SAN MARCOS, TEXAS—While looking for ships that belonged to Captain Henry Morgan, the notorious English privateer, a team of underwater archaeologists discovered a rare seventeenth-century Spanish shipwreck off the coast of Panama. The Encarnación, built in Veracruz, Mexico, was a ship in Spain’s Tierra Firme fleet, which carried precious metals from the New World to Spain and distributed European goods throughout the Spanish colonies. “These ships were the backbone of the Spanish colonies,” Fritz Hanselmann of Texas State University told National Geographic News. Sixteen such shipwrecks have been found, but the Encarnación is unusual in that it has not been looted and is well preserved. “It is the rise of capitalism, imperialism, rationalism, and the middle classes that are going to buy art and consume literature,” said nautical archaeologist Filipe Castro of Texas A&M University. To read in-depth about the project, see "Pirates of the Original Panama Canal."
