Wreck of Captain Cook's Endeavour found

The vessel has lain underwater in Newport Harbour, Rhode Island, New England, since 1778.

Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project says it is 80 per cent certain that material found in its investigations belongs to the Endeavour, based on high-tech mapping of the seabed and historical shipping documents.

Captain Cook set sail from Plymouth at the helm of HMS Endeavour in 1768 on a mission for the Admiralty to record the transit of Venus across the sun – and to locate a Great Southern Continent.

He charted the east coast of Australia and all of New Zealand, meeting with Polynesians, Melanesians, Aborigines, Maoris, Eskimoes, Canadian Indians and Patagonians on his three-year voyage.

The vessel that was built in Whitby and sold four years later and renamed Lord Sandwich. It used to transport troops during the American Revolution before being sunk by British forces to blockade the waters of Newport.

The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project has announced its progress on mapping nine sites of the 13 ships scuttled in Newport Harbour.

It said: “One group of fiveships included the Lord Sandwich transport, formerly Captain James Cook’s Endeavour Bark.

“We now know the general area where those five ships were scuttled, and in previous work had already mapped four of the sites there.

“A recent analysis of remote sensing data suggests that the fifth site may exist, too. That means the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project now has an 80 to 100 per cent chance that the Lord Sandwich is still in Newport Harbour, and because the Lord Sandwich was Captain Cook’s Endeavour, that means we have found her.”

The next step for the archaelogical project is a more intense study of each vessel’s structure and its artefacts.

There also needs to be a proper facility in place to conserve and store waterlogged material from the sites so the project has launched a fund campaign.