Columbus: For Gold, God and Glory, by John Dyson; Nautical
research by Dr. Luis Miguel Coin Cuenca, The World & I Dec. 1991,
Vol. 6, No. 12, pp. 357-371.
 
The Secret of Columbus
The boom of a farewell cannon rebounded from the cliffs enclosing
the tiny harbor of Gomera in the Canary Island.  Like a medieval
phantom, the Nina emerged from the smoke and turned toward the
open Atlantic.  Her sails, bellying in the breeze, were tamed and
trimmed by rope-chafed hands.  A white wave began to bubble around
the caravel's blunt black bow.  The flag of Castile rippled from
the mainmast, and Columbus's own banner flew from the mizzen. 
From forward drifted the aroma of lentil soup which, with hard
bread, blood sausages and beans, would be our staple fare during
the weeks of tough sea voyaging ahead.  It was a Saturday morning
in June 1990, and we were bound on a 2,7000-mile historical
odyssey.
     Soon the Nina was swooping through a disheveled wilderness of
foaming blue seas, her wake a crooked finger pointing at our last
sight of the Old World.  The trade wind breezed over the poop, and
sunlight speared through the lace holes of swelling sails.  As
authentic as lack of technology could make her, our sixty-four
foot replica of a medieval caravel was powered only by rope, spar
and canvas, and by the sinew and nerve of eighteen nautical
students from the University of Cadiz in Spain.  Like Columbus's
men long ago, many of our hapless crew were discovering that
seasickness has two stages: the first when you think you are going
to die and the second when you hope you will.
     Scattering flying fish as she surged through twenty-foot
waves, the caravel was part of a world that was still exactly as
Christopher Columbus had seen it nearly five centuries before. 
Like the original Nina - the smallest ship of his fleet and his
favorite - our replica was rugged, low to the water and
uncomfortable.  Painted inside and out with pitch, she was a black
country of tar that went soft and sticky in the sun.  Like
Columbus's men we sought a soft plank to sleep on, crowding into a
dark and dank hold where nobody could stand upright.  We had
neither engine nor electronic navigation aids, and only a candle
illuminated our compass.  We gulped water from earthen jars, and
the sea was our only bathroom.  While hanging from the side on  a
rope to visit what the chroniclers of Columbus's time termed "the
house of necessities," a roll of the ship would often dip us up to
the waist.
     By sailing in the wake of Columbus and reliving as closely as
possible the conditions and experiences of his remarkable voyage,
all of us on board the Nina aimed to contribute to a whole new
understanding of the maritime skills, motivations and even the
enigmatic character of history's most famous navigator.  Our
captain was Dr. Luis Coin Cuenca, a former ship's officer who was
now a professor of maritime history.  After painstaking analysis
of nautical clues in fifteenth-century records, Dr. Coin had
determined that many of the traditional notions of how Columbus
discovered the New World were wrong.
     After Jesus Christ, no individual has made a bigger impact on
the Western world than Christopher Columbus.  He is commemorated
in the names given to streets, cities, rivers, and even in the
name of a country, yet the reason he dared to embark on his
fateful enterprise has never been adequately explained.  Although
academics have scrutinized every known detail of his career and
his voyages, just what impelled him to pursue his dream so
doggedly has remained concealed behind a blur of speculation and
legend.  Why was a humble merchant sailor of little formal
learning driven to sacrifice the best years of his life to the
launching of so ambitious and farsighted an enterprise?
     There are few historical characters about whom scholarly
controversy has raged with such vehemence.  The records that
survive suggest Columbus was a compulsive social climber and snob,
a religious zealot, and a prickly character who would knock down
and kick any man who stood in his way.  He was materialistic,
obsessive and a skillful self-promoter capable of sweet-talking
his way into the company of kings and queens.  Yet he seems to
have been an entrancing person to know, a loyal father, and a good
man to have on your side when the going got tough.  The popular
image portrayed in statues and stories, conversely, is that of an
almost saintly visionary who, as every student knows, "sailed the
ocean blue in fourteen hundred and ninety-two."
     The facts about his early life are relatively few, and even
these can be interpreted in different ways.  For example, despite
convincing evidence that he was born in Genoa and learned the arts
of high-seas navigation in Portugal, entire books have been
written to support arguments that he was Greek or Jewish.  A
secretive man, Columbus himself told only part of a story here,
another part there.
     After so many centuries, was it conceivable that real flesh
and blood could be put on the bones of one of the most researched
and written-about figures in history?  Could a hard voyage across
the Atlantic bring a legendary hero into human focus?
     The key to the understanding of Columbus's first voyage is
his Diario, or daily journal.  Although the log survives only as a
summary extracted from a copy of the original made by a priest
named Bartolome de las Casas about twenty-five years after
Columbus's death, it has long been regarded by historians as a
reliable document.  Dr. Coin demonstrated, however, that the
journal was never analyzed by an expert with sufficient maritime
knowledge to identify and make sense of its many nautical
inconsistencies.  His fresh assessment of this crucial source
would ultimately lead to our Nina setting her course in 1990
across what was known in the fifteenth century as "the green sea
of darkness."
     This modern detective story began in 1974, when Luis Coin was
the second mate of a bulk carrier pounding across the Atlantic. 
The voyages of Columbus were the young seaman's hobby.  One
evening, when studying the Diario he noted it reported that for
several days after Columbus's three ships left the Canaries they
were struggling against contrary currents.  But Coin knew from his
experience as a professional mariner that in the waters due west
of the Canaries, where Columbus purported to be, the currents
invariably traveled from east to west and should therefore have
been favorable.  As the remark was hardly the kind of error likely
to have been made by a copyist, Coin began to wonder whether
Columbus had deliberately laid a false trail.
     The deeper he investigated, the more Coin unearthed nautical
inconsistencies, anomalies and plain contradictions that threw the
authenticity of the discoverer's journal into doubt.  Somehow,
Columbus's ships had managed to sail long distances on days of
calm weather.  Lands and river birds were seen hundreds of miles
from land - not the waifs and strays occasionally encountered in
mid-ocean, but whole flocks, day after day.  His seamen went
swimming when the navigating data implies that the fleet was
averaging a speed of five or six knots, yet no sailor in his right
mind jumps over the side unless his ship is dead in the water. 
     Clearly there was something seriously wrong with the one
document of so-called unimpeachable veracity on which some
historians have relied for so long.
     Until I met Dr. Coin at the Cadiz nautical school, where he
was teaching navigation to the supertanker captains of the future,
I, too, had accepted the Diario as gospel.  One can hardly argue
with the reported speech of Columbus himself.  From knocking
around the globe in a variety of ships and yachts, I knew that a
mariner who crammed on sail and dashed toward an unknown lee shore
in the middle of the night might as well be committing suicide,
yet I accepted a description of such an event from Columbus. 
After all, even the most eminent of scholars had failed to
challenge this and similar pieces of nautical nonsense recorded by
Columbus in his log.
     The American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who sailed the
route set out in the journal and whose biography of Columbus was a
Pulitzer Prize in 1942 grandly glossed over many of the awkward
points.  For example, when Columbus wrote that he was sailing
between islands lying unseen to the north and south of him,
Morison reasoned that these must have been mythical islands that
were then thought to lie in the middle of the Atlantic.  But how
could imaginary islands have shaped waves and clouds in way that
would lead a mariner as experienced as Columbus to make the
observation in the first place?
     Coin's analysis of the logbook from the viewpoint of a
professional mariner convinced him that Columbus seeded his diary
with a trail of misinformation and had sailed a route quite
different from that which historians generally accept.  But this
was only the beginning.  His line of inquiry led not only to new
data and new interpretations of archival information, but also to
inescapable conclusions that, if correct, would stand Columbus
scholarship on its head.  The most famous discoverer in history,
it seemed, had been guided on his voyage by a secret map. 
Christopher Columbus knew all along exactly where he was going and
what he would find, because somebody had been there ahead of him.
     To make time for research, Coin left the sea and took a job
as a lecturer in navigation and maritime history at the nautical
college that is now part of the University of Cadiz.
     The idea that Columbus had a map had been common gossip
during his own lifetime, but most historians have either dismissed
it or been unable to substantiate it.  But Coin, through his fresh
approach, could now explain how such a map originated, how it
could have got into Columbus's hands and why neither Columbus nor
the king and queen of Spain had ever mentioned it.  Coin's case,
although circumstantial, was overwhelmingly convincing.
     Moreover, the probability of a secret map helped to clear up
many of the enigmas that have baffled historians for centuries. 
Believable explanations emerged for why a humble merchant sailor
of little formal learning would so doggedly pursue royal backing
for eight long years despite repeated rebuffs, why Queen Isabella
abruptly changed her mind and decided to back him, how Columbus
knew at the outset of his first voyage that he would find land (as
he did) after sailing about 750 leagues and how he also predicted
his landfall so precisely at the island of Dominica on his second
voyage even though he had passed nowhere near it in his first.
     After years of intensive study, Dr. Coin's ideas were
compiled into a weighty thesis.  In November 1989 he defended it
against eight of Spain's most eminent historians, and the
university awarded him a doctorate.  These findings not only
underpin much of the story told in this book but furnished the
historical framework for our voyage.  We were sailing to
demonstrate, in a practical way, that there are logical
explanations for the inconsistencies in the Diario of Columbus -
explanations that shed a whole new light on the most important sea
voyage ever made.
An Enterprise Is Born
     A story widely current during Columbus's own lifetime
suggests that either before his marriage or while he and his
family lived on Porto Santo, Columbus came into contact with
someone who had already been to the Caribbean and returned with
detailed navigational information.  This story was accepted by
Bartolome de las Casas, the priest who documented the early
history of the Indies from personal experience and whose summary
of Columbus's logbook is the primary surviving record of the first
voyage.  In The History of the Indies de las Casas wrote: "[It] is
what was said and believed amongst us at that time and held
certain, namely that this event effectively stirred Christopher
Columbus to carry out the enterprise as if it were something that
could not be doubted."
     It was rumored at the time that Christopher Columbus's
information came from the pilot of a ship that had been blown
across the Atlantic while on a voyage from Spain or Portugal to
England.  As it would not be possible for a ship on this route to
be carried westward against the prevailing winds, historians have
dismissed it as myth.  But the story would appear in a wholly
different light if the unknown ship were in fact homeward bound
from the Guinea coast to Lisbon.
     Here is how it might have happened.  During the period
between 1477 and 1479, while Portugal and Spain were at war and
Spanish warships hunted for Portuguese vessels, the Portuguese
developed a secret oceanic bypass to avoid capture by the Spanish. 
The route required them to sail far to the west of the Cape Verde
Islands and into what we know now to be the nursery of tropical
storms, or hurricanes.  Every summer about eight lethal tempests
bred in this zone sweep westward across the Atlantic to hammer the
Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.  A caravel trapped in its whirling
embrace had no option but to turn west and run before the wind
under shortened sail.  West and always west it flew, its bow wave
piling up like a wall of bricks on either side as it made
frightening speeds of up to twenty knots.  After days of terror it
was left behind by this storm only to be hit by another.  This is
not unusual.  Our own voyage on the replica Nina was completed
just ahead of two hurricanes that swept into the Caribbean only
two days apart.
     Perhaps this happened to several ships at different times,
all but one being badly damaged and never making it home.  This
one spent several months exploring the islands and mainland of the
Caribbean.  Eventually, with its crew stricken by the fevers that
later killed many of the first settlers in the islands and its
hull timbers riddles with the worms that menace all wooden ships
in tropical waters, the caravel set her course back for Madeira.
     Somewhere to the west of the island the vessel went down and
a handful of diseased and starving men took to the ship's boat. 
These exhausted survivors managed to reach Porto Santo.  There
Christopher Columbus, home between voyages and perhaps acting as
governor in the absence of his brother-in-law, made the men as
comfortable as possible, but in due course they all died.  On his
deathbed one of these, perhaps a Genoese pilot of Columbus's
acquaintance, told of the trinkets he had traded for gold from an
unarmed and brown-skinned people on a lush island at the extremity
of an archipelago they believed to be part of the Indies.  When
the pilot died, Columbus quietly took possession of his charts and
the heavy pilot book filled with sketches of landmarks, maps of
rivers, reefs and anchorages, navigation plots and useful comments
on the friendliness of natives and the locations of food and water
sources.
     This story, although it hinges on one stroke of remarkable
good fortune, is entirely possible and was widely believed in
Columbus's time.  As we shall see, it helps to explain many of the
inconsistencies in the accepted version of the events leading up
to the first voyage and in the record of the voyage itself.  The
new evidence laid out in the pages that follow makes a powerful
circumstantial case that Columbus had some sort of inside
information before he set sail.  All we know for certain about how
he might have obtained this knowledge is that, at some time
between about 1478 and 1484, Columbus became so sure he could
reach the Indies that he began to marshal arguments to convince
King John II of Portugal to back his venture.  He could never have
revealed that he possessed a map, however, since the king would
have immediately claimed it for Portugal and probably had Columbus
executed for stealing it.
     Before presenting his enterprise to the king of Portugal,
however, some awkward geographical questions had to be resolved
about the width of the Atlantic.  According to the geographical
concepts of Ptolemy, the circumference of the globe at the equator
was half land and half water.  As the land mass of Europe and Asia
was thought to span about 180 of the 360 degrees comprising the
circumference of the globe, to reach "the Indies" a ship would
have to cross about the same span of ocean, or 3,375 of the
leagues used by navigators at the time (10,800 nautical miles). 
Clearly such a voyage of such magnitude could not be achieved by
the vessels of the day, and this was the reason nobody had
attempted it.
     But Columbus had concluded, either by divine inspiration or
from his secret information, that the distance to the fringes of
Asia was only about 750 leagues (2,400 miles), and this was well
within the range of a well-provisioned caravel.  Now he set out to
build a convincing scientific case to support his conviction that
the voyage was feasible.  Over a period spanning several years, he
and his brother pored over the available manuscripts, maps and
books coming off the new printing presses in Europe.  They seized
upon any assertion propping up their case and cast aside any
throwing doubt on it, which has led most historians to suppose
that Columbus had a financial capacity to launch onto one idea. 
Certainly the case the brothers built was a masterpiece of wishful
thinking.
     Columbus was not alone in believing the voyage was
manageable.  Through his connections he heard of a letter received
by the Portuguese Court from the Florentine cosmographer Paolo
Toscanelli.  Convinced of the feasibility of the Atlantic route,
Toscanelli had even enclosed a map of it.  In 1481 or 1482
Columbus corresponded with him directly.  Toscanelli's reply was
encouraging.  "I esteem your noble and grand desire to navigate
from the east to the west...for the said voyage is not only
possible, but is sure and certain and will bring honor," he wrote. 
This moral support was welcome, but the map, a copy of which
Toscanelli sent to Columbus, showed the distance to Asia to be
about four thousand miles and depicted many islands in between. 
Much has been made of this map by some historians, but based as it
was on pure fantasy, it could have been of no practical use for
navigation.
     Just how far these arguments were developed during the early
1480s and during Columbus's subsequent years in Spain, and which
parts were conveniently added after his successful voyage, is not
known.  Nevertheless, before he went to see King John, Columbus
had done enough research to feel his enterprise stood on firm
scientific and religious foundations.  The most difficult barrier
he had to surmount remained the psychological one.
     Throughout all European history, mariners had voyaged along
the margins of Europe and more recently Africa.  Even though
Portuguese ships routinely sailed out into the Atlantic, they
remained mentally attached to the land.  As discoverers, the
Portuguese were improvisers, seldom originators; each voyage
simply extended the last.  Now Columbus proposed to sever those
apron strings, to turn his bow deliberately away from the coast
and sail from one land to another.
Only God Can Stop Us Now!
     Sputtering a salute of smoky gunfire, the flagship and her
consorts had hardly cleared the harbor and trimmed their sails
when a Spanish caravel was sighted.  It was rushing to intercept
them with the urgent news that a squadron of Portuguese warships
was lurking over the horizon to the southwest.  Christopher
Columbus had no doubts about their intentions.  According to his
journal, the king of Portugal was angry that Columbus had switched
his allegiance to Castile and had ordered the warships to capture
him.
     The wind died, and for two days Columbus's fleet wallowed in
calm seas.  Shifts of sailors toiled at the oars of small boats,
laboriously towing the ships in an effort to distance them from
the enemy, while their disconcerted captain-general pondered what
to do.  Although he could not say so publicly, according to Dr.
Coin, Columbus's intended route was not due west from the Canaries
but southwest toward the Cape Verde Islands.  Now that way was
blocked.  The waters south of the latitude of the Canaries were an
exclusive Portuguese zone.  If Columbus was caught trespassing
there was little doubt that his ships would be taken as prizes,
his men thrown overboard and he himself publicly hanged in Lisbon.
     By the time the wind returned to fill his sails, Columbus had
hit on an ingenious solution.  His ruse would not only help him
talk his way out of trouble if captured, it would succeed in
confusing scholars and historians for nearly five hundred years. 
The stratagem Columbus adopted, as Dr. Coin's analysis of the
voyage demonstrates, was to falsify both the directions and
distances he sailed.  In addition, his falsified journal was later
deliberately scrambled to conceal key facts about the voyage and
its discoveries.
     The traditional notion that Columbus sailed west, always west
toward the sunset until he was more that halfway across the
Atlantic, stems from the surviving extracts of Columbus's logbook,
or Diario.  Day after day it repeats the same phrase:"...they
sailed on their course which was West."  Until now, despite the
puzzling anomalies of his description of this westward route,
historians seem never to have questioned it.  But the very fact
that Columbus was so worried about the Portuguese caravels is the
first clue that he was heading south.  He had earlier tried to
interest King John of Portugal in his plan and now the Portuguese
were waiting just to the south of the Canaries to intercept him. 
This suggests that a westward route was never contemplated. 
Instead of remaining safely north of the boundary decreed by the
Pope eleven years before, Columbus was planning to risk all - his
ships, his enterprise, his life - by heading deep into the
Portuguese zone.  First, however, he had to sidestep the enemy
ships, and that meant sailing west for a day or so.
     The high islands of the Canaries at last dropped astern on
Sunday, September 9.  Despite the new breeze little distance was
covered before nightfall.  Columbus apparently reduced sail
through the day to make the taller rig of the Santa Maria less
visible to enemy lookouts.  Once the flagship's crew had restowed
some cargo to make her less heavy in the bow, the fleet licked
along at seven or eight knots.  The captain-general kept a close
eye on the compass, and the log records that many times he rebuked
the helmsman - probably fearful of being sighted by the Portuguese
- for letting the ship waver toward the north.
     Of this change in course, probably to southwest by south, the
log makes no mention.  The only hint that something is not quite
right, and that Columbus had deception on his mind, is the
revelation that he decided to keep two accounts or reckonings of
the distance traveled each day, the true one to be secret and a
false one of smaller figures concocted "so that if the voyage were
long the people would not be frightened and dismayed."
     This trick has become part of the folklore about the world's
most famous discoverer, but how believable is his reason for it? 
It was never the custom for sailors to read a ship's official log,
and ordinary seamen in medieval times were illiterate.  Besides,
Columbus had already told his captains that the first land would
be found at 750 leagues, so the men already knew how far they had
to sail.  On the other hand, if the false account was to ensure
that the official documents of his voyage maintained the fiction
that he was in Castilian waters, the ploy makes sense.
     During the Atlantic crossing he probably did keep two sets of
distance figures.  The fake distances he recorded each day in his
official logbook and the true set he kept in his back pocket and
planned to dispose of if capture by the Portuguese seemed
imminent.  Once his voyage was successfully completed he was able
to insert the true distances into the record alongside the false
ones, adding the explanation that the latter had been part of his
deliberate ruse to allay the fears of his men.
     On the sixth day out, Tuesday, September 11, a lookout
shouted that the mast of a ship was in sight, but it turned out to
be only a piece of wreckage that Columbus thought had come from a
ship nearly twice as big as his own.  The weed growing on it
showed it had been in the water a long time.  As the fleet had by
then covered 365 miles by Columbus's true reckoning, it would be
hard to account for the wreckage floating in the clockwise current
so far to the west of the Canaries.  However, if they were sailing
roughly in the direction of the Cape Verde Islands, which lie
somewhat to the west of south from the Canaries, they would be
close to Portuguese shipping routes.  And there is other evidence
that this was the actual route Columbus took.
     Two days later, on Thursday, September 13, the diary noted
that "the currents were contrary."  This remark, which first set
Dr. Coin on the quest to penetrate Columbus's smoke screen, is
further evidence that the fleet was heading south or southwest. 
The currents due west of the Canaries invariably move more of less
in the direction Columbus claimed he was sailing and could not
have been against him.  As the oceanic wind and current patterns
are constant there is no reason to suppose that the situation
would have changed in five centuries.  Furthermore, from his
professional experience Dr. Coin knew that oceanographers have
identified a current that does set strongly to the northeast,
flowing from the vicinity of the Cape Verde Islands toward the
Canaries between the months of July and October.  This could be
the contrary current Columbus noted.
     As well, Columbus reported that during the days since leaving
the Canaries the water had been noticeably less salty than before. 
Historians cannot explain this comment.  Samuel Eliot Morison
concluded that it could only have been  "imaginary."  But it is
hard to believe that veteran seamen emptying buckets of seawater
over their heads to cool themselves down would be mistaken, and
there is a plausible explanation to account for it.
     Parallel with the African coast and roughly in a line between
the Canaries and the Cape Verdes, there is a large area of
upwelling where the cold and less salty layer of bottom water,
originating in the Antarctic, rises to replenish the top layer as
it is lost by intense evaporation and wind action.  Had Columbus
been west of the Canaries he would not have observed it.  As well,
the mixing of water due to the upwelling creates rich fishing
grounds to this day.  Columbus noted many tuna hunting in schools,
and one was caught.  As we sailed the same waters five centuries
later in the new Nina, we, too, caught a tuna on a trailing lure,
and those of us who cleaned our teeth in seawater noticed how
remarkably less salty it was.  
     The birds seen by Columbus are another clue to his true
route.  On Friday, September 14, his log reported that the men of
the Nina saw a tern and a tropic bird, "and these birds never
depart from land more than twenty-five leagues."  Columbus was
wrong about the habits of these two species, but his comment is
revealing.  Although his log puts him to the west of the Canaries,
he expresses no surprise at the bird's appearance.  Yet the
ornithological expert cited by Morison pointed out that the
occurrence of the tern six hundred miles west of the Canaries is
"incredible," while Bartolome de las Casas, who knew Columbus
well, noted wryly in his History of the Indies that the crew could
not have been experienced if they were seeing such birds in that
part of the ocean.  However, both the distance sailed and
Columbus's comment would square with reality if the fleet were now
approaching the Cape Verde Islands.
     It drizzled a bit through the morning of Sunday, September
16, but the crews were happy and Columbus noted in his journal a
phrase that would crop up every time he was content - "The weather
was like April in Andalusia and the only thing wanting was the
song of the nightingale."  To judge by the latitude on which he
later caught his first glimpse of the Caribbean island, Columbus
had made his first turn to the west on the nineteenth or twentieth
parallel.  By now the dangers of capture were behind him, and the
tension of the last few days was over.
     That he was now sailing westward with the Cape Verdes astern
is supported by another observation made that day.  They began to
see bunches of floating green weed "whereby all judged that they
were near some island." The next day the weed had become even
thicker.  Historians agree that Columbus was now entering the area
of drifting weed known as the Sargasso Sea.  But if he had sailed
due west from the Canaries he ought to have encountered the weed
much earlier, because mariners' reports dated early in the
sixteenth century suggest that it lay considerably farther to the
east and south than it does in modern times.  
     The gold and olive mats of sargassum weed floating in the
current like sunlit rafts providing shady umbrellas for hosts of
fish, crabs and shrimp, cover a mid-Atlantic area roughly two-
thirds the size of the United States.  The spectacle of weed
covering the ocean like a meadow made the sailors uneasy because
they feared the ships would become jammed, but Columbus had seen
it before on his high-seas voyages, and Martin Alonso Pinzon had
been told of it by a Palos mariner who had also worked for the
Portuguese.  Soon the men saw for themselves how easily the
seaweed was parted by the prows of the ships and that it rustled
lightly along the hulls without holding them back.
     The fleet was entering the gyre of the North Equatorial
Current which, on that parallel flowing from east to west like a
broad moving pavement, hurried the ships forward and added up to
forty free miles a day to their progress.  Unlike a north-south
current, which could be measured by taking latitude sights of the
Pole star, an east-west current was much harder to detect because
navigators had no way of measuring longitude.  Columbus noticed
the current but did not allow for it in his reckoning.
     That Monday, the beautiful weather and good speed kept
everyone cheerful.  The fleet averaged 6 1/2 knots and according
to Columbus covered 160 miles.  The faster caravels dashed ahead
of the flagship, hunting like terriers for signs of land to the
westward.  It was there, under the sunset, where Columbus expected
that "God on high, in whose hands all victories are held, will
soon give us land."  With the Portuguese behind him, the wind
filling his sails and his ship clipping along at a good speed,
Columbus could just as easily have written, "Only God can stop us
now!"
     While the anomalies in the logbook itself support a strong
circumstantial case for the route Dr. Coin has deduced, his theory
is further bolstered by the accounts of contemporary chroniclers. 
For example, on his return to Spain, Columbus stayed in the house
of Andres Bernaldez who, in his Memorial of the Reign of the
Catholic Kings, wrote that Columbus had left Palos
     ...and set his course forward over the sea to the islands of
Cape Verde, and from there always with the west [an obvious
misprint for east] to the stern, he sailed toward where we see the
sun set in the month of March, where all the sailors considered it
impossible that land could be found....and from the islands of
Cape Verde they made sail according to the beliefs of Columbus.
     The route is also described by Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, a
royal chronicler who respected Columbus but supported the prime
role played by the brothers Pinzon.  In The Voyages of Columbus he
described the courses to follow to Hispaniola, stating that if a
navigator
     ...does not come down to fourteen [degrees of latitude north
he] will err to a great extent...and if he travels by nineteen or
twenty, with chance of only a little unfavorable weather, and
because of the defects of the compass needle, he will not reach
this island, and because of the current will come to land in the
islands of the Lucayos or on the island of Cuba as the Admiral
[Columbus] did on his first voyage....
     This is further evidence that Columbus did not head west
directly from the Canaries but first sailed some six hundred miles
to the south, then turned west on latitude 19 degrees N or 20
degrees N when he had covered about two-thirds of the distance to
the Cape Verdes.