"The Columbus Chronicles"
 
by:   William F. Keegan
 
in:   "The Sciences"  (Jan/Feb 1989, published by the New York
      Academy of Sciences)
 
 
"The Log of Christopher Columbus"
Translated by Robert H. Fuson
International Marine Publishing Company; 252 pages; $29.95
 
"The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America
1492-1493"
Translated by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley, Jr.
University of Oklahoma Press; 424 pages; $57.50
 
      On a clear November evening, three weeks after he arrived in
the New World, Christopher Columbus stood on the aft deck of the
Santa Maria, calculating the North Star's altitude with a quad-
rant.  Later that night, he recorded the ship's position in his
log as begin forty-two degrees north of the equator, roughly
where Pennsylvania is today.  He had been sailing along the coast
of a landmass the natives called Colba.  "It is certain," he
wrote, "that this is tierra firme and that I am off Zayto and
Quinsay a hundred leagues more or less."  What Columbus meant is
that he had found the Asian continent, that, in particular, two
legendary Chinese cities--probably present-day Zhao'an and
Hangzhou--lay only about three hundred miles away.  After travel-
ing for almost two months, he was finally within reach of his
destination.  Yet, without seeing the Grand Khan or visiting his
kingdom or acquiring any riches, Columbus abruptly turned his
vessels about and headed in the opposite direction.
      Why Columbus reversed course is a mystery, though if he
harbored doubts about his location--a reasonable assumption,
considering he had encountered little that resembled the civiliz-
ation described by Marco Polo--his action would have helped him
avoid the truth.  Personal motivation aside, wherever the Geno-
vese explorer thought he was, he certainly was not near China. 
Despite Columbus's wildly inaccurate estimate of latitude, his
log entries describing geographic features, distances traveled,
and other aspects of the voyage, when taken together, indicate
that "tierra firme" was not a continent but an island--that Colba
was Cuba.  Indeed, Cuba is the first landmark about which there
is some degree of certainty.  In contrast, the locations of
Columbus's stops before Cuba, including the most historically
significant stop of all--the first landfall in the New World, the
island Columbus called San Salvador--are open to dispute.
      Everyone agrees that San Salvador is located in the Bahamas,
a chain, made up of hundreds of islands and cays, that stretches
from the southeastern coast of Florida to the eastern tip of
Cuba, a distance of some seven hundred and sixty miles.  Facing
the Atlantic between the twentieth and twenty-seventh parallels,
the islands act as a gateway to the Caribbean for ships approach-
ing from the northeast.  Since Columbus did in fact approach from
that direction and, three weeks later, sighted Cuba, there is no
doubt he passed through the chain.  Nor is there any 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, Fernandina, and Isabela.  But
agreement ends there.
      During the past three hundred and fifty years, no fewer than
nine sites have been proposed for the first landfall, from Grand
Turk Island, at the extreme southeastern end of the Bahamas, to
Egg Island, more than three hundred miles to the north.  One
proposal came in 1828, from the American novelist Washington
Irving, who sited the landfall at Cat Island, in the northern
Bahamas, but he was motivated less by historical fact than by
literary whimsy.  About the same time, Juan Bautista Munoz, in
the course of writing a history of the New World, reconstructed
the voyage and identified Watling Island, located midway in the
Bahama chain, as San Salvador--an opinion shared by many sub-
sequent investigators.  (In 1926, the Bahaman government of-
ficially renamed Watling San Salvador.  Both terms are used
today.)  Even Abraham Lincoln's assistant secretary of the Navy,
Gustavus V. Fox, contributed to the debate.  A lifelong seaman
who had spent many years in the Caribbean, Fox conducted his
study of the landfall question in the early 1880s, concluding
that Columbus first set foot in the New World at Samana Cay,
sixty-five miles southeast of Watling Island.  These sundry San
Salvadors have been used, in turn, as the jumping-off points for
a dozen different passages through the chain.  A composite map of
the proposed routes looks like the ramblings of a drunken sailor.
      All but one of the alleged landfalls more or less fell out
of favor in 1942, when the Harvard historian Samuel E. Morison
published his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Columbus, in
which he reaffirmed Munoz's position:  that the Italian mariner
first went ashore at Watling Island.  At that time, Morison was
not only the world authority on Columbus but a superb seaman,
with a keen understanding of navigation (he had even sailed the
route himself).  His view was considered gospel for four decades.
      But Morison's reconstruction of Columbus's passage through
the Bahamas contained gaps and errors--for example, regarding the
locations of key villages mentioned in the log--and as these
became apparent, historians began questioning the Watling land-
fall.  Then, two years ago, a team of National Geographic Society
scientists, directed by senior associate editor Joseph Judge,
charged that the Morison route was not just flawed; it was
completely wrong.  After simulating the geography of the Bahamas
with computer models, which made it possible to sail different
courses electronically, and reexamining geographic and
archaeological data, the team settled on the route suggested by
Fox.  They concluded that Columbus had landed first at the small
emerald-green pendant of sand and trees known as Samana Cay, and
thus they pronounced the mystery solved.  Yet, only a year later,
an oceanographer and a computer scientist from the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, on Cape Cod, challenged the geographic
society team's estimates of wind and water currents and placed
Columbus within sight of Watling Island on the morning of October
12, 1492.
      Doubtless, the matter would have been settled long ago if
not for a lack of information about the voyage.  No map has
survived, and Columbus's log, written in Castilian Spanish,
disappeared soon after he presented it to King Ferdinand and
Queen Isabella.  To make matters worse, the only copy of the log,
which Isabella commissioned, also has been lost.  What has
survived is a literary hybrid--part paraphrase, part
transcription--of the copy, made by Bartolome de Las Casas, a
friar who had known Columbus and had himself traveled extensively
in the New World, and who provided the first full account of the
Spanish conquest, the "History of the Indies".  In short, the
record of Columbus's voyage that exists is a thirdhand manuscript
written in sixteenth-century Spanish.
      Not only does Las Casas's manuscript contain outright
errors--some, such as the latitude reading off the coast of Cuba
or assertions about the proximity of Japan and China, so
egregious that they call attention to themselves; it is rife with
ambiguity.  Descriptive passages are sometimes so general that
they could apply to any number of islands in the Caribbean.  San
Salvador, for instance, is described as "flat...green...and
[having] a lake in the middle"--a portrait that matches Cat
Island, Conception Island, and several others.  Certain words
have double meanings, depending on the context in which they are
used, and the log is skimpy on context.  An example is the phrase
camino de, which can mean either "the way from" or "the way to"--
a distinction that could not be more critical to determining
locations.  Finally, the Las Casas manuscript has numerous
erasures, unusual spellings, and brief illegible passages, as
well as marginal notes that the friar intended either for in-
clusion in the text or as reminders to himself about the
transcription.  Some of these irregularities--especially those
regarding distance terms--bear directly on the location of San
Salvador.  Still, apart from notes made years later by one of
Columbus's sons, this document is the sole source of information
about the European discovery of the Americas.
      From the beginning, the ambiguities, errors, and omissions
in Las Casas's manuscript have been compounded in translation. 
In 1981, the Society for the History of Discoveries, a group of
Columbus scholars, concluded that all the published editions of
the log differed, in varying degrees, from the Las Casas manu-
script.  The discrepancies were due in part to an insufficient
understanding of sixteenth-century Spanish, in part to bias. 
Regarding passages that permitted more than one interpretation,
for example, translators tended to choose the direction, distance
covered, and geographic detail that best matched their own,
preconceived notions about the voyage.  In Morison's translation,
published along with his biography of Columbus, San Salvador
simply was identified as Watling Island, without any acknowledg-
ment that the location of the first landfall was in dispute.
      This in not true of the two newest English translations. 
The first, by Robert H. Fuson, a geographer and Columbus expert
at the University of South Florida, is illustrated with simple
maps, contemporary drawings of key events, and sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century woodcuts.  Although in his footnotes and
addenda, Fuson argues for the Samana Cay landfall, the test
itself, with a few exceptions--for example, perpetuating the myth
that Columbus kept two logs, to hide from his crew the actual
distance of the voyage--appears free of bias.  (These exceptions
are critical, however, making the Fuson translation suitable only
for the nonspecialist.)  The second is a bilingual, meticulously
annotated edition, prepared by Oliver Dunn, a historian at Purdue
University, in Indiana, and James E. Kelley, Jr., a mathematician
and computer consultant, that should become the definitive
version for English-speaking Columbus scholars.  By providing
thorough historical and linguistic analyses of all the disputed
sections of the manuscript, as well as an exact transcription of
Las Casas's own words, the Dunn and Kelley translation, in
particular, will help lift the fog that has obscured Columbus's
route through the Bahamas.
      Indeed, by carefully cross-checking different log entries
(regarding sailing directions, island topography, and the loca-
tions of villages) against the physical characteristics of the
islands today, as well as against archaeological evidence
uncovered during the past few years, it is now possible to
identify San Salvador--to decide whether it is Watling Island,
Samana Cay, or some other island--with reasonable certainty.  And
not a minute too soon:  three years hence, we will commemorate
the five hundredth anniversary of the landfall that led to the
Americas.  After centuries of doubt, it would be satisfying to be
able to point to the place where the first step was taken.
      On August 3, 1492, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria
sailed south from Spain to the Canary Islands, off the north-
western coast of Africa.  After stopping there for repairs and
provisions, Columbus headed due west, the direction that would
bring him, according to his reckoning, to the Indies.  There is
disagreement about how far south the three caravels were driven
by wind and ocean currents during the thirty-seven-day Atlantic
crossing, but virtually all modern navigational studies find
them, by October 12, on the eastern side of the central Bahamas--
somewhere in an area about twelve thousand miles square.
      Within this rectangle lie a number of prominent islands,
including Watling, Rum Cay, and Long Island; a horseshoe-shaped
cluster consisting of Fortune, Crooked, and Acklins islands; and
Samana Cay.  Viewed from above, these variously shaped outcrops
suggest an S, tipped slightly backward, with the top curve
consisting of Watling, Rum Cay, and Long Island, and the bottom
curve of the horseshoe cluster, with Samana Cay, smaller than the
others, resting outside the figure, just east of the bottom
curve.
      According to Morison, Columbus followed the path described
by the S, stopping first at Watling, then Rum Cay, Long Island,
and Crooked Island, before heading west to Cuba.  Joseph Judge,
on the other hand, has Columbus starting his passage through the
Bahamas off the S, at Samana Cay, and following only its bottom
curve--crossing to Crooked Island, then sailing on to Long Island
and back to Fortune before leaving the area.  So it is here, in
the central Bahamas, that the search for San Salvador truly
begins.  And from this point onward, any attempt to retrace
Columbus's path depends as much upon hermeneutics--upon correctly
interpreting the log--as it does upon navigation, geography, and
archaeology.
      Fortunately, as the Dunn and Kelley translation makes clear,
the Las Casas manuscript itself contains clues to how it should
be read.  Most important, some islands are described more com-
pletely than others and, therefore, their locations are more
certain.  The site of the fourth and last stopover in the
Bahamas, the strip of land Columbus called Isabela, is one such
place.  Once it is firmly identified, Isabela can serve as a
benchmark by which to determine the location of sites about which
there is less information in the log.  And the evidence strongly
suggests that Isabela is the horseshoe-shaped cluster consisting
of Crooked, Fortune, and Acklins islands.  Columbus came upon
this cluster on the morning of October 19:
 
      We all three ships reached it before noon at the north
      point where it forms as isleo [small island] and a reef
      of stone outside of it to the north and another between
      the isleo and the big island.
 
Just off the northwestern cape of Crooked Island is a lone pro-
montory known today as Bird Rock, which, as the log indicates, is
separated from the island by a reef.  In honor of the "isleo,"
Columbus named this end of the island Cape of the Small Island.
      The San Salvadoran natives, called Lucayans, whom Columbus
had pressed into service as guides called the "big island"
Saomete.  Columbus understood them to say that a city lay some
distance inland or on the opposite side (the exact location was
unclear) and that the king who lived there ruled all of the
neighboring islands and possessed a great deal of gold.
      Columbus and his crew sailed south along Isabela's western
shore, searching for a way around the island and a passage to the
king.  Midway down the coast, they anchored at a second cape--
Cape Beautiful, so named for its rich array of exotic flora. 
Although Columbus noted in his log that Cape Beautiful was
separated by a narrow bight from another sliver of land, he
referred to both islands as Isabela.  He continued south to the
tip of the second island, then turned and attempted to sail
northeast and east, but found the water "so shallow that I could
not enter or steer for the settlement [Saomete]."  For this
reason, perhaps, he named Isabela's southernmost tip Cape of the
Lagoon.
      This description clearly matches the Crooked-Fortune-Acklins
cluster.  Crooked Island is roughly L-shaped, with one side
forming the top of the horseshoe and the other the upper half of
the western leg, which, in turn, is separated by a shallow water-
way from the lower half, Fortune Island.  Acklins makes up the
entire eastern leg.  Moreover, the three islands surround the
Bight of Acklins, a twenty-mile expanse of shallows that has
changed little during the past five centuries.  It is just such a
"lagoon" that separated the Cape of the Lagoon--the southern tip
of Fortune--from the region of Isabela (Acklins) where Saomete
supposedly lay.
      Columbus never reached the El Dorado of which his guides
spoke, but there was once a huge Lucayan settlement site directly
across the bight, on the western side of Acklins.  Archaeological
studies, conducted in 1983 and 1987, have uncovered remnants of
fire pits, including charred wood and limestone spars (small
heat-cracked rocks), and midden deposits containing large quan-
tities of fish bones, in addition to the shells of clams and
conchs, which were staples of the Lucayan diet.  Also unearthed
were numerous fragments of griddles--earthenware platters the
Lucayans used for baking cassava bread--which are always
associated with permanent habitation.  The size of the village
and its involvement in long-distance trade would befit only a
chief as wealthy and as powerful as the "king" who, according to
the log, was supposed to have ruled Saomete.  The settlement
extends along the shore for more than three miles, or at least
six times farther than the average Lucayan village.  At most
sites throughout the Bahamas, less than one percent of the ex-
cavated pottery found at the Acklins settlement originated in the
Greater Antilles (specifically, Cuba and Hispaniola).
      Having found passage around the southern tip of Isabela
impossible, Columbus reversed course and sailed back to the Cape
of the Small Island, where he dropped anchor and went ashore. 
Only a short distance inland, he and several members of his crew
passed "some big lakes" and verdant groves with "flocks of
parrots that obscure the sun."  From the bank of one of the
lakes, they spied a "serpent," almost six feet long:
 
      When it saw us it threw itself into the lake and we
      followed it in, because it was not very deep, until
      with lances we killed it.
 
      Then, "about half a league from the place where [they were]
anchored," they came upon a village whose Lucayan inhabitants had
only recently fled into the forest.  Before long, the natives
conquered their fear and approached the Europeans, who gave them
gifts of bells and glass beads.  Later, Columbus asked the
Lucayans to bring water from the lakes to the ships.
      There is little doubt that these events took place near the
northwestern cape of Crooked Island, just across from Bird Rock. 
In 1983, archaeologists discovered a village site about two miles
(or roughly half a league) inland of that point.  As described in
the log, there is a freshwater lake about a quarter-mile away. 
Four years later, excavations revealed midden deposits, pottery,
and house floors.  Among the more curious items unearthed was a
leg bone of a crocodile, a reptile that, until then, had not been
known to inhabit the Bahamas.  Since, throughout the log,
Columbus identified various snakes and lizards by name, it is
likely that this rather forbidding species was the mysterious
serpent he encountered and killed on Isabela.
      All of which is to say that there is virtually complete
congruency between Columbus's description of Isabela, the fourth
landfall, and the cluster consisting of Crooked, Fortune, and
Acklins islands.  The isleo of the log, which inspired the name
Cape of the Small Island, is therefore the benchmark by which the
locations of San Salvador, Santa Maria de la Concepcion, and
Fernandina should be judged.  In short, whatever route one pro-
poses for Columbus's passage through the Bahamas, it must bring
him within sight of Bird Rock on the morning of October 19.  The
Judge track does not do so, and that is not its only failing.
      To begin reconstructing Columbus's voyage to the New World,
Judge enlisted Luis Marden, a retired National Geographic editor
and a seaman, along with his wife, Ethel Marden, a mathematician,
to retrace Columbus's course from the Canary Islands to the
Caribbean.  Both Judge and the Mardens concede that the daily
courses and directions given in the log lead to Watling.  But
they argue that one cannot reconstruct the trip on this basis
alone, because it excludes the effects of winds and currents.  Is
this a fair assumption?
      Everyone agrees that the Genovese explorer's navigational
skills were unparalleled.  Columbus had spent years at sea,
sailing the Mediterranean and the coast of West Africa.  It is
inconceivable that he was unaware of the effects of winds and
currents and, more important, that he failed to correct his
course accordingly, if only to be able to retrace his steps--to
get back home.  Yet that is what Judge and the Mardens ask us to
believe.  After estimating wind and current values for September
and October of 1492, they concluded that, by the end of the
crossing, the caravels had been pushed about sixty-five miles
south, to a position near Samana Cay.
      More than the Mardens' premise is questionable.  As Philip
L. Richardson and Roger A. Goldsmith, of the Woods Hole Oceano-
graphic Institution, have pointed out, the way in which the
geographic society team made corrections also was flawed.  The
team based its calculations on the speeds and directions of winds
and currents listed in modern U.S. pilot charts.  But these
values represent prevailing winds and currents--average speeds in
the most frequent direction of flow only.  (If, for example, an
ocean current flowed south most of the year, the only flow
measurements included in the average would be southern ones).  In
contrast, the values for average winds or currents take into
account all velocity observations, regardless of direction (over
a year, winds blow from all directions).
      By using average values (extracted from a large set of data
they had gathered in connection with their studies of weather
patterns in previous centuries), Richardson and Goldsmith found
that the crossing ended within sight--about fifteen miles--of
Watling Island.  As it turns out, the effects of opposing winds
and currents on Columbus's voyage were negligible; those from the
north virtually canceled out those from the south.
      Even if, for the sake of argument, we were to assume that
the Mardens' reconstruction of the transatlantic crossing was
correct, Samana Cay simply does not match the San Salvador de-
scribed in the log.  Columbus wrote that his first landfall took
place on a large island with a large, centrally located lake. 
Samana Cay is a small island with s small, marshy lagoon.  The
log describes a large, protected harbor on San Salvador.  Samana
Cay has only a small, unprotected harbor.  Finally, Columbus
located, near this harbor, a low-lying peninsula that, because it
was partially eroded by the sea, could easily have become a
separate island.  The Samana Cay landmark Judge has identified as
this site is in fact a recent sand spit that is regularly sub-
merged by storms.  It is doubtful this point of land existed even
one hundred years ago, let alone five hundred.
      The identities of other key sites along the geographic
society track are questionable, as well.  According to Judge,
after leaving Samana Cay, Columbus headed southeast to the three-
island cluster, sailing westward along the northern coast of
Crooked Island (the second landfall, Santa Maria de la
Concepcion) until, on October 15, he reached Bird Rock.  From
there, Columbus sailed farther west, to explore a seventeen-mile
stretch of long Island (the third landfall, Fernandina).  He then
returned to Fortune Island (the fourth landfall, Isabela) on the
nineteenth.  The Judge track says, in effect, that Columbus
traced half of the S figure's bottom curve (the horseshoe-shaped
cluster) and the lower section of the top curve (the southern end
of Long Island), then doubled back to the bottom curve.
      There are a number of problems with this route:  Columbus
said nothing about Bird Rock--the isleo--or, for that matter,
Saomete, in the log entry for October 15, and it is completely
out of character for him to have neglected describing so prom-
inent a feature.  Stranger still, Judge's second and fourth
landfalls (on Crooked and Fortune islands) are separated by only
ten miles, yet Columbus makes no mention of this fact, either. 
Despite having native guides who were familiar enough with the
fourth island to call it by name; despite being within sight of
his position of three days previous; and despite his renown as a
navigator with an unerring sense of the relationship between one
place and another, Columbus somehow failed to realize that he had
returned to virtually the same spot.
      Another critical flaw in the Judge track is that it over-
looks an entire day of the voyage.  According to the log,
Columbus was caught in a storm the night of the seventeenth. 
Fearful of running afoul of Fernandina's (the third landfall's)
rocks and shoals, he stayed far from shore:
 
      We [will head] for the southeast cape of the island
      where I hope to anchor until the weather clears.
 
But the log gives no evidence of the fleet's having dropped
anchor that night or the following day, the eighteenth.  Indeed,
Columbus wrote that, when the weather cleared, just before day-
break, he
 
      followed the wind and went around the island as far as
      [he] could and anchored when the time was not good for
      navigation.
 
By "time," Columbus meant time of day.  So, in referring to the
time that was "not good for navigation," Columbus meant night-
fall, on the eighteenth.  In other words, between the evening of
the seventeenth and the evening of the eighteenth, Columbus
sailed about twenty-four hours, at least half the time with a
favorable wind.  Yet, Judge concluded that, during this period,
the flotilla traveled only some seventeen miles, from a point low
on the eastern coast of Long Island (Judge's Fernandina) to its
southernmost tip, now called Cape Verde.  In comparison, Judge
has Columbus sailing thirty-six miles, from Cape Verde to Fortune
Island (Judge's Isabela), the morning of the nineteenth alone, in
winds virtually identical to those of the previous day.  By this
reckoning, Columbus should have traveled at least fifty or sixty
miles during the twenty-four hours of sailing between the seven-
teenth and the eighteenth.  The reason Judge insists Columbus did
not is obvious:  if one assumes, as he does, that the flotilla
left Bird Rock on the sixteenth and, after having traveled a
short distance along Long Island's eastern shore, reversed direc-
tion and sailed to Cape Verde, only seventeen miles south, then
Columbus's progress between the seventeenth and the eighteenth
has to be grossly underestimated.
      A more prudent way of reconstructing the route is to begin
with the most reliable benchmark--Columbus's sighting of the
isleo (Bird Rock) and, nearby, Isabela (Crooked Island) on the
nineteenth--and work backward.  He says in the log that the
caravels approached the isleo from the northwest, meaning that
they started from the coast of Long Island, which lies about
twenty-five miles away and is the only landmass in that direc-
tion.  Taking him at his word regarding the previous day's
journey ("I followed the wind"), one can see that he could easily
have sailed the roughly sixty mile shoreline of Long Island by
the time dusk fell on the eighteenth.  In other words, Columbus
made his third landfall not, as Judge suggests, on the southern
end of Long Island but the northern end.
      During the afternoon of the seventeenth, before getting
caught in the "dirty" weather that would keep him running far
offshore of Fernandina the entire night, the Spanish fleet had
taken "barrels of water" from a freshwater lake near a Lucayan
village.  Morison's inability to locate this village, or to
demonstrate that a native settlement of any kind ever existed on
the extreme northeastern shore of Long Island, was considered a
major weakness in his route.  Even Judge brings up the point,
though one wonders why, since subsequent research has done what
Morison could not.  In 1984, archaeologists found evidence--
pottery and shellfish remains--of thirty-one Lucayan sites on
Long Island, eight of them on the eastern shore, two of which are
within several miles of the northern cape.  An excavation of the
northernmost of these sites has turned up evidence, including
griddle shards and middens, of a permanent Lucayan village. 
Moreover, behind the village site lies a freshwater pond--the
same pond, presumably, to which the Spaniards brought their empty
barrels five hundred years ago.  Most important, the pond and the
village are close to a prominent shoreline feature that Columbus
had passed earlier that day (the seventeenth):
 
      When I was two leagues distant from the end of the
      island, I found a very wonderful harbor with one en-
      trance, although one might say with two, because it has
      an isleo in the middle . . . I thought that it was the
      mouth of some river.
 
      Judge attacked Morison's suggestion that the harbor with two
mouths is Santa Maria Harbor, on the northwestern shore of Long
Island.  And he is quite right to do so, because the harbor does
not have two mouths.  But no one today supports Morison's
proposal.  What's more, there is an ideal candidate for the
harbor almost exactly where Columbus said it should be--along the
northeastern shore.  Into this harbor flows a tidal creek whose
strength, as it swells and streams through a constricted inlet,
makes it seem very much like a river.  As Columbus indicated, an
islet rests at the center of the harbor's mouth, and the village
and its freshwater pond are within walking distance.
      According to the log, Columbus visited one other village on
Fernandina, a few miles south of this harbor.  In fact, it is the
village he set out from, sailing north, on the morning of the
seventeenth, after the crew had spent the previous day exchanging
trinkets and goods with Lucayans there, while Columbus observed
whales, parrots, and exotic trees.  The remains of a permanent
settlement, including griddle shards and middens, have been
unearthed at this site, as well.  The evidence seems overwhelming
that, when Columbus spied Fernandina on the horizon, he had
before him the northernmost shores of Long Island.
      If this is the case, the site of the second landfall, the
place that Columbus called Santa Maria de la Concepcion, cannot
be other than Rum Cay, twenty miles east of Long Island (and near
the peak of the S figure's upper curve), roughly the distance the
explorer claimed to have traveled between the two.  The log
contains little information about Santa Maria de la Concepcion. 
Columbus did not anchor there until he had almost passed the
island, and his stay was uneventful.  Lucayans, who "let us go
around the island," were encountered, but no settlements were
reported.  (As one would expect from the log, village sites have
been found everywhere but the western cape, where Columbus went
ashore.  Midway between two of these sites is a cave in which the
Lucayans carved pictures on the walls, a practice the natives
followed only in places where they lived.)
      Critics have made much of the fact that Rum Cay measures
five miles by ten miles, whereas the log describes an island
three times that size--five leagues by ten leagues.  Morison
invented a special terrestrial unit of measure he called an
"alongshore league," to account for the discrepancy, but it was
an idea that strained the credulity even of his supporters.  A
better explanation is that Las Casas confused distance terms in
this passage.  In his manuscript, the friar canceled the word
leguas, meaning leagues, and replaced it with millas, meaning
miles, a total of twelve times, whereas the reverse--leagues
substituted for miles--occurs not once.  This suggests that Las
Casas, or the scribe who preceded him, was for some reason dis-
posed to translating distance figures into leagues.  It is likely
that, in the entry describing Santa Maria de la Concepcion, Las
Casas simply chose the wrong word in his transcription.  (Between
leaving the Canary Islands and sighting Cuba, Columbus specified
distance seven times.  Using miles or leagues, on a case-by-case
basis, the Watling track matches the log in all seven instances. 
In contrast, the Samana Cay track matches in only three
instances.)
      Harder to explain is Columbus's statement that he saw "so
many islands" upon leaving San Salvador that he could not decide
to which he should sail first.  When one approaches Rum Cay from
the northeast, as Columbus says he approached Santa Maria, the
horizon appears relatively empty.  but this alone is scarcely
sufficient to reject Rum Cay as the second landfall (the Judge
track contains many more such inconsistencies), especially when
it lies dead center between Long Island's northern tip, the third
landfall, and Watling Island, which, according to Richardson and
Goldsmith's analysis, is where Columbus ended up after the trans-
atlantic crossing, and which matches log descriptions of the
first landfall to a much greater degree than any other island in
the central Bahamas.
      Here are the first words Columbus used to describe San
Salvador:
 
      This island is quite big and very flat and with very
      green trees and much water and a very large lake in the
      middle and without any mountains; and all of it so
      green that it is a pleasure to look at.
 
One of the most prominent of Watling's features is a large,
centrally located lake.  On October 14, Columbus and some of his
crew explored the western coast of San Salvador in longboats:
 
      And in between the reef and shore there was depth and
      harbor for as many ships as there are in the whole of
      Christendom, and the entrance to it is very narrow.
 
Watling has a large, protected harbor, exactly like the one
described in the log, on its western shore.  Later, he
 
      saw a piece of land formed like an island, although it
      was not one, on which there were six houses.
 
Not far from the deep-water harbor is a peninsula--Cut Cay--that
is almost separated from the rest of the island.  Lucayan pottery
has been found on that cay, which suggests (but, alone, does not
prove) that it was once inhabited (the "six houses" observed by
Columbus).  Elsewhere on Watling, Charles Hoffman, an
archaeologist at Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, has
excavated a Lucayan site, uncovering a number of objects that the
log specifically states were given to the natives, and "in which
they took so much pleasure."  These include green and yellow
glass beads, broken crockery, a coin, and a belt buckle--objects
that have been found nowhere else in the central Bahamas.
      These tokens and trifles--the first entries in the archaeo-
logical record left behind by Columbus and his crew--heralded the
arrival of European civilization in the New World.  The Genovese
explorer may not have known where he was when he stepped onshore
on October 12, 1492, inadvertently inaugurating one of the most
dramatic episodes in the history of the Americas--the period of
Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, Juan Ponce de Leon and
Hernando de Soto--but now his descendants do.  And it was Watling
Island.
 
 
 
                                                           KEEGAN03.ART