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By Joseph Judge
Finding the landfall of Columbus at Samana Cay in 1492 is not difficult, for it is the landfall the log describes, as Captain Augustus V. Fox demonstrated a century ago, and as the work of the National Geographic team has confirmed. As Fox concluded: “The track which I have laid down (from Samana Cay) was chosen because it appears to be the only one that can be made to fit the courses, distances, and descriptions in the log book.”
That was true in 1881. It is true today, because it is true in the real world. Despite expected errors of transcription in the diario, or log, of the voyage, and despite the vagaries of navigation in 1492, the general outline of the track through four Bahamian islands, articulated in a definitive way as described in the diario
Samana Cay, like the Guanaham' described by Columbus, is green, flat, has a central lagoon, is surrounded by a reef, and has an adjoining cay where Columbus thought that a fort might be located, according to the Judge theory. The solid line indicates the fleet’s track to its anchorage, and the dashed line is the route taken by Columbus and his men as they explored the island in rowboats.
is clear. Sufficient numbers of geographic features are given to enable us to connect the track to modern geography.
The voyage from San Salvador to Cuba is, in the main, east- west, with legs that begin about 20 miles somewhere to the south of San Salvador: westward along Santa Marla de la Concepcion’s 30-mile coast, westward across a sea passage for about 27 miles to Fernandina and westward from Isabela across the open sea for about 70 miles to the Sand Islands. A return leg— first southeast, then east—from Fernandina to Isabela of about 30 miles confirms the 27-mile west passage. Thus, San Salvador lies about 100 miles east of the Sand Islands and about 55 miles east of Fernandina. It lies about 20 miles north of Santa Marla and more than 30 miles northeast of Isabela. The solution to the landfall, obviously, is to find a place to attach this general track to the modern Bahamas. That place is today's Ragged Island Range—the Sand Islands of Columbus. If the western terminus of the general track is anchored to the Ragged Islands, the track runs unerringly to Samana Cay exactly as described in the log.
Along this track the diario gives a position at sea where two bearings cross—the Cape Verde fix, a point 20 miles southeast of the southwest cape of Fernandina and west-southwest of the north end of Isabela. This position identifies Fortune Island as Isabela and Long Island as Fernandina. The geographic features on southern Long Island match perfectly those described in the diario, especially the only east-west coast on the island. The 27- mile sea passage to the western cape of a 30-mile coast identifies the northern coast of Crooked-Acklins as Santa Marla de la Concepcion, and 20 miles to the north of the northeast point of that coast lies the landfall—Samana Cay.
The problem has been made to seem complicated only because much traditional opinion has fixed on the wrong landfall, and attempts to make the geography conform to the descriptions of the diario have of course been vexed. Start from where Columbus started and you will find his log a very reliable sailing guide to Cuba.
Mr. Judge, former Senior Associate Editor at the National Geographic, wrote the 1986 article that brought the landfall issue back into the public eye.
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Proceedings / February 1992