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indicated this when I interviewed him on 27 October 1986, and I have confirmed it using a 1985 chart of Samana Cay.
► If you follow Columbus’s track back through the Bahamas from Cuba, point by point and detail by detail without variance, using Las Casas’s translation and Professor Morison’s deck log from his June and July 1940 voyage through the Bahamas on the ketch Mary Otis, you cannot fail to arrive at Watlings Island—San Salvador. There is no
By Samuel Loring Morison
When Christopher Columbus set sail from Gomera in the Canary Islands, his intent was to reach Cipango, as Japant was called in the 15th century. He expected to cover some 2,400 nautical miles in arriving at a longitude of 68° West. Instead, he and h^ bold band travelled some 3,436 miles and had reached about 74 20’ West when they finally sighted land. What Columbus intended and what he did were two different things.
Shortly after 0200 on the morning of 12 October, Rodrigo de Triana, a lookout, sighted something white and gleaming in the moonlight, and yelled “Tierra! Tierra!' Land ,t was but not Japan; the fleet had reached what came to be known as the Bahamas. Columbus called the landfall island San Salvador but never returned. In the centuries that followed, its precise location was lost to history. f„ H
In the mid-1930s, Professor Samuel Eliot Morison Harvaid University, at the head of an expedition partially funded by the university, set out to discover once and for all where Columbu first touched the New World. Sailing on the barkent.ne•Capt- tana, he retraced the voyages of Columbus, and the results were published in his two-volume biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, published in 1942. As certain as one could be after 450 years, he concluded that the Bahamian island called
Watlings was the landfall. T , ,
There things lay until 8 October 1986, when Joseph Judge, then Senior Associate Editor of National Geograph,c magazine, held a press conference to announce that after a livc-ye^ study the National Geographic Society had concluded that the San Salvador of Columbus was in fact Santana Cay in the Bahama , about 65 miles southeast of Watlings. He said that, . • ■ we have solved after five centuries, one of the grandest ot all th geographic mysteries. We think we have clusively that this matter is finally settled. Most ot the histo y books are wrong. . . .” Supposedly, that put things to rest again.
U After one year of independent research, using all available material (including Professor Morison’s Columbus papers which I hold), and having a new translation made of app P portions of Fray Bartolome de las Casas’s Historic, de las Indian, I believe that Professor Morison, my grandfather, was correct, and that the Bahamian Island called Watlings, sine named San Salvador by the Bahamian government, is the San Salvador of Columbus. My reasons follow;
>• The cliffs of High Cay, a small islet just oft the eas of Watlings proper, rise to 64 feet above sea level. Ihe clitrs
& in the morning of 12 Ociobe, 1492. the moon then
in its third quarter, was 39° above the horizon just off he p r quarter of the fleet as it proceeded westward^ond.tions almost ideal for illuminating the white sand cliffs, whit wc the moonlight back toward the approaching fleet
Samana Cay has cliffs that rise to 60 and 34 feet but these face due north toward Watlings. The only other cllf[s Cay are 32 feet high and face toward the southwest. Any moonlight reflecting off these would have shot off to the soutliwe , rather than back toward the fleet, which at the time was s ee - ing west under conditions ot no more than 2 vana ion. • Marden, one of Judge’s colleagues in the Samana Cay project,
Proceedings / February 1992
other answer.
► Watlings Island fits Columbus’s description of San Salvador—physical characteristics and orientation— much better than does Samana Cay. Watlings, for example, is oriented north- south, while Samana Cay is oriented east- west. Columbus on 14 October, “ . . . ordered the ship’s gig and the caravels’ barges to be readied, and
This chart of Watlings Island appeared in Samuel Eliot Morison’s 1942 biography Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus.
I went along the coast of the Island to the north-northeast, to see the other side. . . If Samana Cay is the correct island, and Columbus anchored south of it (where Mr. Judge says he did), he would have run right into the island by rowing north-northeast; he would have had to row north, then east to get around the island.
Further, Columbus described a harbor that . . could hold all the ships in Christendom . . . where there might be a fortress.
. . I saw a piece of land which is formed like an island although it isn’t one. . .Today, this harbor on the north side of Watlings is called Graham’s Harbour. It is surrounded by reefs, which shelter it from the sea, and has only two entrances, neither of which is deeper than 18 feet. On the eastern side of Graham’s Harbour, protruding from the northern end of the island, lies Rocky Point, which was later fortified by the English. Interestingly, when Professor Morison was there in June 1940, erosion during the passage of time had made Rocky Point into an island by cutting across it from east to west.
If one examines Samana Cay, one does not find the harbor described by Columbus, or the point that he suggested could have been fortified, or a way to row from the anchorage to the harbor the way he described it.
Mr. Morison, a defense analyst, has long been interested in the landfall debate.