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| The Santa Maria at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition (eculp.lib.uchciago.edu) |
On this date in
1951 The Chicago Tribune ran an
article that lamented the slow demise of the replica of the Santa Maria, a replica of Christopher
Columbus’ flagship during his voyage to America that was built in Spanish
shipyards for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, along with its sister
ships, the Niña and the Pinta.
The United State Congress had appropriated the $50,000 necessary for the
construction of the three caravels, and on July 7 of 1893 the Santa Maria’s
captain, Victor M. Concas, wrote in his log book, “147 days out of Cadiz,
dropped anchor in front of the Worlds’ Columbian Exposition.”
The ship was the
centerpiece of the last day of the fair, Columbus Day. Scrubbed clean and fully crewed, the Santa
Maria and her sister ships left their mooring space near what is now La Rabida
hospital and moved to a point off the fair’s music hall where they dropped
anchor about 500 yards off the beach and lowered small boats. In the first boat stood an actor portraying
Christopher Columbus, sword in one hand and a flag in the other. The pageant had everything: monks kneeling in prayer at the base of a
cross, natives of San Salvador ducking behind palm trees for cover, native
chiefs summoned, and friendly greetings exchanged between native and foreigner.
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| The three caravels in New York harbor on their way to the 1893 fair in Chicago (wikimedia photo) |
The glory didn’t
last long, and the ship rapidly faded along with the memory of the great white
city of 1893. The Knights of Columbus
hatched a plan to save the ship in 1900, but nothing came of it. By 1903 The
Tribune in an editorial called the ships “useless, deserted, forgotten
hulks, victims of wind and storm and the prey of vandals, stripped of their
furnishings and appliances, stripped even of all sentiment and associations,
melancholy reminders of the festal days of the white city.”
The ship did not go
without a fight, though. In fact, on
Columbus Day of 1911 the ships set sail again, reaching Grant Park at 8:30 in
the morning as 100,000 “natives” lined the shore from Jackson to Grant Park. Even as the celebration went on, the Santa Maria struggled. At one point in the pageant, all of the crew
as well as the actors aboard were summoned to the pumps as the ship’s hold
began to take on water.
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| Onlookers at the fair watch the three ships sail into Jackson Park (notesonlooking.com) |
In 1913 the ships
left Chicago, headed for San Francisco.
One observer remarked, “Their decks are absolutely rotted and their
hulls are not much better. They will go
down surely.” The vessels made it as far as Detroit, where a fickle wind
damaged both the Santa Maria and the Pinta as they were being towed to a
dock. By 1914 the Niña and the Pinta had
made it to Buffalo when the promoter in charge of the move to San Francisco ran
out of money and they were returned to Chicago during that summer. The Santa
Maria, ever intrepid sailed on to Westerly, Rhode Island where it was
determined she could not make it through the rest of the trip.
Then came the
ultimate insult when a New York city lawyer bought the Santa Maria for $940 at an Admiralty Court sale. A fundraising campaign allowed the ship to
return to Chicago, but her arrival was not the same glorious entrance that she
made in 1893. The Tribune wrote in an editorial, “The protection of the caravels
entails no more expense than the repair of an occasional golf green or the adjustment
of a water plug . . . In spite of the almost sacred character of the relics the
park board already has suffered them to be dragged half way over the continent
by irresponsible adventurers, to be shown as dime museums and hawked about in
the port of strange lands, libeled fro debt and no hand raised to protect them
save that of distant folk whose regard for rare sentiment overrode the quibble
for the dollars it required to save the Columbian replicas from destruction.”
By the end of 1919
the Santa Maria floated alone at the
Jackson Park lagoon. In 1918 the Pinta, her seams open after 25 years of
neglect, sank. The following year the Niña burned to the water line. $90,000 was spent at that point to restore
the remaining ship, but by July of 1938 The
Tribune reported, “[The Santa Maria]
has been allowed to rot for lack of paint and the replacement of a timber here
and there . . . Her once smartly tarred shrouds of imported hemp are black with
age . . . She reeks of bilgewater that slushes about her tons and tons of rock
ballast. She’s a nobody. But she doesn’t complain. Only when the wind is in a certain quarter in
the east and the swells drive into the lagoon form the lake does she teeter a
bit at her moorings.”
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| The three Spanish ships in Jackson Park harbor (chuckman's collection) |
There was another
flurry of activity in 1946 aimed at restoring the caravel, but the news was not
encouraging. James A. Regan, Sr., head
of the Calumet ship yards, the place where the 1920 restoration of the Santa Maria was carried out, said, “The
ship is much worse off now than in 1920.
For the first rebuilding we salvaged only the keel and the metal work. It is doubtful that even the keel is usable
now.” Many began to ask the question,
“What do you do with the replica of a ship when almost none of the materials
that make up the replica are usable?”
And the folks at the Jackson Park Yacht Club were beginning to complain
about the hulk that was making navigation in the harbor difficult.
By 1951 the Santa
Maria was broken at the keel and would not last another year. In 1952 a crane with a clam shell attachment
was brought in on a barge, and it didn’t take long for the Santa Maria to end up as rotten kindling to be carted away and
dumped.
The great fair of
1893 was an event so important that it sits as one of the four stars on the
Chicago flag; it was an event, after all, that was named in honor of the
captain who commanded the three ships that sailed into the unknown seas in
1492. 60 years after the triumphant
entrance of the three replica ships into Chicago waters, the memory of the last
one sailed over the horizon and into the limitless seas of time.
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