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24 One Small Step for a Man To read Columbus’s daily log (diario de a bordo) you would think that his small fleet was never very far from land. For thirty-two days after leaving Gomera in the Canary Islands on September 9, the diario makes repeated reference to signs of land. Sailing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, more than one thousand miles from the nearest land, Columbus observed “river weed” (sargassum seaweed), a live crab “not found more than 80 leagues [240 miles] from land,” a booby or gannet, birds that “do not depart more than 20 leagues [sixty miles] from land,” and “a large cloud mass, which is a sign of being near land.” But it was not until two hours after midnight on October 12 that land finally did appear. The land was an island, which the native Lucayans called Guanahaní. Scholars agree that Guanahaní is in the Bahama archipelago, but that is where agreement ends. To date, ten different islands have been identified as the first landfall; a truly remarkable number when you consider that only twenty islands in the entire archipelago are even remotely possible candidates. In addition, more than twenty-five routes have been proposed to take Columbus to the three other Lucayan Islands he visited before departing for Cuba. When represented on a single map, these routes look like someone gone mad playing connect the dots. Cat Island, in 1625, was the first to be proposed as the landfall island. Cat went unopposed until Watling Island was suggested in 1793. Grand Turk was next, followed by Mayaguana, and Samana Cay in time for the four hundredth anniversary in 1892. Cat Island’s claim was ably defended by the novelist Washington Irving, while Watling was promoted by the Chicago Herald (site of the Columbian Expo- One Small Step for a Man / 131 sition in 1893), and Samana Cay was championed by Gustavus Fox, who served as assistant secretary of the navy under President Abraham Lincoln. In 1926, Cat and Watling entered a legal battle over who had the right to use the name Columbus gave to the island where he first landed—San Salvador. The case was settled by the Bahamas legislature in favor of Watling. Known legally as San Salvador ever since, Watling gained its strongest support from the distinguished Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who retraced Columbus’s steps in his 1942 Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Columbus. Morison’s reconstruction seemed to end the debate once and for all. Other first landfall islands have been suggested since—Conception (1943), East Caicos (1947), Plana Cays (1974), Egg/Royal (1981), Great Harbour Cay (1990)— but none has made a sufficiently strong case to sway popular opinion away from Watling. None, that is, until 1986 when National Geographic magazine told forty million readers that Samana Cay was the place. But why the debate? Why hasn’t Guanahaní been identified with certainty? The answers lie in the quality of the evidence. The only detailed information concerning Columbus’s first voyage is contained in his diario. Columbus presented the original to Queen Isabel, who had a copy made for Columbus. The whereabouts of the original is unknown, and all trace of the copy disappeared in 1545. What has survived is a copy made by Bartolomé de las Casas—a thirdhand manuscript handwritten in sixteenth-century Spanish that has numerous erasures, unusual spellings , brief illegible passages, and notes in the margins.The ambiguities, errors, and omissions in this manuscript have been compounded in modern-language translations . Putting such problems aside for the moment, what of that account might be used to identify Guanahaní? Arne Molander, an advocate of Egg/Royal Island, has identified ninety-nine clues, many of which require specialized knowledge and most of which are subject to multiple interpretations. Such minutia is beyond the scope of this brief essay; instead let us consider four general categories: ocean crossing , descriptions of the islands, sailing directions and distances, and cultural evidence . Using a computer-generated simulation of the first voyage that took into account prevailing winds and currents, the National Geographic team concluded that the crossing ended at Samana Cay (actually, they overshot Samana by more than three hundred miles and had to shorten their league by 10 percent to land at Samana ). When a team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution substituted averages for prevailing winds and currents, their simulated crossing ended in sight of San Salvador (without need to adjust for distance). However...

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