Santa María

1492

Columbus's flagship, Christmas Eve on the reef Location: off Cap-Haïtien, northern coast of Hispaniola · Coordinates: 19.79°N 72.21°W · Casualties: 0 · Survivors: all hands · Depth: broken up · Cause: grounding — Ran onto a coral reef off the north coast of Hispaniola on Christmas Eve 1492, during Columbus's first voyage to the New World. The watch had been left to a young ship's boy while the captain slept. The ship was lost but held together long enough to unload. · Fate: destroyed · timbers became La Navidad · Type: carrack · Spanish · Tonnage: ~150 tons · Crew: 40 · Flag: Crown of Castile · Launched: 1460 Christopher Columbus's flagship on the first voyage to the New World. Grounded on a reef off the north coast of Hispaniola on Christmas Eve 1492, no hands lost. Her timbers became La Navidad, the first European settlement in the Americas; a year later, returning, Columbus found the fort burned and the 39 men he had left behind dead. The wreck site has never been convincingly identified; a 2014 claim was rejected by UNESCO. The Vessel The Santa María, originally La Gallega (the Galician) after her port of build, was a Spanish carrack built at Pontevedra in Galicia around 1460. She was approximately 25 metres long, 150 tons, three-masted with square sails on the fore and main and a lateen on the mizzen, crewed by about forty men, and carried five small swivel guns for defence against corsairs. Her hull form was the standard Galician carrack of her generation: high fore- and sterncastles for fighting and shelter, a beamy midships for cargo, and a modest draft for shallow-water work. She had worked the Spanish domestic trade for thirty years before her charter to Christopher Columbus for the 1492 expedition. Her master and owner was Juan de la Cosa, a Basque navigator and cartographer who would later produce the first world map to show the Americas; she sailed from Palos de la Frontera as the flagship of Columbus's three-vessel expedition, with Pinta and Niña in company. She was the largest of the three and by virtue of that size the least manoeuvrable in the shallow Caribbean waters the expedition was about to enter. Columbus himself had reservations about the Santa María's suitability from the outset, preferring the lighter and more responsive caravel Niña. His journal, preserved in the later summary of Bartolomé de las Casas, records his assessment of the Santa María as "very clumsy and not suited for the work of discovery". He was right. The Disaster She grounded gently enough that no one aboard was injured. Columbus's immediate response, described in his journal with the bitter remark that la Cosa had fled the scene rather than help, was to send a boat to the Niña for assistance; she was nearby and came to Santa María's aid at dawn. The Taíno chief Guacanagarí on the shore sent his own people with canoes to help unload. They could not refloat her. Her keel had settled into soft sand and broken at a frame; the outgoing tide hung her higher on the reef. Columbus ordered her stripped: her timbers, mast, rigging, and most of her stores were transferred ashore over 25 and 26 December 1492. He then made a political decision that would shape the American story: rather than crowd all three crews onto Niña and Pinta for the return, he converted Santa María's salvaged timber into a fort on the Cap-Haïtien shore and left a garrison of 39 men under the command of Diego de Arana. He named the fort La Navidad (Christmas) for the day of the wreck. He provisioned it for a year from the expedition's remaining stores, armed it with the swivel guns from Santa María, and sailed for Spain on Niña on 4 January 1493. He reached Palos on 15 March 1493 to the reception that would change European history. He left 39 men at La Navidad to hold Europe's first colony in the Americas.