It look like the story back in May of the explorer Barry Clifford, who claimed he found the remains of Christopher Columbus 1492’s Santa Maria shipwreck in Cap-Haitien, Haiti is false.
I was really hoping it was. How great would it have been for Haiti and my city of Okap if it was.
According to CNN,
An American explorer’s claim to have found the long-lost Santa Maria, Christopher Columbus’ flagship from his first voyage to the Americas, has been dismissed by a group of U.N. experts. Underwater explorer Barry Clifford made headlines when he said in May that he believed a shipwreck on a reef off Haiti’s northern coast could be the fabled ship, which went down in 1492.
But a team from the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO said in a report Monday that bronze or copper fasteners found at the site point to shipbuilding techniques of the late 17th or 18th centuries, when ships were covered in copper. Before that, fasteners were made only of wood or iron, it said.There is now incontestable proof that the wreck is from a much later period,” according to the report by mission leader Xavier Nieto Prieto, who visited the site for several days beginning September 9.The experts also believe that contemporary accounts, including Columbus’ own journal, indicate that the wreck is too far from the shore to be that of the Santa Maria.The UNESCO mission was requested by the Haitian government to check out Clifford’s claim to have solved a 500-year-old mystery.
Clifford told CNN in May that he was “very confident” that his team had discovered the wreck of a ship he described as having “changed the course of human history.” He believed the site had been looted since he first uncovered it in 2003. – Continue Reading on CNN
