Revisiting
Endeavour’s
scrap yard
Early this year archaeologists from the Australian National
Maritime Museum surveyed a site of great historical significance
to Australia – the reef where James Cook went aground on
Endeavour in 1770. Expedition member, curator and maritime
archaeologist Nigel Erskine reports.
OF THE MANY 18th-century European
voyages of exploration, James Cook’s
expeditions are renowned. The three
expeditions he led between 1768 and
1779 changed European knowledge
of the world profoundly, filling Pacific
charts with hundreds of islands and
providing surveys of much of the Pacific
littoral, including Australia’s east coast.
In addition to geographic discoveries,
Cook’s expeditions provided some of the
first detailed scientific data from the
Pacific and brought back important
botanical, zoological and ethnographic
collections to Europe. The artistic results
of the voyages were similarly impressive
and the three voyage accounts were
best-sellers – ensuring that Cook’s
reputation survived, well after his
untimely death in Hawaii.
For Australians, the 1770 voyage of
the Endeavour along the east coast is
ABOVE: Diver with part of the steel marker
structure left by the 1969 expedition
that recovered the six jettisoned cannon.
Photographer Xanthe Rivett
LEFT: Vue de la riviere d’endeavour sur la cote
de la nouvelle hollande ou le vaisseau sur mis
a la bande (View of Endeavour River, in New
South Wales, the ship Endeavour bark laid on
the shore). Hand coloured engraving after a
drawing by Endeavour artist Sydney Parkinson,
published Paris, France 1774. It shows the
ship being repaired on the shore of what we
now call Queensland. ANMM collection
compelling description of the events of
11 June 1770 in his journal:
… a few minutes before 11 [2300 hrs] …
before the man at the lead could heave
another cast the ship struck and stuck
fast. Immediately upon this we took in all
our sails hoisted out the boats, and
sounded round the ship, and found that
we had got upon the SE edge of a reef of
Sailing by moonlight along the coast of
New Holland, the vessel struck a coral reef
threatening destruction of the ship
intrinsically linked to the foundation of
modern Australia, but things could have
turned out very differently! Twenty-two
months into the voyage, after recording
the transit of Venus, successfully
charting New Zealand and sojourning in
Botany Bay, the expedition suffered a
disastrous setback. Sailing by moonlight
along the tropical coast of New Holland,
the vessel struck a coral reef –
threatening the destruction of the ship,
and along with it, Cook’s survey of the
east coast and all Joseph Banks’s natural
history specimens. Cook left a
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SIGNALS 88 September–November 2009
SIGNALS 88 September–November 2009
coral rocks having in some places round
the ship 3 and 4 fathom water and in
other places not quite as many feet …
Unable to haul the vessel off the reef,
Cook ordered the ship to be lightened
so that it might float free on the next
high tide.
… we went to work to lighten her as fast
as possible which seem’d to be the
only means we had left to get her off as
we went ashore about the top of highwater. We not only started water but
throw’d over board our guns, iron and
Page 11
The cannons are now located at the
Academy of Natural Sciences
(Philadelphia), the National Maritime
Museum (London), the National Museum
of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa
(Wellington), the National Museum of
Australia (Canberra), the James Cook
Museum (Cooktown) and Botany Bay
National Park Discovery Centre. Forty
pieces of iron ballast and 56 pieces of
stone ballast, some remains of ironwork
from the gun carriages, a cannonball,
powder charge and hemp wadding (found
in one of the cannon) plus a number of
concretions are now held by this museum
and form an important part of the
National Maritime Collection.
Readers of the article ‘We find the
missing Mermaid’ in Signals number 86,
by curator and maritime archaeologist
Kieran Hosty, will know that he led the
museum’s maritime archaeology team on
an expedition to far north Queensland in
January this year. While the main
achievement of the expedition was to
successfully locate the remains of the
important colonial vessel HMCS
Mermaid, wrecked in 1829 somewhere in
the area of the Frankland Islands, an
additional aim of the project (weather and
time permitting) was to visit Endeavour
Reef and inspect the site where Cook’s
ship was stranded in 1770.
TOP: This Endeavour four-pounder cannon and
iron ballast pigs, retrieved from Endeavour
Reef, were displayed when the museum first
opened. The cannon (on a replicated gun
carriage) remained here for 17 years before
moving to the National Museum of Australia in
Canberra. Photographer J Carter/ANMM
Our opportunity came sooner than
expected when on day nine of the
expedition, with weather conditions
deteriorating, work on the Mermaid
wreck site was halted and the expedition
vessels headed for shelter behind a reef
further north. Endeavour Reef lies
approximately 80 nautical miles north of
LEFT: Large concretion removed from one of
Endeavour’s cannon, showing the imprint of
the royal cipher or monogram cast into its
breech. ANMM collection
‘We … throw’d over board our guns,
iron and stone ballast, casks, hoops staves,
oyle jars, decay’d stores etc’
Chart of Endeavour Reef and environs
by Richard Pickersgill, master’s
mate on Endeavour. Courtesy of UK
Hydrographic Office
stone ballast, casks, hoops staves,
oyle jars, decay’d stores etc ...
These actions were successful and after
getting off the reef, Cook was fortunate to
find a river mouth on the nearby coast,
where the Endeavour was sufficiently
repaired to sail to the Dutch East India
Company shipyard at Batavia. Cook
finally arrived back in England with the
Endeavour in 1771.
In 1969 the exact site of Endeavour’s
stranding was located by a team from the
Academy of Natural Sciences
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(Philadelphia) and the six cannons and
much of the ballast were recovered. An
anchor was recovered later in 1971. These
objects form an integral part of the
national connection that we and other
nations feel for Cook and the Endeavour
– and in 1970 the Australian Prime
Minister, John Gorton, formally presented
one cannon each to representatives of the
Philadelphia Academy of Natural
Sciences, the British government, the
New Zealand government, the Australian
government, the New South Wales and
the Queensland governments.
SIGNALS 88 September–November 2009
the Mermaid wreck site and the
expedition vessel Spoilsport arrived there
two days later – having stopped to
investigate two other wreck sites en route.
In fact Spoilsport’s skipper had been
playing a skilful game of ‘cat and mouse’
with a tropical low moving south from
the Gulf of Carpentaria and out into the
Coral Sea. For this was cyclone season
and although this period produces
statistically the greatest daily average of
calms in the year, providing the best
conditions for diving, it is also the period
when dangerous cyclones may form.
SIGNALS 88 September–November 2009
Approaching through rain squalls just
after dawn, at first glimpse Endeavour
Reef appeared as a jade-green band
suspended between a dark metallic sea
and low scudding clouds. The reef lies
only 13 nautical miles off the mainland
and high peaks of the Mount Finlayson
Ranges appeared and disappeared through
the fast-moving rain squalls.
Endeavour Reef is imposing, appearing
from Spoilsport’s upper deck to stretch
endlessly from east to west. It is, in fact,
about five nautical miles in length and
must have been a daunting prospect to
those involved in 19th-century attempts to
locate the site of Endeavour’s stranding.
In 1887 the harbour master of Cooktown,
Captain John Mackay, tried to find
Endeavour’s cannons by visually
searching the waters off the southern edge
of the reef. Unsurprisingly, he was not
successful, and the location of the
cannons remained unknown until the 20th
century when advances in technology
greatly improved the chances of finding
the Endeavour stranding site.
The breakthrough came in 1969 when an
Academy of Natural Sciences expedition
led by Dr Virgil Kauffman, using a
magnetometer, successfully located a
large magnetic anomaly on the southern
edge of Endeavour Reef. A magnetometer
registers slight variations in the earth’s
magnetic field and by the 1960s they were
being used extensively in geological
surveys. Towed in the water behind a
small boat, the magnetometer reacted to
Page 13
Using the published reports of the 1969
expedition, we were able fairly quickly to
find a steel marker left to indicate the site
where the Endeavour cannons and ballast
were recovered. It was known that the
original expedition had used explosives
to crack the solid mass of iron ballast and
we expected that the reef would show
some evidence of this. Happily, although
evidence of a blast crater was found in
one area, our overall impression of the
reef was of a healthy, and quite
unexpectedly beautiful, environment rich
in colourful corals, giant clams and tiny
tropical fish.
After a second dive later in the day, the
weather conditions deteriorated further
and Spoilsport motored westward to
round the reef and anchor in its shelter
for the night. Rounding the western
edge of Endeavour Reef we could see
the tiny sand cays that Cook named the
Hope Islands (in the hope of surviving
the ordeal) lying about five miles
further west.
the iron ballast and cannons on the
seabed, pinpointing the spot for divers to
search. However, even with this
breakthrough it took some time for the
expedition divers to identify the heavilyconcreted cannons among the numerous
coral outcrops on the reef.
After a restless night, we returned to the
site next morning and completed a final
dive. The Endeavour stranding site is
actually on a small detached reef just
off the main edge of Endeavour Reef
and under water appears something like
a loaf of bread in section – with a high,
rounded central spine, dropping away
steeply on either side to a flat sandy
bottom. Cook was perhaps fortunate to
strike this isolated reef rather than find
himself aground on the edge of
Endeavour Reef itself, where it is
probable he would have found it
impossible to free the ship.
During this final dive, the team found a
small number of isolated ballast stones
(recognisable from the recovered stones
Spoilsport’s skipper had been playing
a skilful game of ‘cat and mouse’ with a
tropical low moving into the Coral Sea
TOP: Diver with magnetometer approaches
the reef where Endeavour ran aground.
Photographer Xanthe Rivett
BOTTOM: Diver with one of the small ballast
stones remaining on the site. Photographer
Xanthe Rivett
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Concretion is the term given to the hard
casing of corrosion products that
forms around iron objects that are
submerged in the sea for long periods.
The thickness of a concretion increases
over time, sometimes making it difficult
to identify the object beneath. While
they are the result of corrosion, once they
have formed concretions create a
microenvironment that actually reduces
the rate of corrosion, helping to preserve
the encased object.
in the National Maritime Collection),
as well as occasional concrete blocks
used by the 1969 expedition to anchor
marker buoys on the site, but in general
the reef appears to have returned once
more to its natural state. We would have
liked to have spent more time at this
place where, in 1770, the course of
Australian history hung in the balance,
but with the wind turning once again and
strengthening, our time was up and we
headed back southward to complete our
work on the Mermaid site. 
SIGNALS 88 September–November 2009