Updated on 2/3/2022 3:04 PM

• Australian researchers say they have found the wreck of the ship Endeavor off the coast of the US state of Rhode Island.
• It is the wreck of the famous British explorer James Cook.
• However, whether this is really the wreck has yet to be confirmed by scientific processes.

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Australian researchers say they have found the wreck of the ship Endeavor, owned by the famous British explorer James Cook, off the coast of the US state of Rhode Island.

“Since 1999, we’ve surveyed several 18th-century shipwrecks in the two-square-mile area where we suspect the Endeavour sank,” Kevin Sumption, director of the State Maritime Museum, said Thursday. Based on archaeological evidence, he was convinced that the wreck now identified was Cook’s ship.

Two centuries after the seafloor sank, only about 15 percent of the wreck remains intact, according to the museum. “We are now focused on what can be done to protect and preserve them,” Samption told reporters.

Whether the “endeavour” must be confirmed by the scientific process

However, US research partners from the Rhode Island Marine Archeology Project (RIMAP) described the wreck’s mapping as premature. Sumption’s announcement was a “breach of contract.” The conclusion of whether this is truly an ‘endeavour’ should be made through a ‘scientific process’ and not through ‘Australian sentiment’, Rimapp explained.

The research team had already announced in 2018 that it may have located the wreck “Endeavor”. James Cook made his first expedition by ship from 1768 to 1771 and explored the southwestern Pacific Ocean. He sailed from England to Tahiti and then to New Zealand before arriving in Australia in 1770.

The ship was later used by the British Army and named “Lord Sandwich”. Sunk in August 1778 in Newport Harbor. (buck/dpa)