This is a multiple part question. The first five questions are complete in themselves and the answers are all names of British and US ships. The five form a group that you can work out (guess?) once you have answered all five. If there are one or two that you cannot answer then finding what the group is may make it simple.

The final part of the quiz is to say how the group of five names differ from that of a fictional US space ship.

Q 1.

An easy start to the quiz. What is the name of the ship that Captain James Cook used in his first expedition to explore the South Pacific including Australia and New Zealand between 1768 and 1771?

Q 2.

This ship was the main research vessel of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It has been replaced by a vessel bearing the same name.

Clue: where (mythologically) might they search for under the ocean? No not the Titanic – somewhere much bigger than a sunken ship!

Q 3.

Just 101 years ago this week the men realised that their race had been lost. The ship that had taken them to the start of the journey they would never complete was called the Terra Nova, but your task is to name the ship in the earlier 1901-04 expedition.

Q 4.

What the Pelican was for England this ship was for the USA. It may help you to remember that the Pelican was renamed the Golden Hind.

Q 5.

This British ship started life as a warship in Australia and ended as a training ‘hulk’ in the River Medway – but in the 1870s had a glorious life as the home of the world’s first global marine expedition and after which a modern marine research ship was named.

Q 6.

Now you have all five questions and should have named some (even all five) ships. If you have the answers right then they should make sense as a single group – of what?

And now you need to say how this group of five differs from that fictional US space ship.

Enjoy!