What Happened to Christopher Columbus’s Ships?

Christopher Columbus led four separate expeditions to the Americas. His maiden voyage began in 1492 aboard the famous trio of ships known as the Niña, Pinta and Santa María. In total, more than 25 different ships sailed with Columbus and at least nine of them were shipwrecked in the Caribbean, including the original Santa María.

Incredibly, in the 500 years since Columbus’s last voyage, not one of those ships has been found.

That isn’t for lack of trying. Locating a confirmed wreck of a Columbus ship—particularly one of the three ships from the first voyage—is considered the “Holy Grail” of undersea archaeology and an irresistible lure for treasure hunters. Chalk it up to the Columbus mystique, says James Delgado, a veteran underwater archaeologist and author.

“There's an aspect of archaeology that reflects a human need to go back to certain moments in history that reflect strongly held beliefs and national narratives,” says Delgado. “Columbus and his voyage opening up the New World was one of those iconic moments and hence those wrecks took on their own iconic status. It's part of our culture, no matter what part of the world you live in, to say, ‘I found it.’”

In 2014, underwater explorer Barry Clifford made international headlines when he claimed to have located the remains of the Santa María off the coast of Haiti. Months later, a team from UNESCO insisted that the wreck couldn’t be the Santa María because there was evidence of shipbuilding technologies that didn’t exist until two centuries later.

Not everybody is convinced, however, that the wreck identified as the Santa María wasn’t the real thing, including Charles Beeker, a shipwreck archaeologist and director of the Center for Underwater Science at Indiana University.

“When you think of Columbus ships, the Holy Grail is going to be someone proving they’ve got the Santa María,” says Beeker, who visited the alleged Haiti wreck himself.

Despite their fame, it’s not really a surprise that none of Columbus’s ships have been found. Beeker says that fewer than 20 shipwrecks dating to the Columbus era—the 16th century or earlier—have been discovered in the Americas. And by the time archaeologists get to those centuries-old wrecks, they’ve often been stripped bare by treasure hunters.

“The approach has not been one of a careful biopsy,” says Delgado, author of The Great Museum of the Sea: A Human History of Shipwrecks. “Somebody's gone in to see if it's full of coins.”

As a result, very little is known about the actual construction and operation of Columbus-era ships like the Niña, Pinta and Santa María beyond what’s written in Columbus’s diary and recorded in 15th-century ledgers.

Even the names of the three original ships changed over time. The Niña, a small and speedy caravel, was originally called the Santa Clara, named after the patron saint of Moguer, Spain, where she was built. When Columbus bought the 50-foot ship from its owner, Juan Niño, the crew nicknamed her the Niña or “little girl.”

The Pinta, another small caravel, was known only by her nickname “the painted one,” and her original name was lost. The Santa María’s original name was La Gallega or the Santa Gallega, because she was built in the Galicia region of Spain. The slower-moving Santa María was a bulkier type of cargo ship called a nao that likely had a carrying capacity of 110 tons compared with 60 tons each for the Niña and Pinta.

Of the three original Columbus ships, historians know the most about the Niña, sometimes called Columbus’s “favorite” caravel.

The Niña was the only ship from Columbus’s first voyage to return with him for his second and third expeditions. The Niña survived a 1495 hurricane that sank several of Columbus’s second-voyage ships, and she may have even been the ship that carried Columbus back to Spain in chains after his disastrous run as the governor of colonial Santo Domingo (now in the Dominican Republic).

According to a 15th-century Spanish ledger called the “Libro de Armadas,” Columbus ordered the sale of his faithful Niña in October 1499 to a man named Diego Ortiz. After that, she sailed into obscurity.

“The Niña just got lost to history,” says Beeker. “It was never documented as wrecking, though.”

The Pinta gained fame as the first of Columbus’s ships to return to Europe carrying news of his momentous discovery. On March 1, 1493, the Pinta docked at the seaside village of Baiona, Spain, arriving three days before Columbus reached Lisbon aboard the Niña.

There was a ship named the Pinta that sailed on Columbus’s second voyage, but scholars are split on whether it was the same vessel. The fate of the original Pinta is unknown, although 1970s treasure hunters thought they found her shipwrecked remains near the Turks and Caicos Islands. An archaeological team from Texas A&M University was contracted to explore the wreck, but before they could get to work, the site was dynamited by treasure hunters looking for Spanish gold.

The Turks and Caicos site, now known as the Molasses Reef Wreck, is the oldest documented European shipwreck in the Western Hemisphere—it sank in 1513—but it’s not the Pinta.

The Santa María was the only one of Columbus’s original three vessels that was confirmed to have wrecked during the maiden voyage, which makes it the best candidate for being found.

On Christmas Eve 1492, an exhausted Columbus and his men boarded the Santa María after two days of “partying” with the Indigenous Taíno people on Hispaniola, says Beeker. “Columbus went to bed, as did most of the officers and crew, and they left a cabin boy at the tiller, but he fell asleep.”

In the early morning hours of Christmas Day, the Santa María gently ran aground on a barrier reef off the coast of modern-day Haiti. Columbus ordered the ship’s master, Juan de la Cosa, to row a longboat into deeper waters carrying one of Santa María's anchors. By dropping anchor, the crew hoped to use the anchor cable as a towline to pull the stranded ship free.

But de la Cosa decided he was done with Columbus, so he directed the longboat to the Niña, where he asked for refuge. In the meantime, the Santa María was pushed farther up onto the sharp coral reef, which eventually breached the hull. As the Santa María slowly filled with water, Columbus ordered everything that could be salvaged—not only supplies, but also wood planks from the deck and hull—to be taken ashore, where the men built a small fort they appropriately named La Navidad.

When Columbus sailed back to Spain on the Niña, he left 39 men behind at La Navidad. When he returned a year later, they were all dead—likely victims of a Taíno attack—and the fort had been burned to the ground.

Before Columbus went to sleep that fateful Christmas Eve in 1492, he noted the Santa María’s approximate location in his captain’s log, about a league from Picolet Point near the modern port city of Cap-Haitien.

In 1955, an American explorer named Edwin Link traveled to Haiti in search of the sunken Santa María. He didn’t find the ship, but he recovered a coral-crusted anchor in Cap-Haitien Harbor that he believed belonged to Columbus’s flagship. The anchor ended up at the Smithsonian, where head curator Mendel Peterson agreed there was "good reason to believe” it came from “this long lost and famous ship.”

A few years ago, Beeker convinced the Smithsonian to let him see Link's anchor, which had been kept in deep storage since 1960.

“I was allowed to take pictures, but they wouldn’t let me touch it,” says Beeker. “I'll never forget... I'm on one end of the anchor and the Smithsonian archaeologist is on the other. He's getting ready to put the lid back on and he says, ‘You're overthinking this anchor. You don't know it's from the Santa María.’ And I said, ‘I'm not saying it is. The guy who had your job said it was.’”

There are at least two other anchors that allegedly come from the Santa María: one is displayed at the Haitian national museum in Port-au-Prince and the other is housed in the Dominican Republic at a cross-shaped monument to Columbus called the Faro a Colón. While the anchors are undoubtedly old, it's impossible to tell if they came from the Santa María.

“Unless [the anchor] actually has the ship's name stamped into it, no,” says Delgado. “And anchors are notorious... I've seen 20th-century wrecks with 19th-century anchors on them.”

In 2014, professional explorer and treasure hunter Barry Clifford announced that he had found the wreckage of the Santa María in 15 feet of water off the coast of Cap-Haitien. He called the discovery his “Mount Everest.”

Clifford had initially found the site a decade earlier, but failed to connect the undersea artifacts—which included broken pieces of a cannon—with the Santa María. By the time Clifford returned, the cannon was gone, but there was still a telltale pile of river rocks on the seafloor, which 15th-century mariners loaded in their hulls as ballast.

Beeker visited the Haiti shipwreck site in 2014 and was intrigued. “I've always maintained that I'm not saying it is [the Santa María], but I'm not saying it's not,” Beeker says. “I saw no evidence to say it was or wasn't.”

Clifford was planning an extensive archaeological study of the Santa María site, but the Haitian government asked UNESCO to weigh in first. Archaeologists with the international agency focused on some bronze pins and fasteners recovered from the site, which they said were “uncontestable proof” that the wreck was from a “much later period.”

Beeker sharply disagrees with UNESCO’s conclusions, especially about the existence of bronze fasteners.

“I'm a professional archaeologist and I'm telling you that the UNESCO report was not thorough, and it was misleading, and I think it needs an investigation,” says Beeker. “Bronze has been around a long time—the Vikings used bronze fasteners! Just because there are bronze fasteners on the site doesn't discount it as being the Santa Maria."

The UNESCO report effectively sank Clifford’s hopes for an archaeological study, but Beeker thinks that the Haiti site deserves a second look. Under the river rocks, there might be wood from the hull of a ship, which could be analyzed and dated to at least within a century, and there could be buried artifacts, too. Alas, Beeker worries that none of that will happen, since the Haitian government is so unstable.

Delgado also thinks that the Haiti shipwreck deserves to be investigated further, but not because he believes it’s the Santa María.

“It deserves a second look, because, as I’ve said, we don't have that many shipwrecks from this time period—a period that fundamentally changed the world in which we live,” says Delgado, adding that the hardest game in the field of underwater archaeology is “pin the name on the wreck.”

“You're talking about small vessels that in most cases didn't sink intact,” says Delgado. “They were heavily salvaged and things were recovered to help survive or to build ashore. That process of stripping leaves you with very little that might jump out and say this is that ship as opposed to any other ship of the period.”