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This article was published 9/10/2014 (2173 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prominent underwater explorer Barry Clifford is again being buffeted in heavy seas of doubt about whether his team has discovered Christopher Columbus's flagship, Santa Maria.

Earlier this month, a team from UNESCO rejected the American's claim he had located the 1492 wreck of the fabled ship on a reef off Haiti's northern coast. The UNESCO report said bronze or copper fasteners found at the site would be consistent with a more modern vessel.

Clifford was in Winnipeg Thursday at the Manitoba Museum where Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship opens Oct. 17. Clifford discovered the remains of Whydah, the first fully authenticated pirate ship to be discovered in American waters, in 1984.

Walking into the museum's exhibition, Clifford stared at the first artifact on display, the ship's bell preserved in a container of sea water. When Clifford announced he had found the wreck off the coast of Cape Cod, his evidence was also called into question and his reputation sunk by a fleet of naysayers. The Boston-area archeological investigator proved them wrong when the following spring he surfaced with the iron bell inscribed with "Whydah Galley 1716."

"Suddenly there was a lot of crow being eaten in Cape Cod," Clifford, 69, said, during an interview.

"Looking at that bell again today made me think, these are very similar days. They said then it wasn't the Whydah and they are saying now it's not the Santa Maria."

Last May, Clifford announced he was confident he discovered the Santa Maria, the holy grail for hunters of sunken treasure. He said new information about the site of Columbus's fort had allowed him to re-calibrate data from the explorer's diary to work out where the wreck should be.

KEN GIGLIOTTI / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Barry Clifford with the galley bell of the Whydah, the discovered sunken ship that is the focus of the Manitoba Museum exhibition Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship.

"I'm confident we have the best candidate ever discovered," said Clifford, who is leaving Winnipeg for Mozambique, where he says he has found Captain Kidd's pirate ship, the Adventure Galley. "I totally believe we have the site."

He dismisses UNESCO's claims that the artifacts come from a different wreck.

"It's in an area that's like dead man's curve on a dangerous highway," he said. "In over 500 years, guess what, there is more than one car wreck. So you have all these shipwrecks on dead man's curve. That's where the Santa Maria is, exactly the distance from where Columbus said it was from his fort."

Clifford believes dirty politics has muddied the waters around the flagship of Columbus's small fleet that set sail from Spain in August 1492. Clifford was asked by Haitian President Michael Martelly to prepare a plan to save the remains of the ship but it was scuttled by UNESCO, based on a lack of microbiological testing. Then the UNESCO experts quickly dismissed Clifford's claim without any microbiological testing.

"It's all about money with UNESCO," he said. "And guess what? The U.S. has not given UNESCO money for three years. They don't really like Americans, especially this one."

Whoever could claim to have found the Santa Maria could be due a pirate's chest full of international prestige and riches. It possesses an important cultural cachet from a period of first contact between Europe and the Americas.

"It's the ship that changed the course of human history," Clifford said. "It's the ship that made possible the discovery of the Americas. It's a touchstone to that period of history."

He is worried about looting of the Santa Maria remains. He says UNESCO was at the unguarded site for only a few days in September and found a looter sawing something off the wreck. Many artifacts, including a gun carriage he photographed at the site, have been stolen, he says.

"The site is not recognizable from the last time we were there," he said. "If we can't get back to investigate the site, how can we prove it's the Santa Maria?"

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca