These two raised sections at the opposite ends of the ship were originally built with the idea of defense in mind. Ships for many centuries had had raised platforms fore and aft, on which the men who defended them could congregate in order to rain their arrows upon the decks of enemy ships. So useful were these “castles” that often enemy boarders were able to penetrate to the waist only to be driven off by the rain of missiles on their heads. When gunpowder came into general use tiny cannon were mounted in swivels attached to the bulwarks of these “castles,” but old ideas were not easily got rid of, and for a long time ships continued to be built with raised bows and sterns. So it was that the _Santa Maria_ had her forecastle and her sterncastle. The former term is still in use on ships, and signifies the quarters of the crew, which still are often placed in the bows of ships. The sterncastle has no present-day counterpart, and the name, too, has long since disappeared from ships. The cabin of the great Admiral was aft, in the topmost section of the sterncastle and was, from our point of view, not exactly palatial. It had a bed, which looked more like a chest except that it had highly raised head and foot boards of carved wood. There was a table, and there was little else. A door opened on to the high narrow deck, and windows (ports such as ships now use were not then thought of) opened in the narrow stern high above the water. The crews’ quarters were almost non-existent. Generally they slept on deck, although there was room between decks for some of them. This space, however, was not ventilated (that, of course, had little effect on a 15th-Century Spaniard. Even the Spaniards of the lower classes to-day seem somewhat averse to ventilation) and was devoted to cargo and supplies. Below this space was the “bilge” which was filled with stone for ballast. The raised forward deck was in reality just a platform that incidentally formed a roof over the forward section of the main deck—the deck, that is, that formed the waist—and beneath this forecastle deck were protected spots where the crew could secure some shelter from the weather. They cooked, when they cooked at all, on a box of small stones that sat on the main deck just under the edge of the raised forecastle. This crude fireplace was decorated by a large square plate of zinc that stood upright, attached to one side of the box, to serve as a windbreak.