severed end of the shank showed it to be roughly broken, 

 the soft condition of the corroded metal in its core testify- 

 ing to an invasion of salt water sometime in the past, when 

 the fractm'e had occurred. 



Ed had seen enough to feel very certain that we had 

 a Columbus-period anchor. But would we ever know 

 whether it had indeed come from the Santa Maria? 



Strangely, he had discovered, when he went to loosen 

 it from the bottom, so that it could be raised, that it was 

 aheady lying free. Most assuredly, an anchor nearly five 

 hundred years old and as thickly covered with coral as this 

 one would have been cemented so securely to the spot 

 where it lay that nothing less than a charge of dynamite 

 could remove it. Unless it had been buried in sand. How, 

 then, did it get to the location where we had found it, on 

 a hard-coral bottom? 



Then I recalled the numerous woven-cane fish traps 

 of the natives, which we had seen on almost every reef, 

 weighted to the bottom with large rocks or whatever heavy 

 objects could be secured for the purpose. I remembered 

 watching that first day on the reefs as a sturdy fisherman 

 dove over the side of his crude sailing craft to inspect a 

 fish trap near Sea Diver's anchorage. He had come up with 

 two conch shells from a fathometer-measured depth of 

 forty-five feet. Was it not possible that sometime in the 

 past another fisherman had snagged and transported this 

 broken anchor to the spot where we had found it? 



This led to further speculation. Perhaps the anchor 

 had lain in sand with only its ring and upper part cemented 

 in the coral. Then, after hundreds of years of corrosive 

 action, a strong pull from the surface on its lower part 

 had caused the shank to break under the strain, Ed had al- 

 ready remarked that the coral which covered the anchor 

 was a sand-formed encrustation. 



Granting that such a thing might have occurred, and 



Search for the Santa Maria 215 



