The ship on the reverse did not have sufficient detail in Warner's version; Barber requested a photograph of the caravel to be exhibited at the fair from Ellsworth, then turned the reverse over to his assistant, George T. Morgan.
Having sailed north with a caravel and a pinnace and a few armed marines, he returned to Acapulco and claimed to have found the strait, with a large island at its mouth, at around 47° north latitude.
The Northern European adoption of the lateen in the Late Middle Ages was a specialized sail that was one of the technological developments in shipbuilding that made ships more maneuverable, thus, in the historian's traditional progression, permitting merchants to sail out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic Ocean; caravels typically mounted three or more lateens.