Question: Of Columbus’s three ships, which one never made it back to Spain?
Answer: The Santa María, Columbus’s flagship. In the early hours of Christmas morning 1492, with most of the crew asleep after a celebration and a cabin boy at the helm, she ran aground on a sandbar off present-day Haiti. Columbus had the wreck stripped and used her timbers to build La Navidad, the first European settlement in the New World, left 39 men behind to hold it, and sailed home on the Niña. When he returned a year later, the fort had been burned, and every man was dead.
