Endeavour

The Endeavour is 1 of 4 travel bugs symbolizing each ship that sailed under Captain James Cook in 3 separate voyages to the South Pacific from 1768 to 1780.

The mission for these travel bugs is essentially the same as it was for Cook's second voyage -- to explore the South Pacific.

We would ultimately love to see these ships reach New Zealand (which Cook chose for his base, time and time again in each of his voyages) ahead of their owners in March 2005 and travel throughout to provide us with a means of tracking interesting areas in New Zealand to visit/geocache. After that they are free to continue traveling the Pacific or beyond in the spirit of Cook to explore, explore, explore.

While Cook's second voyage from 1772 to 1775 was a marvelous scientific achievement in that he systematically transected the South Pacific verifying the accounts of previous European navigators, adding new islands to the growing map of the Pacific, and disproving the myth of the existence of a great southern continent in the Pacific, these travel bug ships are welcome to take a more random voyage through the Pacific.

Also, if you have read any great books on Captain Cook or New Zealand, please post them. The one that gave me this idea was, Captain Cook - A Legacy Under Fire by Vanessa Collingridge 2002.


My apologies for the size of these hitchhikers and to any Cook purists picking this up for symbolizing Cook's HMS ships with toy pirate ships, but it was extremely difficult to obtain small cache-sized ship replicas from Colorado.