"Beachhead in the Bahamas: Columbus Encounters a New World"
 
by William F. Keegan
 
in "Archaeology" (January/February 1992, pp. 44-50)
 
     "... in order that they would be friendly to us--
     because I recognized that they were people who would be
     better freed [from error] and converted to our Holy
     Faith by love than by force--to some of them I gave red
     caps, and glass beads which they put on their chests,
     and many other things of small value, in which they
     took so much pleasure and became so much our friends
     that it was a marvel.  Later they came swimming to the
     ships' launches where we were and brought us parrots
     and cotton thread in balls and javelins and many other
     things, and they traded them to us for other things
     which we gave them, such as small glass beads and
     bells.  In sum, they took everything and gave of what
     they had willingly.  But it seemed to me that they were
     a people very poor in everything.  All of them go
     around as naked as their mothers bore them....  And all
     those that I saw were young people, for none did I see
     of more than 30 years of age.  They are very well
     formed, with handsome bodies and good faces....  They
     should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that
     they say very quickly everything that is said to them;
     and I believe that they would become Christians very
     easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion."
           --  From "The Diario of Christopher Columbus's
               First Voyage to America, 1492-1493." 
               Translated into English by Oliver Dunn and
               James E. Kelley, Jr.  Copyright 1989 by
               Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr. 
               Published by the University of Oklahoma
               Press.
 
Landfall
     In the early morning of October 12, 1492, Columbus stepped
ashore in the New World.  His landfall was an island known to its
inhabitants as Guanahani.  As a sign of thanksgiving, Columbus
renamed the island San Salvador, "Holy Savior."  For more than a
century scholars and amateur historians have debated which island
should claim these names.  To date, ten of the 25 islands in the
Bahamas and Turks and Caicos have been identified as the first
landfall.  Only three of these have been subjected to close
scientific scrutiny, and only two have won many supporters. 
Watling Island (present-day San Salvador) and Samana Cay are the
leading candidates, with Grand Turk a distant third.
     Efforts to identify Columbus's first landfall are hampered
by a lack of solid evidence, compounded by the fact that all
descriptions of the event are derived from a third-hand
transcription of Columbus's written account.  The original log of
the voyage disappeared soon after Columbus presented it to the
Queen of Spain, and the copy commissioned by the Queen has also
been lost.  What survives is a sixteenth-century version, part
paraphrase and part transcription, of a copy made by Bartolome de
Las Casas, a friar who knew Columbus and had himself traveled
extensively in the New World.  This version, which contains
outright errors and is full of ambiguity, includes three
independent types of information: sailing directions,
descriptions of island physiography and vegetation, and the
descriptions and locations of native Lucayan villages.
     Most attempts to identify Columbus's landfall have been made
using the sailing directions and island geography.  At the end of
the eighteenth century Juan Bautista Munoz, commissioned by King
Carlos III of Spain to write a history of the New World,
reconstructed the voyage and identified Watling Island, midway in
the Bahama chain, as Columbus's San Salvador.  Meanwhile,
Gustavus V. Fox, assistant secretary of the Navy under Abraham
Lincoln, studied the landfall question in the early 1880s and
concluded that Columbus set foot in the New World at Samana Cay,
65 miles southeast of Watling Island.  But most scholars agreed
with the watling Island identification, and in 1926 the Bahamian
government officially renamed Watling Island "San Salvador." 
Furthermore, the identification received the backing of Harvard
historian Samuel E. Morison in his 1942 biography of Columbus. 
But Morison's reconstruction of Columbus's passage through the
Bahamas contained gaps and errors.  In 1986 a team of National
Geographic Society scientists, using computer simulations to re-
evaluate the date, charged that the Morison route was not just
flawed, it was completely wrong.  Like Fox, they concluded that
Columbus had landed first at Samana Cay, and they pronounced the
mystery solved.  A year later, however, an oceanographer and
computer scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
challenged the scientists' estimates of wind and water currents
and placed Columbus within sight of Watling Island on the morning
of October 12, 1492.
     It was clear that the debate would continue unresolved until
a new source of evidence could be found.  Beginning in 1982, I
undertook a series of comprehensive archaeological surveys in the
Bahamas to obtain information about island colonization.  Special
attention was given to locating the villages described by
Columbus.  There is no reason to question Columbus's assertion,
in the log, that he went ashore in four places: first San
Salvador, then the islands he christened Santa Maria de la
Concepcion, La Fernandina, and La Isabela.  La Isabela is well
described in the log, and the evidence strongly suggests that it
is the horseshoe-shaped cluster of islands known today as
Crooked, Fortune, and Acklins islands.  If the identification of
La Isabela is correct, then it is possible to backtrack, using
the log, and determine the first landfall.
     The Lucayans of San Salvador, whom Columbus pressed into
service as guides, called La Isabela "Saomete."  Some distance
inland, or on the opposite side of the island, was, they told
Columbus, the city of the king who ruled all of the neighboring
islands and who possessed a great deal of gold.  Columbus
attempted to sail to this city, but the water was too shallow for
his ships and he sailed instead to Cuba.
     In 1983 we found what we believe to be the city of the king
on the lee shore of Acklins Island.  Working that year and in
1987, we uncovered fire pits and midden deposits containing large
quantities of fish bones and the shells of clams and conchs,
staples of the Lucayan diet.  We also unearthed numerous
fragments of griddles, earthenware platters used for baking
cassava bread, which are associated with permanent habitation. 
The settlement is six times larger than an average Lucayan
village, extending along the shore for more than three miles. 
Another clue to the extraordinary nature of the site became
evident during analysis of the pottery we found there.  The
temper added to clay in island-manufactured pottery consisted of
carbonates, mostly crushed shell but also coral and limestone. 
At most sites in the Bahamas only about one percent of the
pottery has noncarbonate temper, and therefore was imported.  At
the Acklins site, however, 25 percent of the pottery was imported
from Hispaniola and Cuba.  It is clear that Acklins Island had a
large and wealthy settlement at a location that matches the
king's city on La Isabela.
     Accepting the archaeological confirmation of La Isabela as
Crooked, Fortune, and Acklins islands, we can trace Columbus's
route back to the first landfall.  Columbus arrived at La Isabela
on October 19, a week after arriving at San Salvador.  In the log
he says that the caravels approached La Isabela from the
northwest, meaning that they started from the coast of Long
Island, which lies about 25 miles away and is the only landmass
in that direction.  This strongly suggests that Long Island is
Columbus's third stop, called by him La Fernandina.  In 1984 we
found 31 Lucayan sites on Long Island, two of which are in
locations described by Columbus.  Surface collections made at the
northernmost site have turned up evidence of a permanent village. 
Moreover, behind the village site is a freshwater pond whose
location matches that of a pond described by Columbus, and where
his men filled casks with fresh water.  The description in the
log of the coast of La Fernandina corresponds well with the
geography of Long Island.  According to the log, Columbus visited
one other village on La Fernandina, where he observed whales,
parrots, and exotic trees while his crew exchanged trinkets and
goods with the Lucayans.  At a location that matches the
description in the log, the remains of a permanent Lucayan
settlement, including griddle sherds and middens, have been
unearthed.  The evidence seems overwhelming that the island
christened La Fernandina by Columbus is modern-day Long Island.
     Columbus's second landfall, Santa Maria de la Concepcion,
must be Rum Cay, which is 20 miles east of Long Island, roughly
the distance the explorer claimed to have traveled between the
two.  Some have objected to the identification because the size
of the island does not match the dimensions given in the log. 
But a change of measurement units from leagues to miles would
account for the difference.  There is evidence that these units
were sometimes confused elsewhere in the log, which is likely
what happened in the entry describing Santa Maria de la
Concepcion.
     Beyond Long Island, Columbus's third stop in the Bahamas,
and beyond Rum Cay, his second stop, lies Watling Island. 
Charles Hoffman, who worked with the national Geographic team,
has been excavating the Long Bay site on the island since 1983. 
In the course of these excavations Hoffman has recovered green
and yellow glass beads, brass belt buckles, European pottery, and
other artifacts described by Columbus in his log.  So many
European objects have been found that Hoffman recently concluded
that Long Bay must be the site of Columbus's first footfalls in
the New World.
     Hoffman's work has shown that the archaeology of Watling
Island matches the description in the log, and my work at the
other settlements corroborates the route.  None of the other
hypothesized routes can claim conformity on as many counts.  The
Genoese explorer, believing he was on some Asiatic island did not
know where he was stepping onshore on October 12, 1492, but now
we do.  It was Watling Island, known today as San Salvador.
 
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