COLUMBUS REDISCOVERED ancestry and ancestor herself to the modem sailing ship: "By this time the characteristics of rig and construction of ships of Northern and Southern Europe were becoming rapidly similar and the nao that developed showed a trend toward the galleon and navio of the next century." Some things were easy to see. (Though others had not always found them so!) First, that Santa Maria was a nao: Columbus in the journal of his 1492 voyage called her that 81 times, calling Nina and Pinta "caravel" 97 times and never once confusing the two terms. Basic sail plan also came straight from the source, since Columbus had noted on Wednesday, October 24, 1492 that he had set "all the sails of the nao: mainsail with two bonnets and the fore course, spritsail and mizzen, and a topsail. " Even the phraseology helps-the topsai I appearing as the afterthought it still was in this era. Among artists of the day, Martinez-Hidalgo pays special tribute to Carpaccio (whose painting of Mediterranean carracks of Columbus's time adorned the cover of Sea History 53). He studied the Matar6 model of a Catalan ship of around 1450, and collaborated in building an exact replica model. As Chapelle pointed out in his introduction to MartinezHidalgo ' s work, building models is an important step toward getting at the shape and characteristics of these ships. And the building of a full-size Santa Maria for the World ' s Fair of 1964 to plans by Martinez-Hidalgo "gave additional information and corrections which would not be possible had only a model been built." Chap visited that 1964 Santa Maria, built to the order of Lawrence Vineburgh, during its construction, as a consultant provided by the Smithsonian Institution. He noted that it, and the design of the caravels Nina and Pinta were "advances on previous efforts, in all respects." This 1964 Santa Maria visited the NMHS pier at Fulton Ferry Landing, Brooklyn, in the late 1970s. I remember walking her decks and tweaking on running rigging. She had the smell of a proper seagoing vessel-which is what she was. I regret I never sailed in her before she was later lost to fire. The good news today is that a new Santa Maria, and a Pinta and a Nina were built to Martinez-Hidalgo's designs and launched in Spain last autumn. They are now undergoing sea trials and will cruise in European waters before making the transatlantic passage in the spring of 1991-aossing a year early so that they can carry an educational message up and down the American coasts before 1992. What will they have to tell us? They'll speak to us of the difficulties and splendors of Columbus's dream, and of the seafaring heritage that unites the Spanish people with the people of the Americas today, as King Juan Carlos V eloquently sets forth for us in the introduction to this article on page 17. They have to tell us, too, of the encounterofthe European and Indian peoples, an encounter whose full consequences Americans are perhaps only now beginning to take full account of-an accounting we shall be pursuing in these pages. But at this moment to which our story has brought us in the spring of 1492, with Columbus preparing for sea, we can clearly see in his three ships a gathering up of the seafaring ideas, energies and abilities of the European world, drawn together by a dreamer with the will to bind them to his purpose.
.v .v .v Norn: A reading list, maps of the ocean world as it was seen in Columbus's time, and an account of his early life and the world he sailed in are to be found in the preceding Sea History 53, available from NMHS, PO Box 646 , Croton NY 10520. 22
The Matar6 Ship:
An Amazing Survivor from the Age of Discovery
Built over 500 years ago, probably around 1450, to hang in a church in San Matar6, Catalonia, in the northern part of Spain 's Mediterranean coast, the 3 1/2-foot model we know as the Matar6 ship was intended as a votive offering to God, to assure safe passage to the actual ships she was patterned on. Clearly the work of a master shipwright, this little shipintended to sail into eternity-reflects the known shipbuilding practices of the day, with oddities hitherto unknown to us, such as a keelson laid on top of floor timbers that cross the keel. From her we learn also that ceiling (the second skin of planking inside the frames) had not yet come into use in Catalonia in this time-and probably not elsewhere, for Catalonia, facing out on the Mediterranean across from Genoa to the east, was one of the three or four most advanced Mediterranean seafaring states in this time. These details and others have been recovered by master technicians at the Prins Hendrick Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, where the model is undergoing study and restoration
A ship ofColumbus' s era--or actually a little before-survives! This is the votive model of a Catalonian ship , called the Matar6 ship , which was hung from the roof of a church north ofBarcelona in about 1450. She is a little more primitive than Columbus's Santa Maria. Courtesy Prins Henrick Maritime Museum , Rotterdam.
today. Interior details have been viewed by means of a medical camera. These hidden details of construction are beautifully executed. To meet the rigors of seafaring, the parts had to fit snugly and strongly in the actual ship the model is patterned on-and this was not a job to be scamped when built for the creator of heaven and earth and the seas! In all her external features, the model confirms shipbuilding styles and practices evident in such surviving visual evidence as the paintings of Renaissance artist Vittore Carpaccio. In the quest for historical truth, this kind of confirmation is just as important as demolishing old myths. Such vessels as this model and the actual recovered hull of a 1300s Bremen cog and the Swedish warship Vasa of 1627 show that modem artists, correcting what they thought to be the flights of fancy of contemporary ship portraitists, tend to represent these ships with too flat a sheer! Jose Maria Martinez-Hidalgo, who studied the Matar6 ship closely, was able to extrapolate from this model the probable shape of the Santa Maria, a slightly larger nao of the same basic root built on the northwest Atlantic coast of Spain perhaps thirty to forty years later. D SEA HISTORY 54, SUMMER 1990