to hold them in place. The particular lombard we had 

 found was broken into sections. Apparently we had failed 

 to recover the one or two additional sections which would 

 make it complete. 



Just such a piece of armament had announced to 

 Christopher Columbus aboard the Santa Maria that land 

 had been sighted from the Pinta, as his small fleet ap- 

 proached the Bahama islands on that historic voyage west- 

 ward in 1492. Pete said that these parts which we had 

 found probably dated back to within sixty years of Co- 

 lumbus's discovery of America and, as far as he knew, rep- 

 resented the only lombard in existence today which had 

 been found within the American continents. 



He was insistent that at the first opportunity we must 

 return to Burrows cay to see if we could recover the miss- 

 ing parts of the gun. In the meantime he would send the 

 two pieces to the Smithsonian, where the long process of 

 curing and preserving them could be begun. 



Pete also examined with interest other things we had 

 found at Burrows cay: broken bits of brown pottery, now- 

 crumbled bits of taiTed hempen line, and a misshapen 

 hollow metal ball with a fuse hole in the end. From these 

 various small artifacts he deduced that there were two 

 separate wrecks upon the same spot, the earlier wreck 

 bearing the Columbus-period lombards, and the later one, 

 probably eighteenth century, containing the grenade, the 

 tarred line and the pottery. 



So our voyage had not been a complete failure after 

 all. Ed was sure we would be able to recover the additional 

 section of the lombard, although, he said, we probably 

 would not be back in that part of the Bahamas again until 

 the following year. 



Unwittingly, we had found a sample of armament 

 long since relegated to history. Thus were sown in us the 

 first seeds which were to result in the climaxing voyage of 



124 Sea Diver 



