"Ships of Exploration" by Roger C. Smith in "Archaeology" (January/February 1991, pp. 48-52) Painstaking nautical sleuthing is slowly yielding clues to how vessels in the Age of Discovery were built, outfitted, and armed. Nowhere has the impact of seafaring on history been more pronounced than in the opening of a sea route to the East Indies by the Portuguese and the discovery and exploration of the New World by the Spanish. Yet while narratives of Portuguese and Spanish exploration are well-known to historians, the technology of the ships that made these early transoceanic crossings possible is not well understood. This is because Iberian caravels and naos were built before shipwrights documented their formulas for proper ship construction in the form of blueprints or ships' lines. Only in the last half of the sixteenth century do geometric drawings and construction formulas first appear in the historical record. Curiously, modern students of the history of seafaring know far more about ancient Egyptian and Greek ships than they do about vessels from the Age of Discovery, primarily because examples of these earlier vessels have been found, studied, and reconstructed by archaeologists. Ships dating from the period of da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan are only now coming to light. Until recently, scholarly study of Iberian nautical technology was the domain of Portuguese and Spanish maritime historians. Much of their research was conducted by studying fragmentary data on ships and their construction drawn from a relatively small corpus of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works dealing primarily with the broader topics of cosmography and navigation. In the late 1800s, with the impending 400th anniversaries of the accomplishments of Bartolomeu Diaz, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Christopher Columbus, the focus of inquiry turned to ships and maps with the establishment of formal nationalistic and academic commissions. This resulting surge in research served not only to assemble pertinent literary materials, but also prompted an increasing awareness among scholars of the lack of specific knowledge about shipwright technology in the Age of Discovery. This early academic work was based on the interpretation of written documents and artistic representations; few tangible three- dimensional objects were available for scrutiny. In 1929, however, naval archaeology took a new turn with the discovery and examination of a singular example of the art of medieval shipwrights, a votive model from a Catalonian church in Mataro, Spain. The fifteenth-century model, which has passed through the hands of art collectors, had been crafted with contemporary shipbuilding skills faithfully reproduced in miniature. The unique effigy, now in the collection of the Prins Hendrik Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, was studied by several scholars who variously pronounced it to be a caravel or a nao. While the differences between these two vessels are not entirely clear, it is generally thought that the caravel was a shallow-draft, fast, and easily maneuverable vessel, whereas the nao was principally a payload ship that supplied the fleet. As the only three dimensional representation of either ship type, the Mataro model provided the first physical clues as to how these vessels actually were built and rigged. In the 1960s, a new avenue of maritime research appeared as archaeologists took their tools to the sea to study ancient shipwrecks and their cargoes. In the Mediterranean, attention was focused on classical sea trade. In Northern Europe, remnants of the Spanish Armada of 1588 were discovered along the coast of Ireland. And, in the New World, the remains of battered Spanish colonial convoys were found strewn along the sandy beaches of Texas and the shallow reefs of Florida and the Caribbean. Researchers studying the cargoes of these lost vessels soon recognized that the timbers of the sunken ships themselves offered primary clues to the evolution of shipbuilding. In addition, well-preserved remnants of mid-sixteenth-century Basque whaling vessels were discovered under the icy waters of Red Bay, Labrador, in 1978, providing the first substantial and articulated remains of cargo ships that had, within a half century of Columbus, routinely crossed the Atlantic. While the discovery of the Mary Rose provided data on English shipbuilding in the early years of the fifteenth century, we were without examples of Iberian ships from that critical period between 1470 and 1530, when tiny, armed Portuguese and Spanish craft set out to explore the world. In the early 1980s, a small group of researchers at Texas A&M University began to hunt for the remains of the earliest European ships that sailed to the Americas. If shipwrecks dating from the first decades of the sixteenth century could be located, their hull remains would provide tangible evidence of construction techniques. We began our search in the quiet waters of St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, where narratives of Columbus's fourth and final voyage described the abandonment of the caravels Santiago and Capitana in 1504. In cooperation with the Jamaican government, four seasons of fieldwork involving systematic remote-sensing, geological coring, and test excavations were conducted near the ruins of the island's earliest European settlement, Sevilla la Nueva. Several historic shipwrecks, anchorage middens, and landing areas were found along the muddy bottom of the enclosed lagoon. However, none of these sites could be dated to the early sixteenth century. At St. Ann's Bay, seventeenth-century earthquakes and twentieth-century road construction have altered portions of the old waterfront, and the whereabouts of the Columbus caravels remain uncertain. Meanwhile, the grave of a small Spanish ship from the first half of the sixteenth century was discovered at Molasses Reef on the Caicos Bank, north of Hispaniola, where the ocean floor abruptly rises to within a few feet of the water's surface. The coral-encrusted site at Molasses Reef contained types of artillery commonly carried on sixteenth-century European vessels. Hand- forged bombardetas were the main battery of the ship's weapons system, while smaller wrought-iron versos, which served as anti- personnel ordnance, had been mounted on swivel yokes along the vessel's railings. Ammunition for the guns consisted of a variety of iron and lead shot; the ship's crew apparently had the ability to cast additional projectiles with two-part shot molds that were also discovered at the wrecksite. In addition, fragmentary examples of small arms such as haquebuts, an early form of matchlock musket, and crossbows were found. These portable weapons not only were part of the vessel's defensive system, but along with edged weapons they would have accompanied the mariners during any on-shore reconnaissance. Excavation of the site, in cooperation with the government of the Turks and Caicos, gave us substantial information on how artillery systems were organized and stored aboard a small Atlantic vessel. At sea, the heavier guns were place blow the waterline in the hold along with the largest anchor in order to lower the ship's center of gravity. While little of the vessel's wooden hull survived beneath the mound of ballast stones that marked its grave, a geological study of the stones provided clues to the ship's sailing history, suggesting that her original port had been Lisbon, and that at some time in her life, she had visited England and the Azores. While the identity of the Molasses Reef ship is not certain, the wrecksite is one of the oldest found in the New World, dating to the first decades of the sixteenth century. Elsewhere, another early wrecksite turned up along Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. In 1958, fishermen from Isla de Mujeres--named for the female figurines given to the early Spanish explorers by the islanders--discovered the site in a shallow bay between the island and the mainland town of Cancun. They removed a long- barreled falconete, a bombardeta, a verso, two bombardeta powder chambers, one verso chamber, a grapnel anchor, and a large anchor, from the site. We relocated these artifacts in order to examine and record them. Clearly of early sixteenth-century origin, the artifacts from the Bahia Mujeres wreck were quite similar to those of the Molasses Reef wreck, although the size and weight of the anchor, and the number of artillery pieces, suggested that this vessel may have been smaller. In 1984, we relocated the wrecksite, which had been hidden under massive stands of coral. We then turned our attention to another early wrecksite, in the sea off tiny Highborn Cay, an island in the Exuma chain on the edge of the Great Bahama Bank. In 1965, three divers discovered a small ballast mound with several pieces of encrusted artillery and anchors. The site contained two bombardetas with four associated breech chambers, all similar to those found on Molasses Reef. In addition, at lest 13 smaller swivel guns were found with numerous powder chambers and iron breech wedges. These versos were of two types: a standard size and a versodoble of larger caliber. At least one breech block had been loaded; both powder and wooden plug were still in place. Examples of lead and iron shot were also found throughout the site. Unique among the weapons was a wrought- iron barbed harpoon. Since these objects had been salvaged shortly after their discovery, we had to do some detective work to reconstruct the components of the site with the help of one of its discoverers. Elements of the ship's standing rigging provided rare clues to the masts and sails that had been supported in the hull. As with the site at Molasses Reef, a large wrought-iron anchor was found in association with the two bombardetas atop the ballast mound. This pattern of distribution once again suggested that all three heavy iron objects had been stowed in each vessel's hold when she sank. During an exploratory visit to the wrecksite, we learned that the lower hull of the Highborn Cay ship had remained well preserved over the centuries, despite the shallow, warm Caribbean waters and heavy tidal currents. With permission from the government of the Bahamas, we returned in 1986 to conduct a test excavation of the central portion of the site, where we hoped to locate the mainmast step and its associated hull structure. The results were far greater than we imagined; for the first time we began to understand how early Spanish vessels sailing to the New World had been assembled. As the wooden skeleton was uncovered, the ship's backbone and ribs revealed the alternating pattern that her builder had used to join the timbers together for strength and seaworthiness. The critical area where the mainmast had been fitted into the lower hull--the point around which the ship would pivot under sail--had been reinforced by clever carpentry that tied together an assemblage of beams and buttresses. In the midst of this assembly, the shipwright had carved a place to accept the shaft of the ship's pump, which probably had been fashioned from a hollowed tree trunk. Surrounded by a box, which only survived in splinters, the pump was protected from shifting ballast stones. To keep this lower part of the hull clear of trash and debris that might clog the pump, small boards, which fit into carved recesses, covered the spaces between the timbers. The boards could be lifted to gain access to the bilge during cleaning and repair operations. The brief but crucial examination of the heart of the Highborn Cay vessel provided precisely the kind of construction details missing from the Molasses Reef wreck. Comparison of data from these two sites with information gleaned from the Mataro model, medieval ship finds in both Italy and England, and the Basque whalers in Labrador, as well as other sixteenth-century sites in the New World represents a major archaeological breakthrough in our knowledge of how vessels in the Age of Discovery were built, outfitted, and armed. Reprint permission granted by publisher.