~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Spanish culture ministry has begun an inventory of
shipwrecks in the Americas, identifying 681 vessels that sank between 1492 and
1898
Over the following four centuries,
as Spain’s maritime empire swelled, peaked and collapsed, the waves on which it
was built devoured hundreds of ships and thousands of people, swallowing gold,
silver and emeralds and scattering spices, mercury and cochineal to the
currents.
Today, three researchers working for
the Spanish culture ministry have finished the initial phase of a project to
catalogue the wrecks of the ships that forged and maintained the empire.
Led by an archaeologist, Carlos
León, the team has logged 681 shipwrecks off Cuba, Panama, the Dominican
Republic, Haiti, Bermuda, the Bahamas and the US Atlantic coast.
Its inventory runs from the sinking
of the Santa María to July 1898, when the Spanish destroyer Plutón was hit by a
US boat off Cuba, heralding the end of the Spanish-American war and the twilight
of Spain’s imperial age.
After spending five years scouring
archives in Seville and Madrid, León, his fellow archaeologist Beatriz Domingo
and the naval historian Genoveva Enríquez have put together a list aimed at
safeguarding the future and shedding light on the past.
“We had two fundamental objectives,”
says León. “One was to come up with a tool that can be used for identifying and
protecting
The treacherous waters of the
Americas had their first taste of Spanish timber on Christmas Day 1492, when
Christopher Columbus’ flagship, the Santa María, sank off the coast of what is now Haiti.
“The other was to recover a bit of
history that’s been very much forgotten. The most famous ships have been
investigated, but there’s a huge number about which we know absolutely nothing.
We don’t know how they sank, or how deep.”
The information gathered would help
the team to find out what navigation was like at the time, he said.
The team’s research will thrill
historians and cartographers, but is unlikely to delight those who harbour
romantic notions about doubloons, parrots and Jolly Rogers.
It found that 91.2% of ships were
sunk by severe weather – mainly tropical storms and hurricanes – 4.3% ran on to
reefs or had other navigational problems, and 1.4% were lost to naval
engagements with British, Dutch or US ships. A mere 0.8% were sunk in pirate
attacks.
Archaeologists have located the
remains of fewer than a quarter of the 681 vessels on the inventory to date.
León, Domingo and Enríquez were
surprised to come across 12 areas with particularly high concentrations of
wrecks in Panama, the Dominican Republic and the Florida Keys. Instead of the
expected two or three wrecks per bay, they discovered as many as 18.
“Some of these areas, like Damas bay
in Panama, are very open,” says León. “There were huge annual trade festivals
there from the 16th century to the mid-17th and that attracted a massive amount
of maritime traffic. It’s not a very protected area and so when a storm came
in, the ships sank.”
Or, to put it in more modern terms:
“It was like a motorway. It’s not very deep there, either. And ships are a bit
like aeroplanes. They usually go down on take-off or landing.”
Treasure hunters tend to be more
interested in ships that came to grief on their way back from the Americas, but
León and his colleagues say the ill-fated outward-bound vessels are just as
compelling.
“The cargo they carried speaks of a
massive amount of trade,” says the archaeologist. “But it’s not just about
products and trade. These ships were also carrying ideas. We were surprised to
find a lot of boats loaded with religious objects – relics, decorations and
even stones to build churches.”
Their findings,
however, go beyond cutlasses and crucifixes, and help to explain how Spain
succeeded in enriching itself for centuries.
As well as the “tonnes and tonnes”
of mercury sent to the new world to be used in extracting gold and silver from the mines that fed the
empire, “we found boats that were carrying clothes for slaves”.
Others carried weapons to be used in putting down local rebellions.
The researchers now plan to transfer
the paper inventory to a database that the Spanish government can share with countries
with colonial shipwrecks in their waters. León hopes the information his team
has gathered will give those countries what they need to safeguard their
maritime heritage against unscrupulous treasure hunters who all too often use
salvage permits as a cover for more profitable explorations.
“We have to be very careful about
the details and positions of some of the ships,” he says. “But the ministry
works with countries that have ratified the 2001 Unesco convention [on the protection of the underwater cultural heritage], so they should be countries that
aren’t going to use this information to make deals with treasure-hunting
firms.”
Anyway, he adds, the big
treasure-hunting outfits will not be interested in most of the wrecks on the inventory.
“It’s true that the big treasure-hunting firms have spent years doing what
we’ve been doing, but only when it comes to the ships that carried huge
treasure loads. I don’t think we’d be helping them out much, to be honest.”
The three researchers are now
preparing for another deep dive, into the archives and libraries. The Spanish
empire was, after all, a very, very large one. “We’ve still got many more areas
to go,” says León. “Next year, I’d like to work on Mexico, Colombia, Puerto
Rico and Costa Rica so as to kind of finish up the Caribbean area. After that’s
it’s on to the Pacific.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Should information surface (pun intended!) about their finds - without, of course, locations - we will make it available to our readers..
Until next time,
Fair Winds,
Old Salt
No comments:
Post a Comment