Sam Jones: Spain logs hundreds of shipwrecks that tell story of maritime past
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.
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... read more:
