Every schoolchild knows the name of Columbus’ flagship when he discovered America: the Santa Maria. Right? Wrong, probably. Edward T. Stone, author of the article in our April/May, 1978, issue on La Navidad, Columbus’ first settlement in the New World, sends us some surprising information derived from his many years of study in Spanish archives:
“From my research, I have become convinced that the flagship was never known in Columbus’ lifetime as the Santa Maria. Columbus in his Journal invariably referred to her as ‘La Capitana’ or ‘The Flagship.’ Columbus’ great admirer and the major historian of the Discovery, Father Las Casas, never called her by the name, either. He referred to her as ‘La Capitana’ or simply as ‘La Nao’ (‘The Ship’). Nowhere in any of Columbus’ extant journals and letters nor in Las Casas’ Historia will you find the name Santa Maria with reference to Columbus’ ship on the First Voyage.
“Oviedo, the second of the major contemporary historians, in his two specific references to the ship, called her ‘La Gallega’ because of her Galician origin around the Bay of Biscay. In court testimony, two witnesses referred to her as the Mariagalante, which undoubtedly was her registered name. Mariagalante may be roughly translated as ‘Gay Mary’ or ‘Flirtatious Mary,’ a name which Columbus and the pious Las Casas may have deliberately shunned as being out of character with what they considered the sacred mission of the First Voyage.
“Of the contemporary historians, only Ferdinand Columbus, illegitimate son of the Discoverer, called his father’s ship the Santa Maria. But Ferdinand’s Historie is replete with factual errors, and it is likely that he confused the Mariagalante with a ship actually named Santa Maria, which took part in the Third Voyage. Thus the error was perpetuated by later generations of historians who used Ferdinand Columbus as a prime source.”
Santa Maria, however, is a grand old name, and it may be some time before the correction is accepted out there where the first grade eagerly propagates the gospel of history.
DAUGHTER NO. 623,128
Deservedly or not, the Daughters of the American Revolution have often been accused of racial insensitivity, in part because memories of their refusal to allow Marian Anderson to sing in the D.A.R.’s Constitution Hall in Washington, B.C., in 1939 remain fresh (see our February, 1977, issue), but also because the national organization has never had any known black members, even though some five thousand blacks fought in the Revolution.
No black members, that is, until October, 1977, when Karen Batchelor Farmer, a twenty-six-year-old black businesswoman from Detroit became the 623,128th Daughter of the American Revolution. On leave from her real estate business to care for a newborn son in 1976, she found herself with a lot of time on her hands, and began to look into her family’s history. She knew when she started that her great-grandmother, Jennie Daisy Hood, had married Prince Albert Weaver, a black man, in Cleveland in 1889. Working back from there, she traced her great-grandmother’s side of the family to William Hood, an Irish immigrant who served in the Revolutionary forces as a private, sixth class, in the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) County Militia.
A librarian suggested that she apply for membership in the D.A.R.—whose only official requirements are proof that a direct ancestor served in the Revolutionary forces or aided the patriot cause, and that the applicant be sponsored by a local chapter. Mrs. Farmer’s genealogical research proved flawless, and after some delay a sponsor was found, the Ezra Parker D.A.R. Chapter of Royal Oak, an affluent Detroit suburb.
The D.A.R. is pleased with its new member, Jeannette O. Baylies of Scarsdale, New York, president-general of the D.A.R., told the New York Times. Letters received from other Daughters are “99 per cent most favorable. Everyone who’s met [Mrs. Farmer] feels that she’s the tops, and we’re delighted to have her.”
SNOWBOUND IN GOTHAM, BUT CHEEK BY JOWL WITH DESTINY
Those East Coast readers who survived the sundry blizzards of ’78 this past winter may recall with a shiver of recognition “The Great Blizzard of ’88,” which appeared in our February, 1977, issue. Ninety years ago, as in recent months, the city of New York was all but immobilized, and those who nevertheless clawed their way to work through the drifts and driven snow were displaying a kind of loony courage. Among the hardy souls was the father of reader Fred Rinaldo of Sherman Oaks, California, and, he tells us, one of his father’s rewards was to lunch in the presence of greatness: “My old man had fought his way downtown during that one. At lunch, he and one other man were the only people in the restaurant. My dad was seventeen. The other, older, man invited him to his table, saying, ‘Anybody who’d come to work today has a sense of his destiny.’ His name was Teddy Roosevelt. It was the closest to destiny my old man ever got. ‘Fred,’ he once told me, ‘it isn’t easy to be somebody.’ ”
A LONG WAY DOWN FROM THE PITCHER’S MOUND
Among the Chicago White Stockings stars who took part in Spalding’s baseball tour around the world in 1888 (see AMERICAN HERITAGE, October, 1977) was John K. Tener, a veteran righthander. Tener retired from baseball two years later, but, as Michael Goodman of Brooklyn, N.Y., has written us, his career had just begun. The Irish-born ex-ballplayer worked his way up to the presidency of the First National Bank of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, formed a successful brokerage firm, then entered Republican politics and, as the protégé of Pennsylvania boss Boies Penrose, became first a congressman ( 1909–11 ) and then governor of his state (1911–15).
But through it all Tener never forgot his first love. During World War I he was president of the National League, declaring baseball the “watchword of democracy” in the struggle against the Kaiser. His governorship was best remembered for the construction of roads and street railways, and once, Goodman writes, after the governor had signed three important traction bills in a single day, a lawyer remarked that they would become a monument to his career. Not so, replied Tener wistfully. “I once shut out the Giants.” 112
CLARIFICATION ON THE CUBAN FRONT
Virginia Stevens, the niece of William Ransom Roberts, from whose Spanish American War journal we published an excerpt in our December, 1977, issue, has written that our summation of Roberts’ career after the war failed to “make the correct emphasis.” Roberts, she explains, went to the Philippines as a Regular Army enlisted man “under the illusion he would be helping to free a subject people”; instead he found himself forced to fight “to destroy the forces of Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the independence movement,” and this experience unhinged his mind; he spent the rest of his life in mental hospitals.
Another reader, Gilbert A. Sanow of Elyria, Ohio, caught us out in a pair of caption errors in the same article. On page 83, we published a photograph of a line of soldiers, declaring that it was “a troop of cavalry on the march.” Not so, says Mr. Sanow, who looked closely at the guns they carried: “The Krag was a .30 caliber bolt-action magazine weapon.… Infantry troops were armed with the rifle version, which was fully stocked and had a thirty- inch barrel and was equipped with a bayonet. Cavalrymen were equipped with the carbine version, which featured a half stock and a shorter barrel. The photo clearly shows troops marching with rifles, not carbines. They also have bayonet scabbards on their cartridge belts. Both of these facts show that these troops are not cavalrymen.”
The second error (which was also noted by James K. Anderson, editor of V.F. W. Magazine) had to do with the photograph below: “The caption indicates that the troops in the picture are the Rough Riders… the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment.” But, Mr. Sanow notes, “The flag in the photo clearly states that the unit is the ’9th Regiment.…’ ” Therefore, “it cannot be the Rough Riders.”
Mr. Sanow describes himself as a “collector and student of U.S. Army items… a member of the Ohio Gun Collectors Association, the Ohio Valley Military Society, the Company of Military Historians, and the Association of American Military Uniform Collectors,” and we are not about to argue with him.
