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Updated: May 19, 2025
If all happens that all say may happen, not the Pope's library can hold the books!" The Santa Maria was a good enough ship, though fifty men crowded it. It was new and clean, a fair sailer, though not so swift as the Pinta. We mariners settled ourselves in waist and forecastle.
The three caravels in which he sailed were typical craft of the period. The Santa Maria, the largest, was like the other two, a single-decked, lateen-rigged, three-masted vessel, with a length of about 90 feet, beam of about 20 feet, and a maximum speed of perhaps 6-1/2 knots. She was of 100 tons burden and carried 52 men. The Pinta was somewhat smaller.
It began ordinarily enough, with a west-south-west wind blowing fresh, and on a sea rather rougher than they had had lately. The people on the Santa Maria saw some petrels and a green branch in the water; the Pinta saw a reed and two small sticks carved with iron, and one or two other pieces of reeds and grasses that had been grown on shore, as well as a small board.
Three ships were provided. They were called the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina, the last of which was so small that it seemed in size little more than a modern life boat as it only had room for eighteen men.
The Nina was not close at hand, and the Pinta had gone on in front hoping to make good her mistake; but there was no doubt on board the Santa Maria that the light which they had seen was a light like a candle or a torch waved slowly up and down.
On the way to the Canaries and while stopping there, the rudder of the Pinta was twice broken; and now that the open sea was reached and they were sailing into the far west, the helmsmen tried to alter the course of the vessels so that they might not go any further.
The second caravel, the Pinta, was much swifter, built high at the prow and stern, and furnished with a forecastle for the crew and a cabin for the officers, but without a deck in the center. The third and smallest caravel, called the Nina, the Spanish word for baby, was built much like the Pinta. Ninety persons made up the three crews.
From the admiral's ship a green rush was seen to float past, and one of those green fish which never go far from the rocks. The people in the Pinta saw a cane and a staff in the water, and took up another staff very curiously carved, and a small board, and great plenty of weeds were seen which seemed to have been recently torn from the rocks.
Then on Friday the 4th of January, 1493, the Nina spread her sails and slowly glided away, leaving in that far island amid the unknown seas the first colony of white men ever settled in the west. Two days after Columbus set forth upon his homeward voyage, he fell in again with the Pinta. The master had found no gold, so he determined to join Columbus once more.
And again days passed. When many times upon the Santa Maria and as often on the Pinta and the Nina some one had cried "Land!" and the ships been put in commotion and the land melted into air before our eyes, and another as plausible island or coast formed before us only to vanish, despair seized us again. Witchcraft and sorcery and monstrous ignorance, and fooled to our deaths!
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