Cortés ordering his fleet to be destroyed may be one of the iconic moments in history. In 1519, Hernán Cortés led an expedition of 11 ships from Cuba to Mexico. On arriving in Mexico, the crews found themselves vastly outnumbered by the Aztecs and many were on the verge of mutiny, intending to sail back to Cuba. Cortes ordered the 10 remaining ships of his fleet destroyed. (One ship had already been sent back to Cuba with news of the landing.) There is disagreement as to whether the ships were burned, scuttled or run up on the beach. When reinforcements and supplies arrived a year later, Cortés had those 16 ships destroyed as well.

500 years later, where the ships were destroyed remains a mystery. Now, however, an international team of archaeologists is searching for the wreckage of the lost fleets. They may have found the first clue in an anchor with a well-preserved wooden stock. Wood samples from the stock were sent to two different laboratories, and their testing suggests the samples came from a tree felled between 1417 and 1530, the general time period of the conquest of Mexico. The wood of the stock may also be a type of red oak indigenous to northern Spain.

With a grant from the National Geographic Society awarded to Christopher Horrell, research fellow with the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University and funding and resources from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) underwater archaeology unit, the international team of researchers spent six weeks last summer surveying a 30-square-mile area offshore of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, the first Spanish town which Cortés established in 1519, 50 miles north of the modern-day port city of Veracruz. 

Without the means to analyze and preserve the anchor, the archaeologists followed protocol and reburied it where they found it. Once the team acquires more funding, they plan to recover and conserve the anchor and explore dozens of other anomalies recorded with the magnetometer.