Laura Hesketh is a PhD candidate at the University of Liverpool’s Department of History and a researcher in the Centre for the Study of International Slavery (CSIS). In this article, Laura uses the arrival of the replica Santa María in Liverpool to reconsider familiar narratives of Columbus and European exploration, asking what changes when we centre Indigenous knowledge, colonialism and its enduring legacies instead.
Ships visit Liverpool throughout the year, but few carry a story as significant, or as contested, as the Santa María.
The ship has often been presented as a symbol of exploration: Christopher Columbus’ flagship, sailing West for the Spanish Crown in 1492. But if we follow the wake it left behind, the story does not end in the Caribbean. In many ways, it ends here.
At first glance, Columbus and Liverpool appear to belong to different historical worlds. Columbus was a fifteenth-century Italian navigator; Liverpool rose to prominence centuries later as an Atlantic port. Yet the two histories are connected through the colonial system that emerged from European expansion into the Americas.
Today, a full-scale replica of the Santa María sits outside Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum, in a city whose wealth, landscape and identity were shaped by the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and the plantation economies of the Americas. The location is difficult to ignore.
When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, his first landfall was Guanahani, known today as San Salvador in the Bahamas. A place already inhabited by the Lucayan people. They had complex histories, political structures, spiritual practices, technologies and sophisticated relationships with land and water. They possessed extensive knowledge of their environment. It was the Europeans that did not, and yet the conventional narrative reverses this relationship.
What happens if we begin on the shore instead?
What did the Lucayan people see when the Santa María appeared?
What did they know about these strangers?
What did they understand that Europeans did not?
And what happened when European systems of naming, classification and possession began to overwrite Indigenous ways of knowing?
These questions lead beyond Columbus himself and towards a much larger structure: the making of the modern colonial world. Sylvia Wynter’s work asks us to question the very categories through which modernity has defined who counts as fully human. For Wynter, colonialism was not simply a political system imposed on already-existing peoples. It was part of a deeper transformation in how the world was organised and how humanity itself was classified.
The colonial modern world system produced a particular figure of ‘Man’ the rational, European, secular, property-owning subject, as though this figure represented the universal human. Those who did not fit that model could then be constructed as lesser, primitive, irrational or not fully human.
As Tao Leigh Goffe puts it, the Caribbean became a ‘laboratory’ for transforming Indigenous territories, ecosystems and human beings into property within an emerging racialised capitalist order.
The Santa María therefore represents more than a feat of navigation. It belongs to the formation of a world in which conquest, classification, extraction and racial hierarchy became mutually reinforcing.
Decolonising these histories therefore requires more than adding Indigenous or African voices to an otherwise unchanged European narrative. It requires questioning the structure of the narrative itself.
Who is treated as the subject?
Whose knowledge is considered theory, and whose is reduced to culture, folklore or testimony?
This world survives not only in institutions and economic structures, but also in habits of thought: in whose knowledge we instinctively trust, whose histories we consider authoritative, whose accents sound educated, whose archives appear objective, and whose presence requires explanation. This is internalised colonialism. It’s what happens when the hierarchy imposed from outside begins to reproduce itself from within.
Liverpool offers a particularly powerful place to confront these questions. We can see its economic history in the buildings, docks, street names, museum collections and commercial networks. We can also ask what that wealth required: the separation of families, the theft of labour, the destruction and displacement of Indigenous societies, and the trafficking and continued exploitation of African peoples.
This is where the Nao Santa María becomes uncomfortable in a productive way.
We can use it to ask a different set of questions:
Whose world did he enter?
Whose knowledge was already there?
What was taken?
What was transformed?
What survived?
Who resisted?
Who profited?
Who was displaced?
Who was allowed to remain?
And, perhaps most importantly: Who gets to tell the story now?
These questions bring us to the difference between care and accountability.
It is not simply about being more sensitive when telling colonial histories. It is about confronting the structures through which colonialism continues to shape what is considered normal, valuable and knowable. Fred Moten suggests sovereignty involves breaking our ties with empire in how we live, work and create. That confrontation does not require turning history into a morality play. It requires refusing the comfort of inherited categories.
The ship has crossed the ocean again. Perhaps this time we should refuse to let it tell the story by itself.
Discover more about the Centre for the Study of International Slavery, which brings together interdisciplinary research on human enslavement and its legacies and works with partners including National Museums Liverpool to connect scholarship with public understanding and debate. Discover more about CSIS and its research.