Determining whether or not the ship—first spotted by Clifford and his team in 2003—is actually the Santa Maria will take more work, but for now the evidence described by The Independent is compelling: the ship is where Clifford thought it should be, based on Columbus’ journal; the debris’ footprint is about the right size; and artifacts seen among the wreckage, like an old cannon, match those known to have been aboard the ship.
The wreck of the Santa Maria is not, as one might think, a full boat resting on the sea floor. Rather, says the Santa Maria museum in Columbus, Ohio, the grounded ship was stripped down, the wood used “to build a fortress in what Columbus called La Navidad, the first Spanish settlement.”