HMS Endeavour began life in 1764 as the Earl of Pembroke, a boxy, flat-bottomed Whitby cat built to haul coal along the English coast. That shallow draft let her work uncharted shoals and be beached upright for repairs, which is why the Navy bought her for the Royal Society’s 1768 voyage to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti, with secret orders to search for Terra Australis Incognita. First Lord of the Admiralty Edward Hawke refused to give command to civilian geographer Alexander Dalrymple, so the post went to Lieutenant James Cook. Refitted at Deptford with a third deck and copper sheathing against shipworms, she left Plymouth in August 1768 with 94 people, pigs, poultry, Joseph Banks’s two greyhounds, and a milking goat that had already sailed around the world.

Two of Banks’s servants froze to death in a snowstorm after the ship rounded Cape Horn, but she reached Tahiti in April 1769, spent six months mapping New Zealand, and in April 1770 became the first European ship on Australia’s east coast at Botany Bay. In June 1770 she struck what is now Endeavour Reef. The crew jettisoned cannons and ballast, midshipman Jonathan Monkhouse fothered a sail over the leak, and on the beach at the Endeavour River they found a fist-sized lump of coral plugging the hole. Disease at Batavia and after helped kill a third of the crew. Sold in 1775 and renamed Lord Sandwich, she was scuttled in Newport Harbor, Rhode Island, in August 1778 to block French warships.

• The Maori, who had never seen a European ship, took her for a floating island or a giant bird.
• Dutch shipwrights at Batavia found planks eaten by shipworms to an eighth of an inch.
• Rejected as unfit for troop transport, she was resubmitted as Lord Sandwich II and carried Hessian soldiers to New York.
• The Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project found records in 1999 tying Lord Sandwich to Endeavour, and a disputed 2022 Australian announcement preceded a joint report in June 2025.
• A splinter of the ship flew aboard Apollo 15, whose command module was named Endeavour, as were a Space Shuttle and a SpaceX Dragon.