US/INTERNATIONAL PROJECTS
QUEST FOR SANTA MARIA, HAITI
In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail with three ships and ninety men on an epic voyage that has been described by the eminent Harvard historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, as the single most important event in secular human history.
Their flagship, Santa Maria, wrecked on a reef off the coast of Haiti at precisely midnight on Christmas Eve, 1492. Thirty-nine of Columbus’s crew stayed behind at “Fort Navidad”—the first Christian settlement in the New World.While this event marks the beginning of the conquest of the New World, the gravesite of perhaps the most important shipwreck in the Western Hemisphere remains lost.
For the past four years, underwater explorer Barry Clifford and his team have searched for this history-making vessel.
This exhaustive quest has included detailed historical research (including Barry Clifford’s re-interpretation of a new translation of Columbus’s Diario), extensive remote-sensing surveys, and intensive visual examination of Cap Haitian Bay. Much of this work was conducted as part of a 2004 Discovery Channel “Quest” documentary.
All possible locations have been eliminated, with the exception of a single reef. This reef agrees exactly with Columbus’s account as it is 4.2 nautical miles from the site of Fort Navidad, as identified by Dr. Kathy Deagan, of Florida State University, who participated in the Discovery Channel “Quest” project.
Examination of this reef revealed the ballast piles of at least three ancient ship wrecks—one of which is believed to be Santa Maria (archaeological reports available upon request).
Interrupted by political unrest in 2004, the task of conclusively identifying Santa Maria is expected to resume in 2006.
This will be a painstaking scientific process. Besides the task of surveying the distribution of shipwreck materials, laboratory-testing processes such as dendochronology, metallurgical analysis, ballast stone lithology, carbon-14 analysis, atomic absorption spectrometry, and comparative ceramic studies will be required.
Artifacts will remain part of the Haitian national patrimony after they have undergone diagnostic artifact analysis. As part of this analysis, all recovered artifacts examined as part of the identification process will also require conservation treatment to prevent deterioration.
Additional contributions are urgently needed in order to assure the continued funding of this project—whose success will bring to the world a touchstone to history’s most significant voyage.
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©2008 Center for Historic Shipwreck Preservation, Inc.
