Columbus’ Last Ships Sought in a Jamaica Bay

When he set sail with four small caravels on his final trip to the New World in 1502, the much-maligned Christopher Columbus confidently expected to find his long-sought shortcut to Asia and emerge from the disgrace that less than two years before had seen him stripped of honors and clapped in chains.

Instead, with two leaking caravels already abandoned in Panama after a year of perilous wandering, and the remaining two no longer seaworthy, the ailing 52-year-old admiral and his mutinous crew barely made it to the beach in this placid, still undeveloped bay on the north coast of Jamaica.

But the ancient mariner’s misfortune--shipwrecked here for a year and five days only “a crossbow shot,” as his son phrased it, from a band of increasingly hostile Arawak Indians--may be a boon to Jamaica and a team of Texas-based marine archeologists. They believe they have found the spot where Columbus--the fabled finder of America and now controversial historic figure--ran the two caravels aground 488 years ago.

“We are 98% sure they are here,” said James M. Parrent of the Institute of Nautical Archeology at Texas A&M; University, who, in cooperation with the government of Jamaica, first began looking for the Columbus caravels in 1982.

After getting to work in earnest last summer, Parrent said, he hopes soon to unearth the keels and some of the lower hull planking of the caravels Capitana and Santiago de Palos--all that could be expected to remain after almost five centuries under the bay’s bottom--for expert study and eventual display in a Jamaica museum.

“We are charged with locating perhaps the most important historic archeological site in the New World,” said Parrent, noting that as the quincentennial of Columbus’ first voyage in 1492 approaches, no other trace has been found of the ships he sailed. Thus, to Parrent and other marine archeologists, the prospect of unearthing the caravels is more exciting than finding a gold-laden treasure ship.

Not only would they be the oldest European vessels discovered in the Western Hemisphere and the only ones actually commanded by Columbus, Parrent said, but they would solve a simple question that has plagued naval architects and historians for centuries, namely: What did a caravel look like?

The Nina and Pinta--mainstays of Columbus’ first voyage, the Spanish-underwritten expedition that launched him into much Western lore as the finder of America--were fast-sailing caravels that he preferred over the larger, more lumbering Santa Maria. Yet no reliable drawing, painting or naval architect’s plan of any of the vessels has ever been found.

“The size and shape of these ships is not known,” said Ywone Edwards, an archeologist from Jamaica’s National Heritage Trust who is working with Parrent.

She said the best guesses of their length range from 70 feet to 90 feet, about the size of a good racing yacht, and speculations concerning their other dimensions and appearance are equally imprecise.

Although divers have uncovered the wreckage of other 16th-Century vessels thought to be similar to those Columbus sailed, there remains so much uncertainty that every attempt to construct replicas, including several now under way for quincentennial celebrations, has involved guesswork, Parrent said.

“Neither naval architectural plans nor actual remains of ships known to be caravels have been found,” he said. “Important as they were to the discovery of the New World, we do not know how they were constructed.”

Expert examination of what remains of the vessels should give a clear idea of how the caravels looked when they were built, the archeologist said. And artifacts found at the sites should say much about how the increasingly frail admiral and his crew of “115 men and boys” survived for more than a year and dealt with the natives on this remote and hostile shore.

Much of the story is already known from accounts of the adventure by Columbus and his son Ferdinand, then 15. They described the beaching of the two caravels and the construction of huts on their almost-awash decks, where the admiral confined his crew to avoid conflict with the initially friendly Arawaks less than a few hundred yards away.

For a time, the Indians traded food for beads and trinkets. But they eventually tired of baubles and were angered by the marauding of 50-odd crewmen who had mutinied and rampaged ashore. The Indians abruptly cut off all supplies.

Near desperation with what remained of his starving crew, the wily admiral was inspired to study his almanac and found that a total eclipse of the moon was predicted in just three days’ time, on Feb. 29, 1504.

Columbus warned the Indians that their refusal to bring more food had so angered God that he would blot out the moon. According to young Ferdinand’s account, most of the Indians scoffed, but with “the eclipse beginning at the rising of the moon, and augmenting as she ascended, the Indians took heed and were so frightened that with great howling and lamentation they came running from every direction to the ships laden with provisions, praying the admiral to intercede by all means with God on their behalf.”

Still despairing of survival, Columbus wrote, “I came to serve at the age of 28, and now I have no hair upon me that is not white, and my body is infirm and exhausted. . . . Weep for me, whoever has charity, truth and justice!”

But, in the end, the ill-starred onetime hero of the Spanish empire was saved when his most loyal captain, Diego Mendez, courageously sailed an Indian dugout canoe to what is now the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola. After months of pleading, he brought back a rescue party on June 29, 1504.

All that now remains to write a final chapter to the tale, Parrent said, is for his crew of about a dozen specialists and archeology students to fine-tune the high-tech search of St. Ann’s Bay that they began last summer.

Using magnetometers and a one-of-a-kind sonar device called a sub-bottom profiler to try to detect the wreckage of the caravels--which may be buried under nine feet of silt, sand, mud and water--Parrent and his team narrowed the search to less than one-quarter square mile of this reef-guarded bay. They located seven suspected shipwreck sites.

Likening his quest to a detective story, Parrent said each of the sites had to be examined and assigned a high or low priority like suspects in a crime hunt. Next, along with laboratory samples of the mud and silt around them, the sites had to be restudied with fine scientific care before being discarded or deemed worthy of excavation.

One of the candidates was ruled out last summer when examination revealed it to be the remains of an 18th-Century English shipwreck. Two other possible historic shipwrecks were buried more than 15 feet deep, which Parrent said ruled them out as well. He explained that the keels of the Columbus caravels could not have rested more than seven to nine feet below the high-tide line when Columbus ran them head-on into the beach, lashed them side by side and propped them upright, awash in water.

At another site, the archeologists whooped with joy when they found two side-by-side piles of ballast stones, just as would be expected if they had come from two vessels lashed together. “We thought we had them,” said Edwards, a dry-land Jamaica archeologist who confesses to reservations about working underwater.

But spirits collapsed when close examination showed that the stones probably had been tossed overboard from the port and starboard sides of a single ship, not from two caravels standing side by side.

Probes of another site, however, have kept alive the team’s hope that their first high-tech, three-month search last summer may have zeroed in on the Columbus caravels. A core sample taken from the probes and still under study at the institute’s labs in College Station, Tex., contain very old, waterlogged wood, Parrent said. The question for the laboratory scientists is: How old? If tests of the wood sample indicate late 15th-Century origin, bingo, it may be from one of the caravels, and the painstaking task of excavation can begin.

If not, Parrent said, the search will go on for as long as the institute can go on raising private funds to finance it.

“I’ll always believe they are here, whether we find them or not,” he said.

CONTROVERSIAL EXPLORER

Christopher Columbus, an Italian trained in Portugal, was convinced that by sailing west from Europe, he could reach Asia. In 1492, he set sail in the service of Spain with three ships--the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria--and after two months at sea, sighted land, probably the Bahamas. He believed the area to be the East Indies and returned to Spain, in great glory, after only brief explorations. In his second New World voyage in 1493, he explored Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and the Venezuelan coast. He returned to Spain in 1496 to explain why the promised Asian riches had not been found. He came back to the colonies in 1498 but was arrested and shipped in chains to Spain in 1500. He made one last, unsuccessful venture to the Americas. He died in 1506, neglected and impoverished, in Spain. Although celebrated by many for his explorations, some now see him as the spark for centuries of slaughter, environmental destruction and the ruin of American Indians.