UNESCO has scuttled claims a wreck found off Haiti is Christopher Columbus's flagship from his first voyage to the Americas.
Marine archaeologist Barry Clifford stirred up global excitement in May when he announced he believed he had identified the wreck of the Santa Maria, one of three ships Columbus led on his first crossing of the Atlantic that sank in 1492 off the northern coast of Haiti.
The UN cultural body subsequently dispatched a team of experts to the wreck, located off the town of Cap-Haitien, to examine the remains found in the area where Columbus said the ship ran aground.
"There is now indisputable proof that the wreck is that of a ship from a much later period," UNESCO concluded in a report published on Monday.
"Although the site is located in the general area where one would expect to find the Santa Maria based on contemporary accounts of Columbus's first voyage, it is further away from shore than one should expect," experts said.
"Furthermore, and even more conclusively, the fasteners found on the site indicate a technique of ship construction that dates the ship to the late 17th or 18th century rather than the 15th or 16th century."
They added that an artefact recovered on site could be the remains of protective copper sheathing, and if it was, then "the ship could even not be dated to a time before the late 18th century".
Columbus set sail on August 3, 1492 from Palos de la Frontera in southern Spain, with the Santa Maria, La Nina and La Pinta, searching for a shortcut to Asia.
On October 12 of that year, he is believed to have landed in Guanahani, which historians have identified as an island in the Bahamas, in what is popularly called the "Discovery of the Americas".
Columbus stopped in Cuba, and then the island of Hispaniola - home to modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic - before his Santa Maria hit a reef and went down on December 25, 1492.
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