The Town of the Nativity Columbus' Christmas City by Dennis
Montgomery Columbus left thirty-nine of his crew behind after
foundering off Hispaniola on Christmas Day, 1492. When he
returned a year later, the fort and settlement of Navidad those
sailors built had been burned to the ground and all thirty-nine
were dead. The ships of Columbus's fleet, the Niña, the Pinta,
the Santa Maria, struggle toward the New World in this
nineteenth-century print. On Christmas Day, 1492, misfortune and
poor seamanship shipwrecked Christopher Columbus long enough for
him to found Villa de Navidad—the Town of the Nativity—a
palisaded, moated enclosure on Haiti's coast. He, a few
historians, and one or two journalists have been pleased to call
it the first European city in America. Some say not a city, not
even a town, but a settlement. Others just call it a disaster.
By anyone's lights, Columbus may as well not have bothered. La
Navidad, as it is commonly called, was too small a place to
support the dignity of a noun grander th