Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria Found? Mother Of All Shipwreck Finds Likely
Christopher Columbus abandoned his flagship, the Santa Maria, somewhere in the Caribbean over 500 years ago, and now an underwater archaeologist believes he may have found the shipwreck.
According to a Yahoo! News report, explorer and underwater archaeologist Barry Clifford, who is leading what could turn out to be an historic expedition and who has referred to the find as the “Mt. Everest” of shipwrecks, had this to say about the possibility that he has discovered the shipwreck of Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria off the coast of Haiti:
“All the geographical, underwater topography and archaeological evidence strongly suggests that this wreck is Columbus’s famous flagship, the Santa Maria. The Haitian government has been extremely helpful. And we now need to continue working with them to carry out a detailed archaeological excavation of the wreck. I am confident that a full excavation of the wreck will yield the first-ever detailed marine archaeological evidence of Columbus’s discovery of America. Ideally, if excavations go well, and depending on the state of preservation of any buried timber, it may ultimately be possible to lift any surviving remains of the vessel, fully conserve them, and then put them on permanent public exhibition in a museum in Haiti.”
As most of us learned in history class, the Santa Maria was the flagship captained by Christopher Columbus in his attempts to find a sea route to India. While Columbus didn’t reach India (though he believed he had), he did open the way for exploration of the New World by European explorers. Of course, history also tells us that this discovery was disastrous for many of the New World’s indigenous people. Related Inquisitr reports also point out that Christopher Columbus likely wasn’t the first to discover the New World and that he may well have secretly been Jewish.
There is still much evidence to be considered before explorers can definitively say that the shipwreck is the Santa Maria, but Clifford has expressed the belief that he has solid reasons for believing they have indeed found the mother of all shipwrecks. According to a CNN report, much of his proof lies in identifying cannon that were aboard the shipwreck. The report also notes that the shipwreck was found in 2003, but was not believed to be Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria until additional evidence placed the dating of the cannon in the right time period.
What do you think? If this is Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria, is it indeed the mother of all shipwrecks?
