This representation of the vessels of the early Spanish navigators is a fac-simile of a cut in Medina’s _Arte de navegar_, Valladolid, 1545, which was re-engraved in the Venice edition of 1555. Cf. _Carter-Brown Catalogue_, vol. i. nos. 137, 204; Ruge, _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_, pp. 240, 241; Jurien de la Gravière’s _Les marins du XV^e et du XVI^e siècle_, vol. i. pp. 38, 151. In the variety of changes in methods of measurement it is not easy to find the equivalent in tonnage of the present day for the ships of Columbus’s time. Those constituting his little fleet seem to have been light and swift vessels of the class called caravels. One had a deck amidships, with high forecastle and poop, and two were without this deck, though high, and covered at the ends. Captain G. V. Fox has given what he supposes were the dimensions of the larger one,—a heavier craft and duller sailer than the others. He calculates for a hundred tons,—makes her sixty-three feet over all, fifty-one feet keel, twenty feet beam, and ten and a half feet draft of water. She carried the kind of gun termed lombards, and a crew of fifty men. _U. S. Coast Survey Report_, 1880, app. 18; _Becher’s Landfall of Columbus_; A. Jal’s _Archéologie navale_ (Paris, 1840); Irving’s _Columbus_, app. xv.; H. H. Bancroft, _Central America_, i. 187; _Das Ausland_, 1867, p. 1. There are other views of the ships of Columbus’ time in the cuts in some of the early editions of his Letters on the discovery. See notes following this chapter.] And so, out of the harbor of Palos,[62] on the 3d of August, 1492, Columbus sailed with his three little vessels. The “Santa Maria,” which carried his flag, was the only one of the three which had a deck, while the other two, the “Niña” and the “Pinta,” were open caravels. The two Pinzons commanded these smaller ships,—Martin Alonzo the “Pinta”, and Vicente the “Niña.” [Illustration: BUILDING A SHIP. This follows a fac-simile, given in Ruge, _Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen_ p. 240, of a cut in Bernhardus de Breydenbach’s _Peregrinationes_, Mainz, 1486.]