Episode 5: The Santa Maria

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Christmas Day, 1492. Columbus’s flagship sinks off the coast of Hispaniola. The crew builds La Navidad, the first European settlement in the New World. When Columbus returns a year later, the village has vanished. Centuries on, the missing wreck and lost settlement fuel a modern quest for great rediscovery. Shifting seabeds and bitter rivalries lead some to personal ruin. By land, air and sea, explorers employ new technologies to uncover lost traces. Will finding one site reveal the other?

In 1941, German soldiers remove twenty-two amber panels from Catherine Palace and ship them west. When the relic fails to resurface after the war, it launches an eighty year quest for its recovery…

After WWI, one of the world’s largest diamonds vanishes from Vienna’s Imperial Treasury. Its disappearance sparks a diplomatic crisis and a flurry of public speculation. Was the Florentine Diamond…

In 1971, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper jumps from a plane holding $200,000 in ransom. The largest FBI manhunt in history comes up empty-handed. A clip-on tie and dummy parachute confuse the…

More than a millennium since the fall of the Roman Empire, its monumental structures endure. Wonders like the dome of the Pantheon stand strong while modern concrete crumbles within decades. How did…

Christmas Day, 1492. Columbus’s flagship sinks off the coast of Hispaniola. The crew builds La Navidad, the first European settlement in the New World. When Columbus returns a year later, the village…

At the centre of Christianity is the miraculous tale of Jesus’ resurrection. Although Jesus of Nazareth was a real man, the location of his burial tomb is hotly contested. Three tombs in Jerusalem…

In 1929, scientists in northern China unearth ancient human fossils -- proof of an ancestral “Missing Link.” But as war looms, the priceless relics vanish under the custody of US marines. Tales of…

After conquering Egypt in 525 BCE, Persian King Cambyses II faces resistance from the Oracle of Amun, who refuses to recognize his rule. Enraged, he dispatches fifty thousand soldiers into Egypt's…