Shipwreck pollen key to Endeavour ‘discovery’

By Carmelo Amalfi
COULD microscopic grains of pollen embedded in submerged timbers at the Endeavour wreck site in the US confirm it was the ship James Cook sailed in when he explored the east coast of Australia in 1770?
StreetWise raised this possibility a few years ago when Australian and US researchers zeroed in on the site in Rhode Island where it was scuttled in 1778 with four other British transports in a blockade of Narragansett Bay during the American War of Independence.
Yesterday, the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney, home of the Endeavour replica, announced the 18th century wreck in Newport Harbor was the iconic Royal Navy ship, the first European vessel to visit the east coast nearly 20 years before British settlement.
But museum colleagues at the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project said the announcement was premature. In a statement issued by RIMAP, archaeologist Kathy Abbass said: “What we see on the shipwreck site under study is consistent with what might be expected of the Endeavour, but there has been no indisputable data found to prove the site is that iconic vessel, and there are many unanswered questions that could overturn such an identification.
“IMAP recognises the connection between Australian citizens of British descent and the Endeavour, but RIMAP’s conclusions will be driven by proper scientific process and not Australian emotions or politics.”
Today, the museum was sticking to its guns, telling StreetWise it had presented seven pieces of evidence to support its claim, one of which included timber samples confirming the ship was built using British or European timbers (www.sea.museum/explore/maritime-archaeology/deep-dive/finding-endeavour).
Pollen is not mentioned in the announcement, but StreetWise understands it could be addressed in a final museum report due out in a couple of months.
StreetWise last night contacted Dr Abbass who said the issue of exotic pollen at the site had been considered from the start, but did not say whether the team had identified Australian pollen in the submerged timbers.
“The Lord Sandwich 2 (ex-Endeavour) was not the only British vessel that was lost in Rhode Island at the same time, and that had been to the South Pacific. So if we were to identify such exotics, we would have to be very careful about the conclusions drawn from their presence.”

The scent of eucalypts

Endeavour not only sailed the waters off eastern Australia, it spent nearly two months in early 1770 breached on Australian soil – enough time for pollen and insects to infiltrate the ship timbers.
Launched in June 1764, the Whitby collier Earl of Pembroke was purchased by the Royal Navy for a scientific mission to the Pacific Ocean and to search for the ‘unknown southern land’, Terra Australis Incognita.
His Majesty’s bark Endeavour sailed from Plymouth in 1768. After having visited Tahiti to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun and anchored off NZ in September 1769, Cook sighted the east coast on April 19, 1770, and landed a boat on April 29 in what is now Botany Bay.
Cook charted the coast for the next four months, sailing north where the ship nearly ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
On June 17, the ship reached Endeavour River at Cape York Peninsula in Queensland where it was breached for seven weeks on the southern bank of the river and careened to make repairs to the hull and replace sails and rigging.
Notably, Cook’s crew included naturalist Joseph Banks who did not miss an opportunity to study and collect plant and animal specimens, his name commemorated in several Australian species of plant, including Eucalyptus banksii.
Cook and his men also saw evidence of Aboriginal occupation, his journals having noted sightings of smoke and signal fires.
Endeavour arrived in Batavia (Jakarata) in October 1770 before returning to Dover on July 12, 1771.
Endeavour never returned to Australia. The ship was refitted as a naval transport and later renamed Lord Sandwich 2 before arriving in America to take Rhode Island.
RIMAP set out to identify the 13 transports sunk in the Newport Harbour blockade in 1991. In 1999, they were joined by the Australian National Maritime Museum.
Details of the museum announcement at www.sea.museum/explore/maritime-archaeology/deep-dive.

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