Around midnight on Christmas Eve, the Santa María foundered on a reef off Point Picolet. Columbus took various measures to try to save the ship, including sawing off a mast to lighten it, but the tide was receding and the Santa María impaled on the reef and began to sink. Columbus ordered an evacuation to the Niña and dispatched messengers to Guacanagarí.
At sunrise, Guacanagarí came to Columbus’s rescue with a fleet of canoes, and his subjects helped Columbus’s crew remove the Santa María’s stores, equipment, and weaponry into the canoes for transport back to Guacanagarí’s village for safe-keeping inside or beside two bohíos, i.e., Taíno houses, as shown on this website’s Contact page.
That night, writing on the over-crowded Niña, Columbus recorded in his Journal that the king and his peoples loved their neighbors as themselves.
The front and back cover drawn for Encounters Unforeseen depict the rescue, as shown here in the background and on the website’s Home page.