By Matt Majendie, CNN
November 4, 2014 — Updated 1224 GMT (2024 HKT)
(CNN) — This is no treasure hunt for a casket of gold at the bottom of the ocean.
Instead, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, with this search potentially for no more than a few partly rotten timber frames on Newport Harbor’s sea floor.
For years, the whereabouts of one of the most famous ships in nautical history — HMS Endeavour — has remained a mystery.
“I don’t like to call it treasure as there’s no gold or silver,” Dr Kathy Abbass, the executive director of Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project, a not-for-profit organization set up in 1992 set up to study the area’s maritime history, told CNN. “But it’s an intellectual treasure.”
The Endeavour is now believed to have been intentionally sunk — in a new life and under a new name — during the American Revolution in 1778.
Endeavour is endemic to every Australian and New Zealand child’s education with a rich British and American history to boot.
It was the boat on which Captain James Cook achieved the first recorded contact with the east coast of Australia, Hawaii, and the first circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Cook also provided the first accurate map of the Pacific and is believed to have shaped the world map more than any other explorer in history.
So how exactly did the British Royal Navy vessel get from exploring undiscovered far flung lands to lying in waters off the east coast of the United States, sharing the ocean floor with torpedoes and other 18th Century vessels?
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