Archaeologists believe to have found Christopher Columbus' ship

If you behaved properly and did not miss history lessons, you probably remember that Christopher Columbus' ship, the Santa Maria vessel, set out to find a new route to India and found the Americas over 500 years ago, right?

What's new about this whole story is that only now a group of investigating archaeologists seem to have found remains of the ship off the northern coast of Haiti. "All the geographical, topographic and archaeological evidence suggests to us that the wreck remains even from the famous St. Mary of Christopher Columbus, " said expedition leader Barry Clifford.

According to Clifford, the Haitian government has been extremely collaborative, and there is still more archaeological research that needs to be done to confirm that the navigation found is indeed the one that brought Columbus across Europe - but it seems to be so. So far the Clifford team has been doing non-invasive site surveys, taking measurements and taking photographs.

The suspicion that the remains of the ship could be from Santa Maria was raised after the researchers made some discoveries in 2003 by analyzing the waters of the region in question. In addition, Clifford and his team had access to navigation records made by Christopher Columbus himself.

An expedition assembled by Clifford 10 years ago had already found and photographed the wreck, but had not yet associated the material with the Columbus vessel. A new assessment recently found that the material collected a decade ago could actually be one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time. The records made by Columbus also lead to the belief that this is indeed the site of the wreck.

Christopher Columbus led a fleet of three ships from Spain. Their mission was to find a shorter route to India, but instead they "discovered" America in 1492. Columbus's ship would have sunk after reaching a reef in December of that year.