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HMS Endeavour
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HMS Endeavour
HMS Endeavour was a Royal Navy research vessel that Lieutenant James Cook commanded to Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia on his first voyage of discovery from 1768 to 1771.
She was launched in 1764 as the collier Earl of Pembroke, with the Navy purchasing her in 1768 for a scientific mission to the Pacific Ocean and to explore the seas for the surmised Terra Australis Incognita or "unknown southern land". Commissioned as His Majesty's Bark Endeavour, she departed Plymouth in August 1768, rounded Cape Horn and reached Tahiti in time to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun. She then set sail into the largely uncharted ocean to the south, stopping at the islands of Huahine, Bora Bora, and Raiatea west of Tahiti to allow Cook to claim them for Great Britain. In September 1769, she anchored off New Zealand, becoming the first European vessel to reach the islands since Abel Tasman's Heemskerck 127 years earlier.
In April 1770, Endeavour became the first European ship to reach the east coast of Australia, with Cook going ashore at what is now known as Botany Bay. Endeavour then sailed north along the Australian coast. She narrowly avoided disaster after running aground on the Great Barrier Reef, and Cook had to throw her guns overboard to lighten her. Endeavour was beached on the Australian mainland for seven weeks to permit repairs to her hull. Resuming her voyage, she limped into port in Batavia in October 1770, her crew sworn to secrecy about the lands that they had visited. From Batavia Endeavour continued westward, rounded the Cape of Good Hope on 13 March 1771 and reached the English port of Dover on 12 July, having been at sea for nearly three years.
The ship was largely forgotten after her Pacific voyage, spending the next three years hauling troops and cargo to and from the Falkland Islands. She was renamed in 1775 after being sold into private hands, and used to transport timber from the Baltic. Rehired as a British troop transport during the American War of Independence, she was finally scuttled in a blockade of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, in 1778. Historical evidence indicates the ship was sunk just north of Goat Island in Newport Harbor, along with four other British transports.
Relics from Endeavour are displayed at maritime museums worldwide, including an anchor and six of her cannon. A replica of Endeavour was launched in 1994 and is berthed alongside the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. Multiple geographic features are named after the ship, including the Endeavour River and Endeavour Reef, as were three spacecraft. The ship is depicted on the New Zealand fifty-cent coin.
Endeavour was originally the merchant collier Earl of Pembroke, built by Thomas Fishburn for Thomas Millner, launched in June 1764 from the coal and whaling Port of Whitby in the North Riding of Yorkshire. She was a type known locally as the "Whitby Cat". She was ship-rigged and sturdily built with a broad, flat bow, a square stern and a long, box-like body with a deep hold.
A flat-bottomed design made her well-suited to sailing in shallow waters and allowed her to be beached for loading and unloading of cargo and for basic repairs without requiring a dry dock. Her hull, internal floors, and futtocks were built from traditional white oak, her keel and stern post from elm, and her masts from pine and fir. Plans of the ship also show a double keelson to lock the keel, floors and frames in place.
There is uncertainty about the height of her standing masts, as surviving diagrams of Endeavour depict the body of the vessel only, and not the mast plan. While her main and foremast standing spars were standard for her shipyard and era, an annotation on one surviving ship plan in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has the mizzen as "16 yards 29 inches" (15.4 m). If correct, this would produce an oddly truncated mast a full 9 feet (2.7 m) shorter than the naval standards of the day. Late twentieth-century research suggests the annotation may be a transcription error with "19 yards 29 inches" (18.1 m) being the true reading. If so, this would more closely conform with both naval standards and the lengths of the other masts.
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HMS Endeavour
HMS Endeavour was a Royal Navy research vessel that Lieutenant James Cook commanded to Tahiti, New Zealand and Australia on his first voyage of discovery from 1768 to 1771.
She was launched in 1764 as the collier Earl of Pembroke, with the Navy purchasing her in 1768 for a scientific mission to the Pacific Ocean and to explore the seas for the surmised Terra Australis Incognita or "unknown southern land". Commissioned as His Majesty's Bark Endeavour, she departed Plymouth in August 1768, rounded Cape Horn and reached Tahiti in time to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun. She then set sail into the largely uncharted ocean to the south, stopping at the islands of Huahine, Bora Bora, and Raiatea west of Tahiti to allow Cook to claim them for Great Britain. In September 1769, she anchored off New Zealand, becoming the first European vessel to reach the islands since Abel Tasman's Heemskerck 127 years earlier.
In April 1770, Endeavour became the first European ship to reach the east coast of Australia, with Cook going ashore at what is now known as Botany Bay. Endeavour then sailed north along the Australian coast. She narrowly avoided disaster after running aground on the Great Barrier Reef, and Cook had to throw her guns overboard to lighten her. Endeavour was beached on the Australian mainland for seven weeks to permit repairs to her hull. Resuming her voyage, she limped into port in Batavia in October 1770, her crew sworn to secrecy about the lands that they had visited. From Batavia Endeavour continued westward, rounded the Cape of Good Hope on 13 March 1771 and reached the English port of Dover on 12 July, having been at sea for nearly three years.
The ship was largely forgotten after her Pacific voyage, spending the next three years hauling troops and cargo to and from the Falkland Islands. She was renamed in 1775 after being sold into private hands, and used to transport timber from the Baltic. Rehired as a British troop transport during the American War of Independence, she was finally scuttled in a blockade of Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, in 1778. Historical evidence indicates the ship was sunk just north of Goat Island in Newport Harbor, along with four other British transports.
Relics from Endeavour are displayed at maritime museums worldwide, including an anchor and six of her cannon. A replica of Endeavour was launched in 1994 and is berthed alongside the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. Multiple geographic features are named after the ship, including the Endeavour River and Endeavour Reef, as were three spacecraft. The ship is depicted on the New Zealand fifty-cent coin.
Endeavour was originally the merchant collier Earl of Pembroke, built by Thomas Fishburn for Thomas Millner, launched in June 1764 from the coal and whaling Port of Whitby in the North Riding of Yorkshire. She was a type known locally as the "Whitby Cat". She was ship-rigged and sturdily built with a broad, flat bow, a square stern and a long, box-like body with a deep hold.
A flat-bottomed design made her well-suited to sailing in shallow waters and allowed her to be beached for loading and unloading of cargo and for basic repairs without requiring a dry dock. Her hull, internal floors, and futtocks were built from traditional white oak, her keel and stern post from elm, and her masts from pine and fir. Plans of the ship also show a double keelson to lock the keel, floors and frames in place.
There is uncertainty about the height of her standing masts, as surviving diagrams of Endeavour depict the body of the vessel only, and not the mast plan. While her main and foremast standing spars were standard for her shipyard and era, an annotation on one surviving ship plan in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has the mizzen as "16 yards 29 inches" (15.4 m). If correct, this would produce an oddly truncated mast a full 9 feet (2.7 m) shorter than the naval standards of the day. Late twentieth-century research suggests the annotation may be a transcription error with "19 yards 29 inches" (18.1 m) being the true reading. If so, this would more closely conform with both naval standards and the lengths of the other masts.
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