Goodbye Columbus, Hello Samana Cay
 
by:   Bruce Bower
 
in:   Science News (Oct. 18, 1986)
 
      Nearly 500 years after his historic voyage to the New World,
Christopher Columbus's accepted point of arrival has shifted. 
The explorer first landed on the narrow, 9-mile-long island of
Samana Cay in the Bahamas, according to a report presented at the
National Geographic Society in Washington, DC, last week.  The
island is 65 miles southeast of San Salvador, known as Watling
Island prior to 1926, which many history books peg as the place
where Columbus first dropped anchor.
      The five-year study was directed by Joseph Judge, senior
associate editor of National Geographic magazine.  He commis-
sioned a new translation of a summary of Columbus's lost log
written by a 16th-century priest.  The voyage was then replotted
by Luis Marden, a former National Geographic editor and trans-
atlantic sailor, and his wife, mathematician Ethel Marden, taking
into account the effects of currents and leeway, a ship's side-
ways slip due to wind.  Other investigators have not used these
crucial factors in their calculations, says Judge.  The Mardens
also based their work, which included a computerized retracing of
the Atlantic crossing, on the recently discovered length of the
sea league used to chart nautical distance in Columbus's time. 
The course plotted with these data ends up at a point about 10
miles east-northeast of Samana Cay.
      Further analysis bolstered the Mardens' estimate.  The 16th-
century abstract of Columbus's gives the general directions and
distances he traveled after the initial landing to four other
islands before going on to Cuba.  One location in these Bahamian
travels was pinned down with certainty; a computer program ran
the course backward from that point, ending up at Samana Cay.
      Earlier this year, Judge and several co-workers, including
archaeologists Charles Hoffman and Nancy Hoffman of Northern
Arizona University in Flagstaff, confirmed that Samana Cay was
inhabited, at least seasonally at the time of Columbus's arrival. 
The group uncovered 10 archaeological sites, along with pottery
and other artifacts.
      At least eight other islands in the Bahamas have been
proposed as the site of Columbus's initial landing.  Samana Cay
was first proposed in 1882 by Gustavus Fox, who had been Abraham
Lincoln's assistant secretary of the Navy.  Other scholars,
however, dismissed his argument.  In 1942, Harvard University
historian Samuel Eliot Morison asserted that Columbus arrived at
Watling Island, or San Salvador, a view that researchers began to
challenge several years ago.
      The argument over where Columbus landed has not been con-
clusively settled, but Judge says he is "98 percent sure" that
Samana Cay is the answer.  "Perhaps infallible proof will come
with discovery of the original Columbus log and chart," he adds.
 
                                                          BOWER-01.ART