Help RIMAP Excavate the Endeavour

For the past 25 years, the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP) has been looking for the Endeavour in Newport's Outer Harbor, Rhode Island. The Endeavour, then named the Lord Sandwich, was among 13 British transports scuttled there in 1778, during the American Revolution. RIMAP began the study of these transports in 1993, with the first of many remote sensing surveys, and in the following years, RIMAP divers found and mapped 10 of these 18th-century shipwreck shipwrrecks. In 1999 RIMAP  published the historical evidence that the Lord Sandwich transport, scuttled in that fleet, had been Captain Cook's Endeavour Bark of his first circumnavigation. By 2016 RIMAP had narrowed the list of which archaeological site might be the Endeavour from the original 13 to the 5 that were sent to a particular part of the harbor. In 2018 RIMAP identified an archaeological site from among those 5 that is our primary candidate to be the Endeavour.


In order to prove this particular site is the Endeavour, RIMAP must conduct test excavations, retrieve artifacts and take samples for analysis. Details of those processes are outlined on the http://www.rimap.org  website. RIMAP now needs funds to support the 2019 excavation, and to create a basic artifact conservation lab and storage facility to manage the cultural materials that will emerge during that excavation. 


All of this work has been done by trained RIMAP volunteers under professional archaeological guidance. Please join the RIMAP team now, help to prove that the Endeavour is still there, and be part of our success!