A true story told with a pleasant sense of the people behind the events- this is a companion volume to The First Christmas Tree and The First Easter Rabbit. It is a little known incident in Columbus' voyage, the wrecking of the Santa Maria on Christmas Eve on a friendly island where he established his first settlement, and named it La Navidad. It was a quiet and all the responsible people fell asleep leaving little Pedro to the ship. He was homesick and thinking of Christmas back in Spain when he ran the ship on to a reef. And the date was 1492. But on this island Columbus found evidence of the first gold and recorded it in his Journals.