The Voyage of the Vizcaina The Mystery of Christopher Columbus's Last Ship [Paperback]

Of all the great seafaring vessels of the Age of Discovery, not one has been recovered or evengiven the lack of detailed contemporary descriptionsaccurately represented. Then, in the mid-1990s, a sunken ship was found in a small, shallow gulf off the coast of Panama. Chronicling both dramatic history and present-day archaeological adventures, Klaus Brinkb?umer and Clemens H?ges reveal this artifact to be not only the oldest shipwreck ever recovered in the Western Hemisphere but also very likely the remains of the Vizca?na, one of the ships Christopher Columbus took on his last trip to the New World. The Voyage of the Vizca?na gives us an exciting tale of exploration and discovery, and the startling truths behind Columbuss final attempt to reach the East by going west.

Between 1492 and 1504, Christopher Columbus made four attempts to find the East by heading West. In the process he lost a fair number of ships; on his last journey alone he lost no fewer than four. Although Columbus also left written documentation of where his boats had gone down, no one has been able to locate even one of the wrecks. (His reports were probably inaccurate, perhaps willfully so--he was frequently less than truthful about his adventures in the New World.) In the mid-1990s, an American expatriate living in Panama—an aging surfer dude who ran a Scuba-diving outfitting shop and diving school—a Panamanian real estate agent, and an American on vacation with his son all claimed to have been the first to locate the remains of a small ship lying in fairly shallow waters in a small gulf in Panama. No one took the discovery seriously, since it had not been made by a team of established archeologists and scientists. Finally, in 2002, the authors of this book--journalists and amateur divers--decided to investigate. They organized a team of American scientists, all of them experts in carbon dating and underwater shipwrecks, who established not only that the Panama wreck lƒ"