HMS Endeavour

She was built as a merchant collier by Thomas Fishburn for Thomas Millner and launched in June 1764 from Whitby, the coal and whaling port in the North Riding of Yorkshire, under the name Earl of Pembroke. Locally her type was called a Whitby Cat: ship-rigged, with a broad flat bow, a square stern and a long box-like body over a deep hold, measured at 368 and 71/94 tons burthen. Nothing about her was designed for exploration; she was designed to carry coal.

The flat-bottomed hull that made her ungainly also made her useful. She could work shallow water, and she could be run up a beach for loading, unloading and basic repair without a dry dock — the quality that would later save her life on an unmapped Australian shore. Her hull, internal floors and futtocks were white oak, her keel and stern post elm, her masts pine and fir, and plans show a double keelson locking keel, floors and frames together.

How tall her masts stood is uncertain, because the surviving diagrams show the body of the vessel and not the mast plan. An annotation on one plan in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich gives the mizzen as "16 yards 29 inches", which would make it a full nine feet shorter than the naval standard of the day and oddly truncated beside her other masts. Late twentieth-century research suggests the note is a transcription error for "19 yards 29 inches", which fits both the standard and the ship.

On 16 February 1768 the Royal Society petitioned George III to fund an expedition to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, and the Admiralty attached to it a confidential mission to search the south Pacific for Terra Australis Incognita. The Society wanted the geographer Alexander Dalrymple in command, on condition of a captain's commission. First Lord Edward Hawke, remembering naval officers refusing orders from the civilian Edmond Halley aboard HMS Paramour in 1698, said he would sooner cut off his right hand. The compromise was James Cook, a naval officer with mathematics and cartography, promoted lieutenant for the job.

Cook took command of Earl of Pembroke on 27 May 1768. Valued in March at £2,307 5s 6d, she was bought for £2,840 10s 11d, then refitted at Deptford by the yard's master shipwright Adam Hayes for £2,294 — almost the price of the ship again. Her hull was recaulked and copper sheathed against shipworm, and a third internal deck was built in to hold cabins, a powder magazine and storerooms. Cabins of roughly two square metres apiece ringed the officers' mess for Cook, Joseph Banks and the Society's men; the great cabin aft became their workroom.

She was commissioned as His Majesty's Bark the Endeavour, to distinguish her from a four-gun cutter of the same name. At Gallions Reach on 21 July 1768 she took on ten 4-pounder cannon — six mounted on the upper deck, four struck down into the hold — and twelve swivel guns fixed to posts along the quarterdeck, sides and bow. Cook added twelve tons of pig iron as ballast. A longboat, pinnace and yawl were supplied, the longboat rotten enough that it had to be rebuilt and painted with white lead before it could come aboard.

Endeavour left Plymouth on 26 August 1768 with eighteen months of provisions for ninety-four people, a crew of eighty-five including twelve Royal Marines, and livestock that included pigs, poultry, two greyhounds and a milking goat. She was at Funchal on 12 September and Rio de Janeiro on 13 November, reached Cape Horn in a storm on 13 January 1769 and was driven back for two days before the wind eased on the sixteenth. Two of Banks's servants died of cold gathering plants in a snowstorm on the shore beyond.

She lay at Tahiti from 10 April 1769. The transit was observed on 3 June from three separate shore observatories, set up apart from one another in case cloud spoiled the view; the main one at Fort Venus held three telescopes and Charles Green, Cook and the master Robert Molyneux. Endeavour sailed on 13 July to survey the Society Islands, and Cook claimed Huahine, Raiatea and Borabora for Britain. On 15 August she turned south into open ocean to look for the southern continent.

In October 1769 she raised the coast of New Zealand, the first European vessel there since Abel Tasman's Heemskerck in 1642. At Poverty Bay the Māori took her for a floating island, or a giant bird from Hawaiki. Six months of coasting let Cook establish that New Zealand was two large islands and not the continent anyone wanted; in March 1770 the longboat put him ashore to proclaim British sovereignty. Her crew sighted the east coast of Australia on 19 April 1770, and on 29 April a boat landed Cook on the southern shore of Botany Bay.

Just before eleven at night on 11 June 1770, charting northward, she struck what is now called Endeavour Reef. The sails came down, a kedge anchor was set, and a first attempt to drag her clear failed. The reef rose so steeply that Cook sounded seventy feet of water less than a ship's length from a ship that was hard aground. Iron and stone ballast, spoiled stores, the drinking water and all but four of her guns went over the side — forty to fifty long tons by Cook's reckoning — the guns buoyed for a recovery that proved impractical at the time. Six of them were lifted off the reef by an American team using a magnetometer in 1969.

She came off on the tide at 10:20 pm on 12 June with a hole in her hull, and all three working pumps had to be manned without pause. A fresh hand measured the sounding line from the outside plank where his predecessor had used the cross-beams, making it appear that the water had risen eighteen inches between soundings, and fear ran through the ship until the error was found. Land was twenty-four miles off and the three boats could not carry the crew. Banks noted in his journal how calmly the men worked.

Midshipman Jonathan Monkhouse, who had seen it done on a merchantman, proposed fothering: oakum and wool sewn into an old sail and drawn under the hull until water pressure forced it into the wound. It worked well enough to stop two pumps. On 17 June she crossed the bar of a river Cook named the Endeavour, was beached on its southern bank and careened for seven weeks. The hull showed that a piece of coral the size of a man's fist had sliced clean through the timbers and snapped off in the hole, plugging what it had made.

She sailed again on 5 August 1770, reached the top of Cape York fifteen days later, and on 22 August Cook went ashore on Possession Island to claim the eastern Australian mainland, with volleys fired from the shore and from her deck. Through the Torres Strait he confiscated every logbook and journal aboard and ordered silence. At Batavia on 10 October the carpenter John Seetterly reported her making six to twelve inches an hour, main keel wounded in many places and false keel gone; some planks were cut through to within an eighth of an inch. Cook wrote that it was a surprise to everyone who saw her bottom how she had stayed above water.

Batavia repaired the ship and ruined the crew. Of ninety-four aboard, all but ten fell ill with malaria and dysentery; seven died before she sailed on 26 December 1770 and twenty-three more were buried at sea over the following twelve weeks, among them Spöring, Green, Parkinson, the surgeon William Monkhouse, Jonathan Monkhouse who had saved the ship, and the carpenter Seetterly who had mended her. She rounded the Cape of Good Hope on 13 March 1771 and entered Dover on 12 July. Cook was made commander a month later; Endeavour went to Woolwich to be refitted as a naval transport.

She made three voyages to the Falkland Islands: provisioning Port Egmont in 1771–72, carrying out the collapsible thirty-six-ton shallop Penguin in pieces with four carpenters to reassemble her in 1773, and in 1774 evacuating the settlement entirely, leaving behind a flag and a plaque asserting British sovereignty. Paid off in September 1774, she was sold in March 1775 to the shipping magnate J. Mather for £645 and sent to Archangel for timber. Offered to the navy as a troop transport she was refused, and refused again when Mather resubmitted her renamed Lord Sandwich: "Unfit for service. She was sold out Service Called Endeavour Bark refused before".

Repaired and accepted on a third try as Lord Sandwich 2, she sailed from Portsmouth on 6 May 1776 in a fleet of a hundred vessels supporting Howe's attack on New York, carrying 206 men, mostly Hessians of the du Corps regiment. After Rhode Island was taken she became a prison ship at Newport. In the summer of 1778, with a French fleet expected, Captain John Brisbane blocked the bay by sinking surplus vessels at its mouth, and Lord Sandwich 2 was scuttled on 4 August 1778, north of Goat Island. The Admiralty valuation of the sunken ships matched her Whitby build and her tonnage exactly.

The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project began work on the thirteen scuttled transports in 1991 and found the London documents tying Endeavour to Lord Sandwich in 1999. In 2016 it put the odds at 80 to 100 per cent that she lay in Newport Harbor among five wrecks. The Australian National Maritime Museum declared the identification confirmed in February 2022, RIMAP called that premature, and the two published a joint final report agreeing in June 2025. Shipworms and gribbles are eating what is left. She appears on the New Zealand fifty-cent coin, a 1994 replica lies at Darling Harbour, and her name has been carried by Apollo 15's command module, a space shuttle and a Crew Dragon capsule.