We were surprised to find a lot of boats loaded with religious objects – relics, decorations and even stones to build churches.”Ĭaravels of Christopher Columbus setting off for the Indies in 1492, by Rafael Monleon y Torres. “But it’s not just about products and trade. “The cargo they carried speaks of a massive amount of trade,” says the archaeologist. 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. They usually go down on take-off or landing.” Or, to put it in more modern terms: “It was like a motorway. It’s not a very protected area and so when a storm came in, the ships sank.” “There were huge annual trade festivals there from the 16th century to the mid-17th and that attracted a massive amount of maritime traffic. “Some of these areas, like Damas bay in Panama, are very open,” says León. Instead of the expected two or three wrecks per bay, they discovered as many as 18. 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. A mere 0.8% were sunk in pirate attacks.Īrchaeologists have located the remains of fewer than a quarter of the 681 vessels on the inventory to date.

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. 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. The information gathered would help the team to find out what navigation was like at the time, he said. We don’t know how they sank, or how deep.” The most famous ships have been investigated, but there’s a huge number about which we know absolutely nothing. “The other was to recover a bit of history that’s been very much forgotten. Ships are a bit like aeroplanes – they usually go down on take-off or landing Carlos León, archaeologist “One was to come up with a tool that can be used for identifying and protecting wreck sites – especially in areas where there’s a high concentration of sunken ships. “We had two fundamental objectives,” says León. 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.Īfter 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. 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.

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.

Crossword puzzle galleon cargo