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[i]Now, thanks to a combination of archival research and deep diving, archaeologists with RIMAP and the Australian National Maritime Museum have narrowed their search to a single shipwreck they say is probably the ship that once carried Cook and Banks to Australia. Since eighteenth-century shipbuilders recorded the specifications of their projects in detail, archaeologists have spent some time on the bottom measuring the few timbers that remain buried beneath the silt and comparing those dimensions to what we know about HMS Endeavour's construction. Because there is some historical information about where the Lord Sandwich was scuttled, archaeologists could also eliminate ships of the right size that weren't in the right place, like a shipwreck dubbed RI 2119, which was briefly in the running last year. Divers also collected samples of the wood from timbers on all five wrecks. Historical records list all 13 of the ships that were scuttled in 1778, and tracking those ships through trails of documents reveals that many of them were built in either India or North America, with timber from those places. But HMS Endeavour was built at a shipyard in the north of England, mostly of English oak, so oak timbers on a ship of the right size in the right place also provided a significant clue.[/i]
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