Searching for Columbus’ last ships: UTC team leads survey for undiscovered shipwrecks and Jamaica’s layered history

Andrew J. Van Slyke dives under the water with diving gear. Traces of the Sugar Mill Wreck are on the sea floor.

Andrew J. Van Slyke dives on The Sugar Mill Wreck in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Photo courtesy of Andrew J. Van Slyke.

A crossbow shot from shore.

A quarter league from the Taíno village of Maima.

And beached side-by-side.

Those are some of the “clues” 15-year-old Ferdinand Columbus recalled when describing the location of the shipwrecks from the fourth and final voyage of his father, Christopher Columbus, in 1503. Ferdinand wrote about being part of the 110 men and boys running their last two ships, La Capitana and Santiago de Palos, aground in modern St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. Stranded, the Europeans lived on board the beached shipwrecks for one year and four days.

These are the clues that University of Tennessee at Chattanooga archaeologists and an international team of underwater researchers are piecing together to study Jamaica’s maritime history.

Andrew J. “AJ” Van Slyke, a former underwater archaeologist for the U.S. National Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center and a recently hired visiting lecturer in archaeology at UTC, is a co-founder of the Maritime Legacy Project: Jamaica. He is also the field director in the effort to locate shipwrecks in Jamaica.

Van Slyke and UC Foundation Associate Professor of Archaeology Morgan Smith are among the crucial core of researchers leading the collaborative effort to find the site where two of Columbus’ ships were abandoned in St. Ann’s Bay.

“Archaeologists have never found any of Columbus’ ships or the type of ship that carried these Europeans to a new world, a caravel. That means there is a substantial contribution to be made to fill that gap of knowledge in the field of nautical archaeology,” Van Slyke said.

Van Slyke, along with Maritime Legacy Project co-founders Dr. Marianne Franklin and Dorrick Gray, revitalized the search for Columbus’ wrecks, with the support of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, in 2021.

“The 1980s and 1990s saw the most extensive archaeological investigation into Columbus’ wrecks because of the upcoming 500th anniversary of the first voyage in 1992.” Van Slyke said, “It’s these investigations that our mentors and teammates led that are leading us to a small portion of shoreline that contains their highest probability anomaly.”

This anomaly has sent Van Slyke, Smith and the rest of the team back to Jamaica for multiple field seasons, where they’ve used historical records from archives around the globe and modern technology in their search for shipwreck sites.

In 2024, the team used aerial drones to fly a magnetometer—used to detect iron objects like a ship’s fittings—above the shoreline where the vessels were beached. Earlier this year, the team took to the water and conducted a maritime magnetometer survey of the entire bay to cover where the ships may have sailed into and grounded.

Two men look out to sea from a beach with a drone flying overhead.

Archaeologists fly a drone towing a magnetometer over the shoreline in St. Ann’s Bay.

At the beginning of the fourth and final voyage, Columbus spent months trying to find a western passage to Asia by tracing the coasts of Central America. This was Columbus’ most westward voyage, which was more focused on exploration than colonization.

In 1503, Columbus tried to set up a fortification at Rio Belen in Panama, but it was overrun, and the first ship of four, Gallega, was lost. The remaining three vessels retreated to Porto Bello, where they unloaded Viscaina and abandoned the second ship. Now, La Capitana and Santiago de Palos, overloaded with the surviving 110 men and boys, sailed their leaky ships north to safety.

“He comes up this way and he’s sailing around, kind of heading east across this northern shore of Jamaica, and his ships are sinking,” said Smith, guiding his finger down a map. “They’re talking about bailing water out actively as the ships are kind of just limping along against the wind and it becomes basically a total emergency.”

The winds and currents pushed the vessels backward on their approach back to Hispaniola, and the ships were so worn and leaky that the crew bailed water with pots and pans. In Jamaica, the crews decided to run the caravels ashore to prevent their complete loss in the deep waters between Jamaica and Hispaniola.

His two remaining ships were beached in St. Ann’s Bay, where Columbus and his crew lived aboard them for more than a year.

“On his first voyage in 1494, Columbus first saw Jamaica by arriving at St. Ann’s Bay where he called the island ‘the fairest land that human eyes have ever seen,’” Van Slyke said, “and then nine years later, he’s shipwrecked there while also banished from the only European settlement in the Caribbean, Hispaniola. It’s kind of a full-circle moment at the end of his story.”

Smith is one of Van Slyke’s founding members of the Maritime Legacy Project: Jamaica, and Van Slyke will join UTC in fall 2025 as a visiting lecturer in anthropology.

The two met in 2017 while both were graduate students volunteering on an archaeological project in the deserts of Nevada and have worked together ever since.

“We’ve always been scheming,” Van Slyke said. “I always thought I’d be his Ph.D. student at one time when he got to a place to do that, but we always wanted to do archaeology with each other long term. UTC is the perfect place.”

Since then, the duo graduated, with Smith coming to UTC. Van Slyke, through his employment in the National Park Service, conducted underwater archaeological, marine biological, and search and rescue operations in any U.S. National Park with water.

Van Slyke described his role in upcoming UTC projects and the potential for underwater archaeology in Chattanooga.

“Morgan and I sort of complement each other in a great way,” Van Slyke said. “Morgan is a very accomplished diver and an excellent student of pre-contact studies and geology. I am very much a maritime historian and shipwreck nut. Together, we offer students a unique and capable view of the field that they cannot get at any other university around the world.”

Two men sit in a red boat on the water. Morgan operates the boat and Andrew is looking at a laptop.

Andrew J. Van Slyke operates the survey through the laptop while Morgan Smith operates the boat towing a marine magnetometer.

In Jamaica, the team’s fieldwork involves remote sensing with a boat, flying drones equipped with magnetometers, and diving to search for anomalies that might indicate a buried shipwreck.

Van Slyke tasked Smith with leading the geoarchaeological mapping aspects of the investigation into Columbus’ caravels. In 2024, Smith sought to reconstruct what the coastline would have looked like in 1503. The last person to attempt finding this “Columbus Shoreline” was Smith’s Ph.D. advisor, Dr. Michael Waters, in the 1990s.

Since Waters’ work, technology has come a long way.

“Essentially, the problem of finding these wrecks is that there’s really only a couple of scientific means to possibly detect the needle in the haystack, let alone find it,” Smith said. “In the ’60s and ’80s, the technology just wasn’t there. They were doing their best with what they had.”

Van Slyke said the earlier teams helped lay the foundation and excavated a handful of shipwrecks that weren’t Columbus’ caravels.

“We are extremely fortunate to have had archaeologists clear portions of the bay and suggest others as likely locations. And we are getting to do it the right way,” Van Slyke explained, “We are working with Jamaicans as well as previous researchers to share the history of this bay with the world. Good things happen when you collaborate with respect.”

A large part of the Maritime Legacy Project is helping the Jamaican National Heritage Trust build the case for St. Ann’s Bay and Seville Heritage Park—a park that was once a Taino village and the first European capital and sugar plantation in Jamaica—to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In 2009, the land-based portion of the park was tentatively listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With the stories the UTC team is discovering from beneath the waves, Van Slyke believes they will be successful in the long-term preservation goal of protecting the bay’s submerged cultural resources.

While the area holds significance in Jamaica, the team’s research surrounding the cultures, shipwrecks and landscape changes could help elevate it to global recognition.

During their most recent trip at the beginning of this year, the team made serious progress in understanding the geography of the coast and was able to geolocate several essential features—including the remains of an English fort built before 1690—using GPS equipment to replace older, hand-drawn maps.

While the team members are limited in what they can share publicly, they did say they discovered something unexpected.

“We have a distinct ballast pile in the area that we and previous researchers long considered the highest-probability zone,” Van Slyke said. “But we’re not saying it’s Columbus. We’re not saying it’s Spanish, or even a shipwreck. Right now, we are focused on first trying to figure out what it is not.”

A man in a yellow vest stands at the bank of a river with a device in his hands. Another man (Van Slyke) is in the water that is up to his shoulders. He is also holding a device above the water.

Andrew J. Van Slyke (right) and Morgan Smith re-locate a British shipwreck from the 1750s in the mangroves which was excavated by Dr. Gregory Cook in 1992. Cook was Van Slyke and Smith’s underwater archaeology professor during their undergraduate studies at the University of West Florida in Pensacola.

While previous archaeological investigations looked specifically for Columbus’ caravels, Van Slyke and Smith are hoping to teach students how to do archaeology on the wrecks the UTC team found in March 2025.

“We found many things on this last expedition to St. Ann’s Bay, two of which are historic shipwrecks,” Van Slyke explained. “The first was a ship from 1780-1825 which wrecked carrying a sugar mill machine, and another coastal steamer which wrecked bringing passengers into the bay in 1878.”

UTC adjunct professor and underwater archaeologist Hunter Whitehead also joined Van Slyke and Smith in Jamaica in 2025 and created detailed photogrammetric 3D models of the sites.

“We’re not just doing this to find a shipwreck,” Van Slyke said. “It’s to help provide the scientific and historical context that makes this Jamaican National Park internationally significant.”

Smith added that he has offered scientific diving classes to complement UTC’s archaeology courses over the past few years. But now, with Van Slyke on board in the Department of Anthropology, UTC is offering its first maritime archaeological field school.

The course is being offered in fall 2025 and will largely replicate the team’s work in Jamaica.

“AJ brings his expertise in underwater survey and remote sensing from the National Park Service to UTC’s maritime survey-based field school in the Tennessee River, where we’re working with the State of Tennessee to learn more about the submerged resources in the area,” Smith said.

“Chattanooga plays an integral part in this design for an underwater archaeological study of Tennessee,” Van Slyke said. “There are a handful of wrecks right abreast of town that offer many avenues of local scholarship.

“I want students to be inspired the same way that I was inspired in college. Together we will begin ‘The Underwater Archaeology of America’s First National Park City’ in much of the same way I have studied, dove, and protected many American and Jamaican National Parks.”