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Late Fifteenth Century Ship: Santa

It is highly improbable that the original Santa Maria had a square tuck such as has been given her by her modern Spanish reproducer, or that her fore and after castles resembled in any wise the early 17th Century forms exhibited in what he would have us believe is "an exact counterpart" of the Genoese navigator's vessel. The arrangement and sheer of the decks were quite different also. Nor is it believable that at this date the transom could have conceivably been of a form permitting the display of a large and nearly rectangular painting of the Holy Virgin, no matter how appropriate and desirable such a talisman might be.

Speaking of the talisman, it was quite customary at this date for a harbinger of good fortune in the form of a bullock's horns to be installed upon the end of the bowsprit or for a goat's skull to grace the extremity of this spar. The late 15th Century ships sometimes carried a small topmast bearing an almost microscopic topsail sheeted into the top. In the modern Santa Maria's rigging the topsail is quite large and the sheets lead to the arms of the main yard.

In other matters of rigging, particularly in a ship of a southern European country, the main stay would have been set up to the stem-head with a lanyard in connection with an elaborate collar device as yet not clearly explained; the shrouds would have been galley fashion, that is, without ratlines, and access to the main top would have been gained by means of a Jacob's ladder aft of the mast.

Lifts and bowlines would be present, while the braces would be of a much more rudimentary form than in the new Santa Maria's equipment. Altogether this later production both in hull and in rigging resembles much more nearly a ship of the first part of the 17th Century than one of more than two hundred years earlier. It is probable that in some form, martlets and martnets, the forerunners of the leach lines and bunt lines, were then in use, with brails for the lateen mizzen similar to those employed upon the Mediterranean galleys.

Tacks and sheets would be much as we would expect to find them, while one would probably be astonished to discover, if such a vessel could be found to-day intact, how apt and convenient was most of her subordinate gear. While to us they would seem inadequate, these late 15th Century ships, especially those of the larger size (and it is quite probable that some of them exceeded eight hundred tons), were probably not bad seagoing vessels. Of course, they went to windward slowly or not at all. But with fair luck (of which they had at least an average) and with good management (of which they certainly had much) it is not surprising that it was in a vessel of this sort that Columbus ventured out to the westward in order to report officially to the Spanish sovereigns the existence of that land destined to play a revolutionary part in the development of the sailing ship, the land of which the reputed discoverer of the New World had heard from an unnamed but positively theretofore existent Portuguese pilot, his certain predecessor in that romantic feat.

These statements may seem iconoclastic, but they are based upon solid facts.