Ships That Made History · Episode 1
Three Ships
Columbus's three ships: the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa María, named for the Virgin Mary. A big idea about the size of the world, the trade winds, a sandglass and a ship's boy's prayer, a cry of land in the moonlight, a Christmas shipwreck, and two ships separated in a storm that sailed home to Palos on the very same day.
Now playing
Loading episodes…
Click any section or line to jump there in the audio.
Carol Two o'clock in the morning. October 12th, 1492. There's a bright moon over the Atlantic Ocean.
Shannon And up on the Pinta, the fastest of three little ships, a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana is keeping watch. He looks out ahead, and sees something pale in the moonlight.
Carol And he shouts. Land! Land!
Shannon After more than a month out of sight of land, they've found it.
Carol Welcome to Ships That Made History. One ship, one story.
Shannon Except this time, it's three ships. The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María.
Carol Episode one. Three Ships.
Carol So let's start with the man in charge. Christopher Columbus.
Shannon Columbus was a sailor from Genoa, in what's now Italy. And he had a big idea. He believed that if you sailed west across the Atlantic, you could reach Asia, and all its spices and silk, faster than going around Africa.
Carol Now, I have to ask. Did people really think he'd sail off the edge of the world?
Shannon (laughs) No. That's a myth. Educated people in 1492 knew the world was round. The real argument was about how big it was. And Columbus thought it was a lot smaller than it really is.
Carol So the experts were right.
Shannon The experts were right. Asia was much too far away. What nobody in Europe knew was that there was a whole other world in between.
Carol And who paid for it?
Shannon Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain. Columbus spent years asking kings for ships. Portugal said no. Spain said no, more than once. And then, in the spring of 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand finally said yes.
Carol So, the three ships. Let's meet them.
Shannon First, the Santa María. And that's actually the short version of her name. Her full name is usually given as La Santa María de la Inmaculada Concepción.
Carol Which means?
Shannon Holy Mary of the Immaculate Conception. She was named for the Virgin Mary. Sailors back then often named their ships for Mary and the saints, and asked them to watch over the ship at sea.
Carol That's beautiful.
Shannon It is. She was the biggest of the three, and Columbus's flagship. A nao, a sturdy cargo ship, maybe sixty feet long.
Carol Sixty feet. That's not very big.
Shannon It's about the length of a bowling lane. And she carried around forty men. Her owner was a sailor named Juan de la Cosa, who came along on the voyage.
Carol And the other two?
Shannon The other two were caravels. Smaller, lighter, quicker ships. The Pinta was the fastest of the three. Her captain was Martín Alonso Pinzón, an experienced sailor from the town they sailed from.
Carol And the Niña.
Shannon The Niña was the smallest, and her captain was Martín's younger brother, Vicente. And here's a fun fact. Niña wasn't her real name.
Carol It wasn't?
Shannon Her official name was the Santa Clara, after Saint Clare. But her owner was a man named Juan Niño. So everybody called her the Niña. It was a nickname that stuck.
Carol And all three ships together carried how many men?
Shannon Around ninety. Sailors, ship's boys, a doctor, and an interpreter who spoke Arabic and Hebrew, in case they met someone from Asia.
Carol So when did they leave?
Shannon Friday, August 3rd, 1492. Before dawn, from a little port in southern Spain called Palos.
Carol And they headed straight west?
Shannon Not quite. First they sailed south, to the Canary Islands. The winds there blow from the east, steady, almost all year. Columbus knew that if he started from the Canaries, those winds would push him straight across.
Carol Smart.
Shannon Very smart. Those winds are still called the trade winds. And while they were in the Canaries, they fixed the Pinta's broken rudder, and they changed the Niña's sails to square sails, so she could run better with the wind behind her.
Carol And then?
Shannon On September 6th, they left the last island, and sailed out into the open ocean.
Carol So what was it like on board?
Shannon Crowded. Only the captains had anything like a bed. Most of the men slept wherever they could find a spot on the deck.
Carol And how did they tell the time?
Shannon With a half-hour sandglass. A ship's boy watched it, and every time the sand ran out, he turned it over, and sang out a little prayer, so everyone knew another half hour had passed.
Carol I love that.
Shannon And to find their way, Columbus used a compass, and a method called dead reckoning. You know your speed, your direction, and how long you've been sailing, and you work out where you must be.
Carol No maps of where they were going.
Shannon No maps. Nobody had ever drawn one.
Carol And how long were they out there?
Shannon About five weeks without seeing land. Along the way, they sailed into a huge stretch of floating seaweed. We call it the Sargasso Sea today. At first, the men worried they'd get stuck in it.
Carol Did they?
Shannon No. They sailed right through. But by early October, the men were tired, and homesick, and starting to wonder if they'd ever see land again.
Carol And Columbus?
Shannon Columbus told them to hold on a little longer. And then the signs started showing up. Flocks of birds flying southwest. A green branch floating by. A carved stick in the water, clearly made by a person.
Carol Someone was out there.
Shannon Someone was out there. And on the night of October 11th, everyone was watching the horizon.
Carol Which brings us back to the moonlight, and Rodrigo de Triana up on the Pinta.
Shannon Back to the moonlight. At about two in the morning, he saw it. The Pinta fired a cannon to tell the other ships. And they waited for the sun to come up.
Carol And where were they?
Shannon An island in what we now call the Bahamas. The people who lived there called it Guanahani. Columbus named it San Salvador.
Carol Do we know exactly which island it was?
Shannon People still debate it. But there's an island in the Bahamas called San Salvador today, and it's the favorite candidate.
Carol And they went ashore.
Shannon That morning, they rowed ashore, and the people of the island came down to the beach to meet them. Columbus wrote that they were friendly and generous, and brought them gifts of cotton thread and parrots.
Carol So, what happened to the three ships after that?
Shannon They spent the next few months exploring. The Bahamas, Cuba, and then a big island Columbus called Hispaniola. Today it's Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Carol And then?
Shannon And then, late on Christmas Eve, 1492, right around midnight, the Santa María ran aground.
Carol On Christmas Eve!
Shannon On Christmas Eve. It was a calm night, and everyone was exhausted. Columbus went to sleep. The helmsman handed the tiller to a ship's boy. And the current carried the ship gently onto a coral reef.
Carol Oh no.
Shannon She stuck fast, and couldn't be saved. But here's the good part. A local chief named Guacanagarí sent his people out in canoes to help. They worked all day, and saved almost everything on board.
Carol That's wonderful.
Shannon It is. And the timbers of the Santa María were used to build a small fort on shore. Columbus called it La Navidad. Christmas.
Carol And the wreck itself?
Shannon It's never been found. Somewhere off the north coast of Haiti, the Santa María is still out there.
Carol So Columbus was down to two ships.
Shannon Down to two. He took over the Niña. And the Pinta, which had gone off exploring on its own for about six weeks, joined back up in January.
Carol And they sailed home together?
Shannon They started out together. But in February, a terrible storm hit, and the two ships lost sight of each other. Columbus was so worried, he wrote an account of the voyage, sealed it in a barrel, and threw it into the sea.
Carol A message in a bottle!
Shannon A message in a barrel. In case the Niña went down and nobody ever learned what they'd found.
Carol Did it go down?
Shannon No. The little Niña made it. She stopped in the Azores, then got blown into Lisbon, in Portugal, and finally sailed into Palos on March 15th, 1493.
Carol And the Pinta?
Shannon That's the best part. The Pinta sailed into Palos the very same day, just a few hours later.
Carol No!
Shannon After all that. Two ships, separated in a storm way out in the Atlantic, and they sailed home to Palos on the very same day.
Carol So which ship was the real star?
Shannon You could argue it was the smallest one. The Niña. She was Columbus's favorite. She sailed with him again on his second voyage, carried him home again in 1496, and by one count she covered something like twenty-five thousand miles in his service.
Carol The little ship that could.
Shannon The little ship that could.
Carol So, can you see these ships today?
Shannon You can see full-size replicas. In Palos, Spain, where they set sail, there's a museum on the water called the Wharf of the Caravels, with copies of all three ships that you can walk aboard.
Carol And in America?
Shannon Replicas of the Niña and the Pinta have been touring river towns and harbors around the United States for years. If they come to a port near you, you can climb aboard and see just how small they really were.
Carol And imagine ninety men crossing the ocean in them.
Shannon Exactly.
Carol That's the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. Three small wooden ships, a big idea, and a voyage that connected two halves of the world.
Shannon And two of them made it home on the same day.
Carol Next time, five ships set out to sail all the way around the world. Only one of them makes it.
Shannon The Victoria. That's next time, on Ships That Made History.