abbass was working at the bottom of the Rhode Island harbor?

So where is the wreck? Off the Great Barrier Reef, or in Newport harbor USA?

I thought it wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef.

No, it was never claimed it sunk off the Great Barrier Reef. The ship eventually returned to UK. From the article

Abbass discovered during an archive search in 1998 that the roughly 30-metre-long Endeavour was part of a fleet of 13 ships that the British scuttled during the Revolutionary War in 1778 to blockade the port.

More info at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Endeavour

Good that the Hawaiians put an end to this guy's reckless adventures.

Aye the bloody French (or Spanish) sank her off Mass and the Aussies to whom she belongs don't seem that arsed.......

Aye the bloody French (or Spanish) sank her off Mass and the Aussies to whom she belongs don't seem that arsed.......

'HMS' is the hint to which navy...

HMS' is the hint to which navy

think the Aussie navy also have HM(A)S bur she was't an active ship only a merchant vessel when it was sunk by them pesky peasants.....

The infamous Gale of 1827.tore apart the exposed upper half of the ship and the tides and storms have scattered its remains under considerable silt. It's important to remember it's North Atlantic waters that we see down there, the same waters that flow over the Tianic.

There are two separate areas where the not for profit Rhode Island Marine Archeology Project believes it can find the ship's remains, one of which is under a filled in area supporting a popular seafood restaurant and parking lot. I'm partial to the restaurant but given that I have another and very distant haunt,I haven't been seen in Newport for many moons.

Nothing serious is going to happen in this unless the Newport Historical Society grande dames get involved, which they haven't done. There's just nothing seen for Newport in this so I'm afraid the people of Oz are going to have to carry the ball on it. That's because the project doesn't look like this....

The Breakers, at the Cliff Walk Point, Newport, Rhode Island, summer residence of railroad tycoon Julius Vanderbilt

It unfortunately also doesn't help anyone that this is emotive rather than another instance of a sunken treasure and pieces of eight.

Still, it is encouraging that Dr.Kathy Abbass and her RIM-AP are fully committed because they are better at this sort of underwater history than the NHS which doesn't have magnetometers or sonar.

In Newport Harbor, the grey area is a mosaic that shows where side scan sonar was towed in a back-and-forth pattern much like mowing the lawn. Marine archaeologists studied the details of the sonar data sets and found patterns that led them to locating the wreckage of four additional Revolutionary War transports.

I noticed in several visits inside the Breakers that they must have a hundred cookie jars vases throughout the place.

I am totally confused. The headline starts US: Then the article talks about the ship running into the Great Barrier Reef and Australia. Next it talks about Dr Kathy Abbass who I think is an American archaeologist with the US Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project. There is a Newport Harbor in Rhode Island USA.

No, I haven't been drinking. The article says:

"Dr Kathy Abbass has been working for years to find its remains at the bottom of Rhode Island’s Newport Harbour."

Does this actually say that Dr. Abbass was working at the bottom of the Rhode Island harbor?

So where is the wreck? Off the Great Barrier Reef, or in Newport harbor USA?

I thought it wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef.

The Endeavour hit the reef but was was repaired. Cape Tribulation is named after the event.

Wonderful wording "To have the Endeavour raised and, if possible, bought to Australia, whatever is left of it"

Good that the Hawaiians put an end to this guy's reckless adventures.

Exploration is rife with "recklessness", particularly during the time period in question. I wasn't there, don't know what the mindset of times may have been and certainly don't applaud anyone's death, be they Hawaiian, English or otherwise.

It's quite easy to judge events that took place hundreds of years ago, and we may be judged hundreds of years in the future for ours "reckless adventures".

Live and LetLive.

HMS' is the hint to which navy

think the Aussie navy also have HM(A)S bur she was't an active ship only a merchant vessel when it was sunk by them pesky peasants.....

LOL, many here in the U.S. are still fighting the Civil War, I see there are a few out there still fighting the American Revolutionary War!

Aye the bloody French (or Spanish) sank her off Mass and the Aussies to whom she belongs don't seem that arsed.......

Did you really get that from reading the article? I thought Hornblower sailed the Bounty to Vladivostok. Go figure.