Historian Traces Clues About the Nina : In Search of Columbus’ ‘Little Girl’

Its name, rarely mentioned apart from the Santa Maria and the Pinta, is immortal in the annals of exploration: Nina --little girl.

It was Christopher Columbus’ favorite ship. Among the most advanced of its day, it proved sea-kindly and swift on his first voyage to the New World. And, after his flagship, Santa Maria, ran aground on Christmas Day, 1492, it carried the discoverer through a fierce mid-Atlantic winter storm safely and triumphantly home to Spain.

What happened to the Nina after that famous first voyage? What did it look like? For nearly 500 years, its appearance has been assumed from early 16th-Century drawings. Little is known about the Spanish caravels of discovery.

Searching for information on the early Spanish shipping system in Spain’s Archive of the Indies in Seville, historian Eugene Lyon examined a 400-page bundle of documents called the “Libro de Armadas.” It described the sending of several caravel fleets to the New World between 1495 and 1500.

At First, Not Aware

“When I saw her name on the aged paper before me, I did not immediately grasp its significance,” Lyon, an expert in old Spanish documents, reports in the November National Geographic.

“Nina, also known as Santa Clara.” Could this be Columbus’ “little girl?” It was nicknamed Nina because it was first the property of Juan Nino. It was formally Santa Clara, after the patron saint of the town (Moguer) where it was built.

The bundle of documents included details of the Nina’s cargo, sails, rigging, and other equipment in 1498, the year of Columbus’ third voyage to the New World. Nina, the papers revealed, had four masts, instead of two or three as has always been depicted.

Most historians, including Lyon, believe the first- and second-voyage Ninas were one and the same. A five-year investigation by National Geographic magazine, also reported in its November issue, has concluded that the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria first anchored in the New World at Samana Cay in the Bahamas in 1492.

Belief in Asia

On the second voyage, which left Spain in September, 1493, the Nina was among the flotilla of 17 vessels. Convinced that Cuba was the Asia he sought, Columbus “aboard the caravel Nina, also known as Santa Clara,” on June 12, 1494, required all his crews to swear to their belief about reaching the Asian mainland.

In August, 1495, the sturdy Nina was badly damaged in a hurricane off the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). The documents mention “Nina, which was remade in the Indies.” On her return to Spain in 1496, the Nina brought back New World goods: gold, wood, cotton and a barrel of sand. Columbus thought the sand was a precious ore.

Next, apparently without Columbus’ approval, the Nina was sent to Rome on a commercial voyage in 1497 and was hijacked off the coast of Sardinia by a French pirate. The crew, through bribery, escaped and returned the ship safely to Spain. An angry Columbus recovered it.

Finally preparing for his third voyage to the New World, Columbus decided to send the Nina and its companion ship Santa Cruz ahead to Hispaniola in early February, 1498, with much-needed supplies. To pay his seamen, the documents disclose, Columbus used funds he was to have taken to Hispaniola, hoping to balance the books with gold to be found there.

40 Days of Repair

The Nina received new sails, a new 200-pound anchor, and cartloads of planking. Caulkers worked 40 days on its deck and hull.

Finally, the documents say, it was refitted and fully laden: 18 tons of wheat, 17 tons of wine in great pipe barrels, about 7 tons of sea biscuit, almost 2 tons of flour, more than 2,000 pounds of cheese and a ton of salt pork. Also aboard for the colonists were olive oil, sardines, raisins and garlic.

From a ship’s loaded cargo, it is possible to estimate the dimensions of its hold, and thus its hull. Lyon calculated the Nina’s 1498 Indies lading at just over 52 tons. The ship appears, therefore, to have been 67 feet long, with a beam of 21 feet and a draft of just under 7 feet. Its total carrying capacity was 58 to 60 tons.

For this third voyage, Columbus had received permission to take as many as 330 persons to the Indies on royal salary. The Nina and the Santa Cruz carried more than 90 of them, including farmers and stockmen, crossbowmen, a priest, locksmith, miner and surgeon.

Women Emigrants

Two of the four women aboard were Gypsies named Catalina and Maria, convicted murderers freed by the crown on condition that they emigrate.

The Nina was armed with 10 bombardas with their breechblocks, turning yokes, bolts, and wedges, as well as 80 lead balls, 54 short and 20 long lances and 100 pounds of gunpowder.

The Nina carried three anchors, a small boat with six oars and 11 water casks. According to the documents, its sails included a worn mainsail, an old foresail, an old mizzen sail and a half-worn countermizzen sail. The countermizzen, which indicates two masts after of the main mast, was Lyon’s clue to the existence of the Nina’s four masts.

Lyon is in the process of translating all 400 pages of the “Libro de Armadas,” under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the University of Florida.

“Unfortunately,” he writes, “it will not solve the mystery of Nina’s final end.” The documents record the Nina’s apparent sale to a Diego Ortiz in October, 1499. And that, Lyon says, is the last glimpse of the beloved “little girl.