Sydney (AFP) – The wreck of Captain James Cook’s famed vessel the Endeavour has been found off the coast of the US state of Rhode Island, Australian researchers said Thursday. Their research partners in the United States, however, have described the announcement as premature. The Endeavour, which the British explorer sailed in an historic voyage to Australia and New Zealand between 1768 and 1771, was scuttled in Newport Harbour during the American War of Independence. For more than two centuries, it lay forgotten. “Since 1999, we have been investigating several 18th-century shipwrecks in a two…