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00:00The year 1494. Christopher Columbus, the most famous explorer of his age, returns to the
00:10New World. This time he comes with a new mission, to build a colony and sow vast riches. Yet
00:18within four years, the city Columbus created would disappear, his ships and his men buried
00:25in long forgotten graves. Now, two teams of archaeologists are trying to find evidence
00:32that explains the colony's demise. All these people died, passed away for some reason.
00:39His story is in the water. His time capsule is in the water. His ship is in the water.
00:45That's what we're looking for. On land and at sea, a 500-year-old cold case is being
00:51reopened to uncover the true story of Columbus' cursed colony.
01:11Charlie Beaker looks for ships. You need to make sure you can see the bombard. As director
01:17of underwater science at Indiana University, that's his job. It's also his obsession.
01:30Beaker has surveyed thousands of shipwrecks. The oldest so far date to the age of conquest
01:36and piracy in the Caribbean. But recently, Beaker began his most important quest ever,
01:44to find a ship of Christopher Columbus.
01:47Well, first, there's never been a Columbus ship found. Let's start from that point. People
01:52ask why do we care to find a Columbus ship. It's not just that it's Columbus. It's the
01:56space capsule of its time. What were they carrying? What did they load it with? I mean,
02:04it doesn't get any better than that.
02:07For Beaker, finding any wreck means starting with historical sources and trying to match
02:13them to debris on the seafloor. It was this process that led him to an incredible discovery
02:20in 2006.
02:21Hola, Francis.
02:22Hi, Charlie.
02:23Hey, como estas?
02:24Good to see you, as always.
02:25Hi, John.
02:26Today, his find lies in a chemical bath at a lab in the Dominican Republic.
02:35Francis, tell us, go?
02:36Yeah, go.
02:37Okay.
02:38It's an anchor, one Beaker believes may have once been tethered to a ship of Christopher
02:43Columbus.
02:44It's Columbus' potential era, the way it looks. You can see the kind of rope look to it. Palms
02:53are placed on it, the angle of the arms, and certainly it's an early anchor, right place,
02:59possible right time period.
03:02Beaker discovered the anchor just where historical sources said it should be, in a bay where
03:07hurricanes had sunk six Spanish ships. The ancient piece of iron sparked a mission to
03:14find more.
03:16This is on the trail. This anchor is a piece of the puzzle. We want a shipwreck. We don't
03:20want a part of the shipwreck. We want the wreck itself.
03:28The missing ships were part of the largest fleet Columbus ever assembled.
03:39Less than two years after his famous expedition across uncharted waters, he set out on a second
03:44journey to the New World, a journey not of discovery, but of conquest and colonization.
03:52This time, he planned to stay in a place he would call La Isabela.
04:03Everything started here. When 17 ships arrived in 1494 and they started this settlement,
04:12the New World, the American continent that we have now, started here, in this place.
04:22You want to talk about the first city in the Americas. You want to talk about the first
04:26church in the Americas, the first mass in the Americas, the first graves in the Americas.
04:32You really have to talk about Isabela.
04:35La Isabela was Columbus's greatest aspiration, his chance at empire. Instead, it would become
04:44his greatest failure.
04:51Columbus would claim at least six ships. Hundreds of his men and thousands of indigenous Taino
04:57Indians would perish. In just a few years, his colony would collapse.
05:06Five centuries later, what happened here is still a mystery, one that two separate teams
05:13of archaeologists are trying to solve.
05:21When we started, when we approached this project, of course, we were fascinated. This is a unique
05:28context. These are the first Europeans to die in the New World at the beginning of this
05:37colonization.
05:39Here we have burials one and two.
05:46Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina are a husband and wife team from the University of Yucatan.
05:53Their specialty is bioarchaeology, the scientific study of ancient human bones.
05:59He was suffering.
06:00He had a stressful youth.
06:02Together, they've been analyzing the remains that have been exhumed from the colony and
06:08planning a new expedition to the site to gather more evidence.
06:13Evidence convey us information about the diet, about living styles, about occupations
06:18of the people. And then from there on, you try to reconstruct how the living population
06:23was.
06:24This is really remarkable. Most probably a male, late teens, something like it.
06:30Every clue they find adds to the story of La Isabella, picking up with science where
06:35the history books leave off.
06:39Those sources are typically male-centered. They tell you the official story, the one
06:44promoted by politics. And the story that is conveyed by bones is slightly different.
06:51Already the bones hint at strange details. Could there have been women on the colony?
07:01Or perhaps the first Africans in the New World?
07:06Both are conspicuously absent from the records Columbus left.
07:10Bones don't lie. They tell you about diseases, they tell you about accidents, sometimes even
07:16how people died.
07:19That's the biggest mystery of all. How and why so many colonists perished in La Isabella?
07:28Five hundred years ago, Columbus started his ill-fated second voyage with hope and ambition.
07:36His men were ready to settle this new world and grow rich from it.
07:43Columbus's childhood friend, Michela de Cuneo, recorded their common goals.
07:48The Lord Admiral wrote to the king that he was hoping to give him as much gold as the
07:54iron mines of Biscay gave him iron.
08:00When Columbus came here, he thought he was on an island off the coast of Japan, and he
08:06was going to build a fine city here through which the wealth of the Orient would flow
08:12on its way to Spain.
08:15Instead, on January 2nd, 1494, the fleet of Columbus arrived off the Caribbean island
08:22Hispaniola, today's Dominican Republic.
08:29The local Taino Indians saw them from the shore. The ships were like nothing they had
08:36ever seen.
08:39That story is the Kaleisha II world. Only today can it be matched by an alien spaceship
08:44landing right here in front of us.
08:51This is the spot where rats and pigs and goats and horses, priests and microbes came
09:02down the gangplank into the new world for the first time. And after that, the world
09:08was changed forever.
09:12Underwater archaeologist Charlie Beaker has brought his team back to this bay, where he
09:17found the potential Columbus-era anchor in 2006.
09:22The first ships of the fleet were here. It sank in this bay with the first hurricane
09:27noted by the Spaniards.
09:30They hit their bottoms on the floor of the sea as the waves went out of this first hurricane.
09:35So I think they're shallow enough to be in 30, 20, 10 feet of water.
09:41But finding them will still pose a challenge.
09:46To shrink the search zone, his team deploys a device called a magnetometer, a high-tech
09:52underwater metal detector.
09:55The iron, the cannons, the anchors, all this will make electronic signature. So even with
10:06the coral there, we can read through the coral like an x-ray machine through the sand and
10:11mud and silt.
10:14Beaker works systematically in a grid pattern, creating a map of potential hotspots.
10:27The remote sensing survey, electronic survey tied to satellite positioning, ended up producing
10:3331 magnetic anomalies. So you end up having kind of a vision underwater under the mud
10:39of what might be below. And if it changes, then it's probably anchors, it's cannons,
10:44it's ship parts that will change magnetic field.
10:49Certainly we have something man-made under the mud at Isabella.
10:53Okay, you see straight ahead that rock? We want to mark that. Do you see it? One of our
10:59anomalies is just inside of that.
11:03With more than two dozen hotspots to choose from, Beaker now has to select the most promising
11:09and take to the water. While at the colony itself, Kuchina and Tiesler will start to
11:15look for more bones. On land and at sea, these two teams are trying to unravel the mysteries
11:22of Columbus' ill-fated colony.
11:30Every time that I step into the site, it's like opening up a door into the past.
11:37That's amazing. Wow, look at the site.
11:42Bioarchaeologists Vera Tiesler and Andrea Kuchina have arrived at Columbus' lost colony
11:49to hunt for skeletal remains.
11:50Ah, there they are. Wow. So there.
11:53They're hoping new finds at La Isabella will help them piece together details about who
11:58the colonists were and uncover the cause of the settlement's rapid collapse.
12:09What we want to do now is expand the investigation by doing test pits and locate other burials.
12:18While we do some investigation here, I want to also concentrate in this part where there
12:23are no graves. There is some record that says that up to 300 people died. We don't
12:31know where they really 300 or maybe 100. We only have 30. So, for sure, there must be
12:41more and that's what we want to find.
12:46Like the investigation at sea, choosing where to dig is the critical first step. Location
12:53is everything, and in a settlement that spanned nearly four acres, a false start could waste
13:00valuable time.
13:03La Isabella was meant to become a grand medieval city, such as those the settlers knew from
13:08home, with fortress walls, armories, a church, and even a noble house for the admiral.
13:16To build it, Columbus brought over a thousand men, carpenters, sailors, soldiers, and stonemasons,
13:25as well as nobles and priests. They carried with them to the New World horses and pigs,
13:33wheat, sugar cane, and guns. But Columbus quickly found he needed something more.
13:41When Columbus decided this is the place, he did not do it because he liked it. He also
13:48did it because it was an important Taino settlement and he needed the native peoples to build
13:54up his town.
13:57The Taino Indians had thrived for thousands of years in this very location. Some estimate
14:05their population topped one million. They lived off the bounty of a rich land, on staples
14:13that were alien to the Europeans. Their local knowledge and willingness to share it was
14:18critical to Columbus.
14:20Tainos were coming back and forth, day and night, constantly at the very beginning. They
14:25were supporting, helping, sustaining the new settlers with food.
14:33Their relationships were friendly, were amicable.
14:45With such promising beginnings, the colonists gathered together to renew their faith.
14:53They celebrated the first mass in the New World.
15:01La Isabela was now officially a colony, with its days of conflict and suffering still hidden
15:10over the horizon.
15:31Centuries later, little would remain of these first days of peace.
15:45The team heads out into the bay, sights set on the strongest of their magnetic readings.
15:53You come out and down, and that was the hot anomaly that you guys hit, Steve?
16:00Yeah, there's one right off that rock.
16:02I'm looking for somebody to find the deep depression hole that might be there, and I'm
16:07asking to take a look to see the bottom, feel it out.
16:11Surface to divers, surface to divers, you're all in a good looking area, over.
16:17Columbus shipwrecks were here, they had to hit something, there's reef here, we've got
16:22an anchor from this spot already.
16:25And in that area, there's anomalies, large anomalies in the mud, there's anomalies in
16:30the corals.
16:31It's got a good scientific feel, it's got a good personal feel, and now we need a little
16:35luck.
16:36I want to do a circle search, okay?
16:42I want to do a circle search, okay?
16:47Five hundred years ago, when Christopher Columbus sailed into La Isabela, this bay was deeper,
16:53and the water, much clearer.
16:55Solo diver move, two divers stay still, stay still.
16:59Silt from nearby rivers, and centuries of hurricanes, have changed it for the worse.
17:05Charlie Beaker's divers are having a tough time getting oriented.
17:10Can you tell us where we are in relation to the buoys?
17:14Yeah, roger that, you now are 20 feet west of the buoys.
17:21Gradually, the divers plot their grid, and begin the tedious process of probing the murky
17:28ocean floor.
17:31Come on, if you just want to look around and try probing.
17:36This is diving by braille right now, you're down there with it, you're feeling it, you're
17:45seeing it, you're touching it, they're following the sand beds along, they're running the rock,
17:50they've got to go around a coral head, they've got to regroup again.
17:53Every time you pass me at this marker, I want you to give me another three feet.
18:03Copy that.
18:07Come on, just a moment, we're a little tangled.
18:11Ah, good shot on it, didn't see much, huh?
18:14I mean, I know it's murky, couldn't feel any holes or anything.
18:17Well, we're going to start making our own then, okay?
18:20It's a disappointing first dive.
18:23Any signs of the shipwrecks are hidden by the mud.
18:27The good news is, the mud's all over the place.
18:30It's all over the place.
18:32A disappointing first dive.
18:35Any signs of the shipwrecks are hidden by the mud.
18:38The good news is, the mud's also what's protecting the ship.
18:41When we get the mud out of the way, we're going to have a Columbus shipwreck that's
18:45going to be preserved, and they're going to tell us a lot about history that we don't
18:48know.
18:49It'll be a whole new chapter once we find the wrecks.
18:52March, 1494.
19:02Christopher Columbus was just a few months into building the great colony.
19:07Now, it was time to get what he had come for, gold.
19:18With Taino guides, expeditions probed the mountains and inland rivers.
19:26The settlers knew from the Tainos that there was gold to be found, but how much was not
19:31clear.
19:34The precious metal was crucial to the success of the colony.
19:38It was the economy of the age and the fuel for empires.
19:45In the early days, the searches paid off.
19:50Gold is most excellent.
19:52Gold constitutes treasure, and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can
19:59even lift souls up to paradise.
20:02But paradise would not last long.
20:06If you want to say that La Isabella had a golden age, I'd say it was January and February
20:11of 1494, and that from then on, basically, it's a slide downhill.
20:20One specific event played a big role in that slide.
20:24The date it happened is well known.
20:27June, 1495.
20:30A vicious storm hits the colony.
20:33The Taino had a word for it.
20:36They called it a hurricane.
20:46They described it as a storm with a huge tempest of wind.
20:51Then there was a calm, the eye of the hurricane, and the tempest occurred again.
21:03The Taino knew to flee to higher ground, but the colonists hunkered down, cowering before
21:11a terror they had never encountered.
21:18It had to be a bad storm.
21:21It sank ships.
21:23These ships came all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
21:25They weren't meant to sink, but they were sunk in the hurricane.
21:30At least six ships went to the bottom of the bay, including Columbus's flagship,
21:36the Maria Galante.
21:38They have remained buried there ever since.
21:43I can just see these ships on cable being thrown up and down and bouncing and busting open.
21:48Other than his original anchor, Beaker has yet to find hard evidence of the wrecks.
21:53But his next expedition will take him farther afield.
21:57And this time, he'll find what he's after.
22:01Charlie Beaker's search for a ship of Columbus does not just take place in the water.
22:06Today, that search is taking the team down a windier path.
22:11A few hours of trekking through jungle forest brings them to a set of recently discovered caves.
22:18Researchers believe TaÃnos inhabited these caves during the time of Columbus,
22:23possibly even using them to shelter from hurricanes.
22:28Man, that was an ordeal.
22:30That was something.
22:32Their guide to this extraordinary site is Dominican anthropologist Juan Rodriguez.
22:38Caves were the last place where they could retreat and hide.
22:44They took with them the most important things that they could take,
22:49the myth, the religion, their beliefs.
22:55I don't hate caves.
23:01Okay, well, one we're in this far.
23:03That's the hard part.
23:05Here, John.
23:08It's amazing.
23:10Oh, yeah.
23:12Watch your head.
23:14And then this is what we came to see.
23:18Far back in the cave, a wall with great historical significance.
23:24I do think we've entered another realm here,
23:28where we're picking up these depictions of the Spaniards and their arrival.
23:33Interesting that anthropomorphic or human face there,
23:37that may be some European bearded man.
23:42Juan, check this out.
23:44Up here high on the column.
23:46I mean, look at that.
23:48It's like a ship coming to you.
23:50And there's no chain in the days of Columbus,
23:52so the two lines could be the holes for the hoseline for the anchor.
23:57We need to look right there, John.
23:59See if there's any carbon.
24:01Oh, man, it's fantastic.
24:03See if you can look in that spot there.
24:07That ship could be the first ship in the New World depicted on the wall.
24:13If that truly is a ship, then we're talking the first contact
24:16between the prehistoric and the historic
24:18that happened right here in the Dominican Republic
24:21and is represented by that ship.
24:23The story on the walls ends shortly after the ship arrives.
24:28And if the Taino had made it,
24:30this would be the next chapter of their story.
24:32And instead, this is the end of their world right here.
24:38But exactly how the end came
24:42is the question archaeologists are still trying to piece together.
24:51Andrea Cucina and his team
24:53continue to explore the territory behind the church.
24:58No, um...
25:03Wow.
25:04OK, good.
25:06But it's broken.
25:08It's broken?
25:09Yeah.
25:10Yeah.
25:11We've apparently got another grave.
25:13Yeah.
25:14It was completely hidden.
25:16It might have been, you know, an empty space,
25:19and instead we have a structure,
25:22and now we have a grave.
25:25So what we have to do now is slowly, carefully
25:29remove all the sand and try to expose the body.
25:34If these bones can be salvaged,
25:36they will join the growing body of forensic evidence
25:39from La Isabella
25:42and perhaps reveal more insights
25:44into some of the mysteries the colony left behind.
25:48Among the skeletal information that we recollected,
25:51there were some really interesting features,
25:54attributes that talk about people
25:57that are probably not of European ascent.
26:01It is feasible that among those first crew members of Columbus
26:06that died at La Isabella were Africans.
26:09Columbus makes no mention in his records
26:12of non-Europeans or Africans aboard his ships.
26:16But if the bones show otherwise,
26:18But if the bones show otherwise,
26:20it would mean that at least a few of these men
26:23could have been the very first Africans in the New World.
26:27Were they slaves or sailors,
26:30and where had they come from?
26:33The answers may lie in the teeth,
26:35which have been sent to the University of Wisconsin
26:38for analysis.
26:39Teeth carry chemical remnants of what we ate as children,
26:42and those remnants can be traced back to specific locations.
26:46There were features, there were some traits
26:48that are typical of individuals of African origins.
26:52We still don't know exactly which part of the continent,
26:56but it was definitely a surprise
26:59to see something that is not written in any historical sources.
27:03The other big surprise from the bones
27:05is the appearance of women in the colony.
27:08This feature is female.
27:10The measurement says it's a female.
27:13It's robust.
27:15It still says it's 97% female.
27:18Wow.
27:19Among those skeletons that we think,
27:22or we're pretty sure that they're women,
27:25there's one clear European woman.
27:27So there's a clear contradiction with historical sources
27:31that almost in all listings only name men.
27:36There were women on the ships,
27:38and most probably also in the settlement at La Isabella.
27:43If true, the presence of women tells its own story
27:48of a settlement designed not just for quick wealth,
27:51but for a stable, permanent growth,
27:54a lasting symbol of Columbus' success.
27:57Yet it only took a few short years
28:00before that utopian vision was shattered.
28:04They were failing to adapt, but more importantly,
28:08they were falling short of the one thing
28:10that would have ensured success, gold.
28:14Foray after foray into the wilderness
28:17turned up little or nothing.
28:20Several times we fished in those rivers,
28:23but never was found by anyone a single grain of gold.
28:27For this reason, we were very displeased
28:30with the local Indians.
28:36In lieu of that precious metal,
28:38Columbus turned the Taino into human commodities
28:42and the chief source of income for the colony.
28:45There are documented events
28:47where they captured and enslaved 1,600 Tainos.
28:52Some of them, many of them,
28:55were sent back to Spain as slaves.
28:58Others were left here as slaves of the local Spaniards.
29:06For those who remained free,
29:08there was another form of hardship.
29:11A tax, the very first in the New World,
29:15was imposed on every male over the age of 14.
29:19Each was required to produce a fixed amount of gold
29:23or face severe punishment.
29:27The relationship between these two peoples
29:30was turning from allies to enemies.
29:33Columbus was on his way to becoming a despot
29:36in the name of empire,
29:38and La Isabela was turning from dream to nightmare.
29:44Charlie Beaker is off on another expedition away from the bay.
29:48This time, their destination is the southern Dominican coast.
29:54They're looking for another anchor.
29:56One Beaker hopes will confirm
29:58that the anchor he discovered at La Isabela
30:01really is from the time of Columbus.
30:04Okay, John, you're close.
30:24On a shallow, choppy reef,
30:26there's a wreck believed to be from the year 1502,
30:29just a few years later
30:31than the Columbus' voyage to La Isabela.
30:34It may have thrown cannons and anchors overboard
30:36as it hit ground,
30:38and those are the clues Beaker is searching for.
30:55Then, anchors.
30:58The shape quickly tells Beaker all he needs to know.
31:02Though these anchors are not from Columbus' ships,
31:05they are from the same period.
31:07Later anchor design would drastically change
31:10thanks to new metal technologies,
31:12but these anchors and the one housed at the lab
31:15share the signs of older equipment.
31:18The angles of the arms, the types of rings,
31:21and the materials used are a solid match,
31:25both old enough to be from the time Columbus sailed.
31:28That anchor is the only diagnostic artifacts
31:31we've excavated anyone has ever excavated from Isabela,
31:34so until we can take it off the list,
31:36it's very, very much on the list
31:38of probability of being Columbus.
31:41On land, the careful dig is revealing more details
31:45about the newly discovered skeleton
31:47and the circumstances of its burial.
31:51From all the features that we have on the skull
31:54are totally male.
31:56The skeleton was simply, you know,
31:59laid down in a normal pit,
32:02dug in the naked earth.
32:05Carefully, was not thrown into,
32:08but nothing sophisticated.
32:11Simple and fast.
32:16The way of interment tells you the story
32:19of the emergency, the urgencies that were lived here.
32:25After two hurricanes and repeated failed attempts
32:28to find gold, the colony at La Isabela
32:31had hit a tipping point.
32:34There was a lack of understanding, of respect,
32:37most of, probably most on the part of the Spaniards
32:41towards the Taino, so obviously the results
32:44didn't have to wait long to show
32:46in a confrontational relationship.
32:48Taino reacted.
32:50Taino reacted, Spaniards reacted themselves.
32:54Battles broke out between the colonists and the Indians.
32:59Guns against arrows.
33:01Old world against new.
33:04But was it war that killed so many settlers
33:07and Taino at La Isabela?
33:12Only the bones will provide proof.
33:18At the lab in Santo Domingo,
33:20Kuchina and Tiesler probed the bones
33:23from La Isabela's many excavations.
33:26Finding the cause of death
33:28is a painstaking process of elimination.
33:30That's an herniation, a very deep herniation actually.
33:34A sailor, a worker,
33:37he maybe was used to carrying heavy stuff.
33:45The colonists were young.
33:47Few found here were older than 45,
33:50most below 30.
33:52Their capability for hard work shows in their bones.
33:57In short, the sort of young, healthy people
34:00one would enlist to jumpstart a colony.
34:03Overall, they were not chronically sick or weak people.
34:09Yet one-fifth of these New World pioneers
34:12would die within four years.
34:15It's the sort of statistic one would expect
34:18from violent battles, from wars.
34:21The bones really don't reflect that,
34:25which surprises us.
34:27We did not find as many paratraumatic events
34:31or violence as we would have expected,
34:34given all the historical sources
34:37that convey information about the confrontations
34:40with the Taino Indians.
34:43The culprit must have been a more subtle killer.
34:46The archaeologists are forced to look deeper,
34:49while Charlie Beaker makes a final attempt
34:52to uncover Columbus' lost fleet.
34:56You can see a member of the old Punto Rojo.
34:59Charlie Beaker and his research team
35:01are more sure than ever they've chosen the right spot
35:04to look for Columbus' lost ships.
35:07But so far, they've been unable to dig their way
35:10through the murky bottom of La Isabella.
35:13Their final effort, to try and dredge the site
35:17at the exact spot where the original anchor was found.
35:21♪♪
35:29♪♪
35:38Good amount?
35:46With the equipment in place, the pumps are turned on.
35:49♪♪
35:57Copy that.
35:58It's the only way to get down
36:00through the five centuries of mud
36:02that has settled on this bay floor.
36:05What it is, sapropel,
36:07a kind of gelatinous cement-looking sediment
36:10that has biological activity associated.
36:13It looks kind of like jello.
36:15When you dig in it,
36:16you have to kind of suck it up through the nozzle,
36:18which means days and days of work.
36:22With limited time to dive,
36:24Beaker has bet everything on this spot.
36:27But it's hardly a sure thing.
36:30The ship may have been separated from the anchor
36:33or smashed and scattered by the hurricanes.
36:38Or the mud may simply be too deep.
36:49Today, the sapropel overwhelms the operation.
36:56After all the diving, digging, and dredging,
36:59Beaker has managed to get only seven feet
37:02through the bay floor.
37:04A start, but short of a shipwreck.
37:09Our next step is to write a report,
37:13clean up our equipment, fix what's broken,
37:17bring in more equipment,
37:19pick a date and do it again.
37:21We're not done.
37:22I'm driven. I want to find it.
37:24My colleagues here want to find it.
37:26We all feel it.
37:27It's just oozing.
37:28The history is here, and that's what drives us all.
37:34For now, Columbus' lost fleet remains trapped in mud.
37:39But in the lab,
37:40the history of the final tragic days at La Isabela
37:44is starting to grow clearer.
37:46The failure of La Isabela,
37:49there's not just one reason.
37:51But I think that most of it is that
37:53they were not really prepared to adapt.
37:58By 1496, the colonists knew they were in trouble.
38:02Their alien crops had failed, gold was scarce,
38:06and their supplies were dwindling.
38:09Food was being rationed.
38:11One cup of wheat, a side of rancid bacon,
38:14and a handful of beans
38:16was the daily portion for each villager.
38:20All of the people that have been in this island
38:24are incredibly discontented.
38:26They had nothing to eat other than the rations.
38:29They were all anguished and afflicted and desperate.
38:36The condition of the settlers in those last days
38:39makes only a surface appearance in the bones.
38:42Many of them, more than 50%,
38:44probably had scurvy, vitamin C deficiency.
38:47This is a scurvy.
38:49Here you can see parotid surfaces.
38:51And here, this is an ongoing process, already healed.
38:55So this individual had suffered from this lack of vitamin C.
39:00They didn't eat citrical fruits
39:03or anything that contained vitamin C.
39:06And you kind of question,
39:08couldn't they have just eaten the stuff that the Taino ate?
39:12This tells you that they were utterly unadapted
39:15and they didn't know, really,
39:17how to use the resources that they were finding here.
39:21Columbus kept consistently writing,
39:24we just can't get the foods we're accustomed to.
39:27If we could just get the foods we're accustomed to,
39:31everything would be fine.
39:33People were sick,
39:35and ultimately there was an outright rebellion.
39:38Disillusioned by failed promises,
39:41factions turned mutinous against Columbus.
39:48Columbus, in turn, took drastic measures.
39:52Traitors were imprisoned and sent back to Spain.
40:00Others were hanged at La Isabela
40:04to be buried alongside their starving compatriots.
40:12They did not expect to have such a death toll.
40:16So the first ones who started dying,
40:19they were buried behind the church,
40:22and they kept on doing it and kept on doing it.
40:25I think, I can imagine,
40:27by looking at the distribution of the crosses,
40:30that it was an emergency.
40:33An emergency so rapid,
40:35it is hardly detectable 500 years later.
40:39The colony's killer acted fast and left few traces.
40:43The fact that we don't appreciate,
40:45we can't detect any specific kind of diseases,
40:50indicates that what killed these people
40:54were very acute diseases,
40:58very common endemic in the New World.
41:02And it doesn't leave traces on the bones.
41:06It is the lack of evidence in the bones
41:09that ultimately provides the most compelling clues.
41:13To show in bones,
41:15most diseases have to have been present for a long time.
41:19Instead, the kinds of epidemics
41:21the settlers may have encountered
41:23were acute and totally new to them.
41:26In their weakened state,
41:28even a simple New World flu could have killed hundreds.
41:33For the Taino,
41:35new diseases would take an even greater toll.
41:39The Europeans brought smallpox, measles, and typhoid with them,
41:44diseases that would decimate the people
41:47Columbus once called,
41:49no finer in the world.
41:54By 1498, the colony was abandoned
41:57by all but a few.
42:00The colony was abandoned by all but the dead.
42:04It was a failure for the Spaniards,
42:06but they quickly learned after that,
42:08and then they set up their colonies
42:10with a much more successful scheme.
42:13But for the Indians, for the Taino,
42:15and for the New World Indians in general,
42:18it was the beginning of an end, so to speak.
42:21I think this is probably the saddest story of them all.
42:25Columbus returned to Spain
42:27with a reputation deeply marred
42:29by his disastrous leadership at La Isabela.
42:33Yet he still left his mark.
42:36The European conquest of the Americas,
42:38which began here,
42:40would reshape the continent.
42:42The Spanish would conquer all.
42:45The Taino, within a generation,
42:48would be wiped out,
42:50killed, enslaved,
42:52or dead from disease.
42:54For one side, La Isabela would be a forgotten chapter
42:58on the path of empire.
43:00For the other, it would mark the end of the world.
43:06Further skeletal remains,
43:08and perhaps technologies not yet invented,
43:10may bring researchers closer to understanding this moment.
43:14One day, they hope to be able to tell
43:16not just why so many perished on both sides,
43:19but even who they were.
43:22Working at La Isabela,
43:24we really wanted to know who these people were.
43:28I know it's almost practically impossible to say
43:33the skeletal remains of this person
43:36are what's left of Mr. So-and-so.
43:40That would be kind of a detective story.
43:44We know it, but a tiny dream would be
43:48to be able to identify one of these individuals.
43:54That's the focus of the next effort,
43:57looking at DNA and chemical traces in the teeth
44:00to give a name, maybe a face,
44:03to a 500-year-old set of bones,
44:07and perhaps at the bottom of La Isabela's bay
44:11to find the ships that have become symbols
44:14of the colony's collapse.
44:17We'll be back.
44:18We'll be back bigger and stronger,
44:20more equipment.
44:21It's still there.
44:22It's still to be found.
44:24We will discover this shipwreck.
44:26If I'm around long enough,
44:27we will discover this shipwreck.
44:30Yeah, this is my Moby Dick.
44:32This is my whale.
44:33This is my albatross.
44:34This is my problem.
44:37I see shipwrecks.
44:39I see ships floating in anchor.
44:41I see a lot of people trying to set a foothold
44:44in the new world right here.
44:47This is where it started.
44:48This is where the toe first hit.
44:51The first European experiment in America
44:53descended from grand mission to appalling disaster
44:57in the hands of Columbus and his pioneers.
45:01It is only now, five centuries later,
45:04that we are beginning to understand why.