Hunt For Columbus’s Ships On Floor Of Jamaican Bay

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31754, 10 August 1968, Page 22

Hunt For Columbus’s Ships On Floor Of Jamaican Bay

BOGOTA (Colombia). French archaeologists will seek to determine whether wreckage under the sea floor of St Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, is that of two vessels abandoned by Columbus in 1503.

An announcement of the project was made in Bogota by Mauricio Obregon, a Colombian businessman, diplomat and pilot, who has been associated with it for some months.

Dr Obregon, co-author with Samuel Eliot Morison of “The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It,” holds that if the wreckage proves to be that of the caravels Capltana and Santiago, this can lead to the first authentic reconstruction of the various vessels Columbus used on his four voyages to the New World.

The archaeologists are to be ! led by Frederic Dumas, an associate of the pioneer skinI diver Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Sand will work under a conI tract with the Jamaican > Ministry of Development, Dr 1 Obregon said. Should the 'wreckage prove to be ColumI bus’s ships, it is hoped that I the Ford Foundation will help finance their excavation and j reconstruction, he added. Pieces Of Keel ! The Santa Maria, the marlj ner’s 120-to-130-foot flagship | on his first voyage, sank in ■ what is now Cap-Haitien Bay ion the north coast of Haiti, ion Christmas Day, 1492, after i being pierced by coral outI croppings. Though discoveries

of traces of the Santa Maria have been claimed, Dr Obregon dismisses the evidence as amounting to no more than “a couple of nails and a piece of anchor.”

By contrast, if the St Ann’s Bay wreckage includes pieces of keel and some ribs, the curved lines of the caravels, which had broad bows and high narrow poops, can be re-constructed rather easily. This had been done, for instance, in the case of longboats of the type in which the Norsemen reached North America 500 years before the Capitana and Santiago came to their end, riddled with toredo worms. On loan from the British Government to the Jamaican Government are two conservation experts, W. H. Bailey and Garry Thompson, Dr Obregon said, adding that without special preservation measures, long-buried remains would “go to pot in a matter of hours” on exposure to the air. No Treasure He dismisses any dreams of finding treasure “in the economic sense of the word.” When Columbus abandoned the Capitana and the Santiago he was at “perhaps the lowest point of his career”— an impoverished sailor on the beach in the Caribbean.

According to Dr Obregon and Professor Morison, contemporary accounts of Colum-

bus’s first voyage say that the Santa Maria was extensively dismantled and that her timbers were used for the construction of La Navidad, the first European settlement in the Western Hemisphere since the Norsemen. What remained of the craft was demolished in target practice, Dr Obregon says, as the Spaniards gave the Arawak Indians in what is now Haiti some cautionary demonstrations of firepower.

Nonetheless, the Indians wiped out La Navidad, near what is now Cap-Haitien, near its 40-rnan garrison before Columbus returned 11 months later on his second voyage. The St Ann’s Bay discovery was made by an American, Robert Marx, on time off from his job of uncovering the onetime pirate stronghold of Port Royal, at the entrance to Kingston Harbour for the Jamaican Government. Dr Obregon says that in St Ann’s Bay on Jamaica’s north coast, Mr Marx excavated objects, including pieces of pottery, that the Jamaica Institute has put in the Columbian period. Also found were pieces of stone that may have served as ballast and which have been identified as being of other than West Indian origin. Samples have been sent to West Germany for detailed identification. Carbon 14 tests in the United States have shown wood samples brought up by Mr Marx to date from the Columbian period or earlier. Dr Obregon says. “Large Objects’* Sonar soundings conducted by Professor Harold E. Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed two large objects beneath the sea floor where Mr Marx made his finds, Dr Obregon says. He adds that Professor Morison and a Jamaican archaeologist, Charles R. Cotter, agree that the indicated site is where the caravels could be expected to rest. According to Dr Obregon, no measurements of the two caravels are given in any of the original records of Columbus’s fourth and last voyage, but general descriptions by those who sailed on them lead to the belief that they were about 70ft long with a 23ft beam and a 9ft draft. “The Carribbean as Columbus saw it,” published in 1963, was the fruit of a series of photographic flights Professor Morison and Dr Obregon made the year before along Columbus’s routes. Dr Obregon, an honorary president of the Parisbased International Aviation Federation, piloted his own plane for the project. Professor Morison, a former member of the Harvard faculty and a naval historian, won a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Columbus, “Admiral of the Ocean Sea.” Four Caravels Columbus’s fleet for his fourth voyage consisted of four caravels. Two of them were abandoned, one trapped in an Indian attack and the other hopelessly unseaworthy, on what is now the Caribbean coast of Panama. With the other two he sailed southeast as far as Cape Tiburon, today the border between Panama and Colombia, then set sail for Hispaniola. Carried west of his intended course, he sailed through the Caymans until he reached the chain of islands off Cuba’s southern coast. From there, pumping ceaselessly to keep his wallowing, worm-eaten boats afloat, he crossed to Jamaica, familiar territory from previous voyages. At St Ann’s Bay, which he called Santa Gloria, he decided that there was no hope that the caravels could safely cross the Windward Channel and reach Santo Domingo, today the capital of the Dominican Republic. He sent picked men there in Indian canoes to get an adequate rescue vessel. During the year that passed

Columbus had to eope with an uprising among his men. The Indians ceased balking at providing food when Columbus, consulting with his nautical almanac, demonstrated his powers by staging an eclipse of the moon. Finds Described Robert F. Marx, aged 33, of Satellite Beach, Florida, said that he and associates had found what he believed to be the Capitana and Santiago. Mr Marx, a marine archaeolgist and diver who is associated with a treasure-hunting concern called the Real Eight Company, said that he had uncovered one of the ships in 8 to 10 feet of mud in St. Ann’s Bay. in 1966, and that both burled ships were located by sonar earlier this year.

He said that for three years, until June 1, he was employed by the Jamaican Government to excavate Port Royal, in Kingston, a pirate port buried by earthquake and tidal in 1692. Mr Marx said he got interested in the Capitana and Santiago as a sideline during his work on the Port Royal excavations and proposed that the Jamaican Govemmen support excavation. It lost Interest when it was told that there was no treasure involved, he added.

According to Mr Marx, he and five volunteers went diving, using charts in “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” as a starting point. Working in aqualungs, he and his crew used what he described as a large “underwater vacuum cleaner” to dig a hole in the sediment. In March, 1966, one vessel—which one is not known—was uncovered and wood from it was removed, photographed and replaced. Removed from the ship and kept for analysis were ceramics, wood, nails, ballast stone, flint and obsidian. Then the hole was refilled to keep the wreck from deteriorating. In June, Adolph Kiefer, an amateur archaeologist and former Olympic swimming champion, asserted that he was almost sure he had found the wreck of the Santa Maria. Mr Kiefer would not disclose the site, but said that it was five miles from an area that archaeologists have long considered to be the likely site. He estimated the cost to raise her at $150,000 and said that he and a partner were negotiating for funds. Beached Together Following are excerpts from the dairy of Ferdinand Columbus, who, at the age of 13, accompanied his father on the fourth voyage to the New World, in 1502-04 (from “Journals and Other Documents on the Life of Voyages of Christopher Columbus,” published in 1963 by the Heritage Press and copyright by Samuel Eliot Morison): “We were ... at anchor, 10 leagues far from Cuba, in great hunger and travail, because there was nothing left to eat but biscuit, a little oil and vinegar; and we had to work day and night with three pumps to clear the bilges; because the vessels were so worm-eaten that they were on the point of foundering. ... On the day after St. John’s Day, we set out for another harbour to the eastward called Santa Gloria, which is protected by reefs. Having got in, and no longer able to keep the ships afloat, we ran them ashore as far in as we could, grounding them close together, board to board, and shoring them up on both sides, so they could not budge. In this position the tide rose almost to the decks. Upon these, and the fore and stem castle, cabins were built where the people might lodge, intending to make them so strong that the Indians might do us no harm; for the island at that time was not inhabited by or subject to Christians.”— Copyright, 1968, “New York Times” News Service.