The Voyage of the Vizcaína The Mystery of Christopher Columbus's Last Ship

Between 1492 and 1504, Christopher Columbus made four attempts to find the East by heading West. In the process he lost a fair number of ships; on his last journey alone he lost no fewer than four. Although Columbus also left written documentation of where his boats had gone down, no one has been able to locate even one of the wrecks. (His reports were probably inaccurate, perhaps willfully so--he was frequently less than truthful about his adventures in the New World.) In the mid-1990s, an American expatriate living in Panama--an aging surfer dude who ran a Scuba-diving outfitting shop and diving school--a Panamanian real estate agent, and an American on vacation with his son all claimed to have been the first to locate the remains of a small ship lying in fairly shallow waters in a small gulf in Panama. No one took the discovery seriously, since it had not been made by a team of establ…