Colon perdió nueve buques durante sus cuatro expediciones al Nuevo Mundo. Un grupo privado sostenido por intereses de USA que se llaman a sí mismos "buscadores de tesoros" están excavando un hallazgo. Pero los arqueólogos marinos dicen que el grupo ya ha cometido muchos errores en la búsqueda, "tirando" de artefactos sin cuidado alguno y quizás destruyendo evidencia que podría resolver el misterio del buque.

Storm Surrounds Shipwreck SiteBY T. CHRISTIAN MILLER
LOS ANGELES TIMES

    PLAYA DAMAS, Panama -- Warren White and his son were swimming just off the beach when they saw it.
    About 16 feet below them, a mass of coral and rock reared up from the sandy bottom. On top, in plain view, sat two coral-encrusted cannons.
    "Look at those guns," White thought. "Those things are ancient."
    So ancient, in fact, that White and a handful of scholars have come to believe that the wreck is one of Christopher Columbus' ships, the Vizcaina, abandoned in 1503 during his last voyage.
    The indications are intriguing. The location seems to match a description of the scene of the Vizcaina's scuttling. The cannons are from the right period. So is a piece of pottery.
    If true, it would be the first time anyone has found one of the nine ships Columbus lost during his four expeditions to the New World.
    Despite years of research, scholars still aren't sure what Columbus' ships looked like, what they carried or how they managed their long voyages. Everything that is known about them comes from written accounts or bureaucratic records sorely lacking in details.
    That's why White's discovery may be so important. Whether or not it is the Vizcaina -- and there is skepticism -- the wreck is almost certainly one of the oldest found in this hemisphere.
    "There is a big gap in knowledge," said John de Bry, director of the Center for Historical Archaeology, a Florida-based nonprofit group that specializes in ships of the Spanish colonial era. "We know more about the construction of Roman ships than the ships of exploration."
    That also explains why so much controversy now surrounds the wreck, and the people exploring it.
    A private group backed by U.S. investors who call themselves "treasure hunters" is excavating the find. While promising to respect the wreck's historical worth, the group is clear in its intention to make money off it, either through film rights or the selling of artifacts.
    Marine archaeologists, however, say the group already has badly bungled the recovery, carelessly yanking up artifacts, botching preservation and perhaps destroying evidence that could help solve the mystery of the ship's identity.
    "Maybe it will turn out to be a ship that can be identified with early explorers and conquistadors," said Donald Keith, an underwater archaeologist who has spent years trying to find Columbus' wrecks. "Whatever it is, it's important -- and we can learn a lot from it, but only if we do it right.
    "None of these people know what they're doing, and they're shooting themselves in the foot."
   
   Doomed Journey: Rafael Ruiloba, director of Panama's National Cultural Institute, says of the controversy, "The storms continue to pursue Columbus' ships."
    By 1502, Columbus was on his last legs. He was 51. He was suffering from gout. He had failed to find riches or a new route from Europe to the Indian Ocean.
    And so he decided to make one more voyage to the Americas from Cadiz, Spain, in four vessels: the Gallega, the Vizcaina, the Capitana and the Santiago. The trip would prove a disaster.
    He lost one ship, the Gallega, in the Belen River on Panama's Caribbean coast.
    Columbus headed south and decided to abandon a leaking Vizcaina. Later, he was marooned in Jamaica and had to abandon his last two ships as well.
    Columbus wrote that he scuttled the Vizcaina in Portobelo, the Spanish colony near Playa Damas.
    The ship disappeared, literally and figuratively, into obscurity. Five hundred years later, the mystery of its whereabouts would become White's obsession.
   
   Deal Questioned: White, a hobby diver and amateur historian, comes from a family of salvagers.
    In 1995, the native Floridian retired from his job as a policeman, moved to Panama and began nurturing a dream of discovering the Vizcaina.
    White noticed a cove near Nombre de Dios called Playa Damas, about 14 miles east of Portobelo. It was similar to the description of the place where the boat was scuttled, on a reef behind two small islands.
    In May 1998, White and his son were exploring the cove when White saw the shipwreck.
    He contacted the Panamanian government but got no response.
    "They said they weren't interested in an old Spanish wreck," White said.
    The wreck seemed destined to be abandoned a second time.
    That's when Marine Investigations of the Isthmus came into the picture.
    Last October, White bumped into Nilda Vasquez, who had run a Portobelo diving tour business in the area for years and worked as a volunteer for the local office of the cultural institute.
    White's story interested her. She, too, had Vizcaina fever.
    She immediately thought that Marine Investigations, which had hired her son as its local representative, might be able to fund the exploration.
    The group, backed by U.S. investors, had signed a deal to find treasure off Panama's coast with the cultural institute in May 2000.
    If the group found treasure, the Panamanian government would get 35 percent of the proceeds. The government also could opt to buy anything the group found, provided that it paid fair market value.
    The group's investors realized that a Columbus shipwreck would be a bonanza.
    Isaac Nunn represents the investors. He called the investors "treasure hunters" and said they are a "wealthy group" able to put up as much as $2 million for the excavation.
    He portrayed the exploration as good for the Panamanian government. The investors put up the money, he said, while the government reaped the benefit.
    "It's a good deal," Nunn said.
    That's not how many Panamanians saw it, however. News of the discovery and the deal behind it caused an uproar once it became public in December.
    The local news media questioned the relationship between Vasquez, because she had once worked for the cultural institute, and the contract with Marine Investigations, which employed her son. There were other questions: How do you determine the worth of a cannon from one of Columbus' ships? And where would the state get the money to buy back the artifacts?
    Later that month, Ruiloba's government cultural office declared the site a cultural patrimony, meaning nothing of historical value would leave.
    But that hasn't dissuaded the company from believing that it still can force the government to pay the group for the artifacts it wants to keep.
    White, Vasquez and Nunn all said they were doing everything possible to excavate the site in an archaeologically sound way, noting that they had built preservation tanks for the artifacts and were working with the cultural institute.
   
   Doubts Abound: The wreck, which lies about 100 feet offshore, has yielded evidence that it could be Columbus' ship.
    First, the ship had a large number of early 16th-century cannons, some of them loaded. White believes that they might have been stripped from the Gallega. Second, the anchors appeared to be resting at midship, as if they were placed there to weigh down the vessel to scuttle it.
    The strongest piece of evidence may be a small shard of pottery that appears to date the wreck to at least the first half of the 1500s.
    "I am convinced," Ruiloba said.
    Others are not. Keith, the underwater archaeologist, has visited the site and seen some of the artifacts.
    He said t he most damning evidence is a neck from a recovered ceramic vessel, shaped in a way that didn't appear until the mid- 16th century.
    Keith said the excavation operation was poorly planned and executed. A detailed site plan wasn't drawn up. Artifacts were prematurely pulled from the sea floor. Preservation tanks were inadequate, leading to the possibility that some artifacts might decay.
    "Extravagant claims require extravagant evidence," Keith said. "They have absolutely nothing, not one piece of evidence, that says this is the Vizcaina."

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