Who went with Columbus ?

Dental studies suggest Africans might have been part of his explorer’s crew.

The first planned colonial town in the New World was founded in 1494, when about 1,200 of Christopher Columbus crew members from 17 ships that made up his second journey to the Americans settled on the north coast of what is now the Dominician Republic. Beset by mutiny, mismanagement, hurricanes and disease, the settlement of La Isabela lasted only a few years. The ruins remained largely intact until the 1950’s.

In the past few years, chemical studies of the skeletons, especially their teeth, have begun to yield new insights in to the lives and orginis of Columbus crew. The studies hint that, among other things, crew members may have included free black Africans who arrived in the New World about a decade before the slave trade began.

La Isabela was not the first settlement established by Columbus. When the Santa Maria ran aground off the Caribean Island of Hispaniola on Christmas Eve, 1492, during his first voyage, the 39 stranded sailors built a fort they christened La Navidad. When Columbus returned the next year, the fort had been burned and the crew massacred.

The study of the La Isabela skeletons grew out of a project in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, where in 2000.Researchers were surprised to find the remains of West Africans among those buried in a mid-16th-century church cemetery in Campeche. Vera Tiesler and Andrea Cucina from the Autonomous University of Yucatan invited Douglas Price, director of the Laboratory for Archeological Chemistry at the University of Winconsin at Madison, to do isotopic analysis of those skeletons teeth.

What is Isotopes? Isotopes are different forms of an element, atoms with different molecular weights based on their varying numbers of neutrons. Depending on their diet and water supply, humans concentrate specific isotopes in varying ratios in the enamel of their teeth.

Ratios of carbon isotopes in the teeth reflect what foods a person ate. A diet heavy in corn, millet, sorghum and other tropical plants yields more carbon 13 (6 protons & 7 neutrons), whereas grains such as barley and wheat produce more carbon 12 (6 protons & 6 neutrons). Europeans of Columbus time would have relatively little carbon 13 in their teeth; Mexicans would have much of the heavier isotopes. Natives of Hispaniola and many Africans, who are believed to have eaten a mixed diet, would probably fall somewhere in between.

Mexicans are about as heavy (on Carbon 13) as you can get, said James Burton, a geochemist at the University of Wisconsin involved in the La Isabela and Campeche projects. “Africans are in between, Europeans at the other end ”.

DNA analysis is also been done on the skeletons. But after excavation and years of storage, the samples could be heavily contaminated with DNA from other sources. “They were Africans sailors on early expeditions ”.