Details of Christopher Columbus's Discovery of the New World & Search for the City of Gold (Pompey Bay),
Historical Seat of the Hanna Heastie Tynes Family in the Bahamas.

The research below details Columbus's search in the Bahamas for the lost City of Gold and the King of the Islands at the time. The research details that during his first visit to the New World Columbus was actually searching for the capital of the Islands which turns out to be the current Pompey Bay area.

KEEGAN02.ART

"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 quadrant. 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 traveling 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 civilization described by Marco Polo--his action would have helped him avoid the truth. Personal motivation aside, wherever the Genovese 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 approaching 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 subsequent investigators. (In 1926, the Bahaman government officially 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 landfall. 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 third hand 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 manuscript. 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 acknowledgment 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 locations 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 completely 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 promontory 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 quantities 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 excavated 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 proposes 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 Oceanographic 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 described 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 submerged 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 seventeenth 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 direction 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 direction. 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 entrance, 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 disposed 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 archaeological 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.

KEEGAN