The situation in the New World changed drastically after Columbus established the first European outpost in the Caribbean by the end of the fifteenth century, as the Europeans relied heavily on ships and shipping, thus introducing and heavily employing their own naval products and experience in the ‘New World’. As a result, indigenous watercraft found themselves delegated to fulfill local needs and only in inaccessible areas such as the Orinoco and Amazon deltas in the South and the Pacific coast of North America, the logboats remained in use until recently. These logboats, up to 20 m in length and 2 m wide, were used for longer coastal voyages, fishing, whaling (Nootka tribes), carrying warring parties, and other transport needs. The native nautical knowledge extended vastly over two continents from the seaworthy skinboats of the Aleutians, called baidarkas by the Russians, and the bark canoes of the Iroquis to the reed rafts of the Uros Natives from Lake Titicaca. The canoes were in fact so well adapted to local conditions that the European fur traders, active in the Great Lakes area from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, adopted the canoes as their only mean of long-distance transport. The large-scale shipbuilding remained, however, the exclusive domain of the ‘newcomers’, and few regions of the world can boast a richer heritage than the Caribbean Sea and the continental waters of the Americas, where sunken wrecks of the Spanish treasure fleets, such as the Nuestra Senora de Atocha (sunk in 1622 off Florida Keys) or the Padre Island 1554 Spanish Fleet, are a permanent attraction for treasure hunters. In addition to such highly marked wrecks, underwater investigations of sites like Port Royal, the Red Bay Basque wrecks off the coast of Labrador (Canada), or the cenotes of Central America added new dimensions to the New World heritage. While the sea surrounding the Americas is the natural place to look for underwater sites, it yielded several times to sites found on inland waters that also contained significant cultural remains. Among those, one can note the sites from Lake Champlain (Vermont, USA), exhibiting eighteenth and nineteenth century American and British watercraft, the sites of the Cairo, Bertrand, and Arabia, all wrecks belonging to the so-called ‘steamboat archaeology’, and the pre-Columbian canoes from Lake
Phelps (North Carolina, USA). To all these, one can mention also sites that have been partially investigated and/or declared national sanctuaries under the Abandoned Shipwreck Act (1988), such as the ironclad Civil War vessels, the USS Monitor (sunk in 1862) and the USS Tecumseh (sunk in 1864).
World History
