bers must have disappeared, eaten by teredo worms, loos- 

 ened and washed away in rough seas, or possibly covered 

 with sand. There could have been little metal on this early 

 ship — a few cannon; cannon balls, if they had not been 

 removed by the survivors; possibly an anchor or two; and 

 a limited number of fastenings and spikes, which would 

 have held the key timbers together. The only other in- 

 dication which might be visible from the surface would 

 be the ballast stone which the Santa Maria must have car- 

 ried. 



And then Captain Weems and I thought we saw them! 

 A scattering of irregular-shaped rocks! We were past them 

 before we could be sure, so we asked Kemp to turn back 

 over the spot once more. Yes, it was ballast stone, accord- 

 ing to Ed, who came in from the cockpit to verify our find. 

 The stones were scattered over a wide area, and only in 

 one place, where the bottom coral seemed to be broken 

 away, could they be seen in any quantity. I also saw some 

 coral-covered shapes at the edge of this break, which, it 

 was easy to conjecture, might be the stock of an anchor 

 or metal fittings from the ship. From the look of the coral 

 at this spot, Ed surmised it must be a very old wreck. 



At this point he returned to the cockpit to ascertain 

 our exact location on the reef. He found that we were on 

 the northwest side of the first reef, a most logical place for 

 a vessel to strike, coming in from the open sea in the dead 

 of night as Columbus had. A later check showed it to be 

 almost exactly on one of the spots selected by Dr. Morison 

 as a likely place for the Santa Maria to have gone down. 



Our hopes were high, that Easter Sunday noon, that 

 we had found the historic flagship. Earlier, in making our 

 plans, we had acknowledged that we were apt to find the 

 remains of several wrecks in this area, and that our problem 

 might be to ascertain which was that of the Santa Maria. 

 Surprisingly, this was the only bit of wreckage we had 



Search for the Santa Maria 185 



