At the risk of hyperbole, Christopher Columbus is rapidly rivalling Napoleon as history's most written-about personage. It seems that in order to celebrate properly the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America in 1992, writers from a variety of disciplines are attempting to tell us everything possible about the Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Columbus has been the subject of hundreds of written works over the centuries, and those by Ferdinand Columbus, Bartholome de Las Casas, Martin Navarette, Gustavus Fox, John Thacher, Paolo Taviani, Carlos Sanz, and Samuel Eliot Morison are particularly important milestones. Regardless of this enormous corpus of literature, no one yet has been able to determine precisely where Columbus made his first landfall. This is a bothersome mystery because many are convinced that the initial sighting of America may have been the single most important event in history. Recent studies focus on this geographical conundrum because its solution would be our generation's gift to the quincentennial commemoration.

The past few years have witnessed a new surge of Columbus scholarship. Gianni Granzotto produced yet another biography in 1984. A year earlier, the Society for the History of Discoveries published a landmark volume specifically devoted to the first landfall, and the National Geographic Society in a controversial 1986 article claimed the final word on that subject. One legitimately can ask if there are any other arguments to be made about Columbus and the initial discovery, and the answer is that in spite of all the rhetoric, universal agreement is far from reality, further analysis must be completed, and there is indeed much more to