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investigation into the location of Columbus’s first landfall, the result of five years of analysis. “No fewer than nine landfall islands have been suggested, defended, and opposed,” Judge writes. “Cat, Watling, Conception, Samana Cay, Plana Cays, Mayaguana, East Caicos, Grand Turk, and Egg in the northwestern Bahamas.” Each candidate for first landfall had a distinguished proponent. Samana, for example, was the choice in 1862 of Gustavus V. Fox, who was Lincoln’s assistant secretary of the navy; the National Geographic itself endorsed this choice in 1894, and there the case rested until 1942, when Samuel Eliot Morison came out in favor, unequivocally, of Watling Island, now known as San Salvador—sixty-five miles to the west of Samana Cay. However, in a dissenting opinion in the same November 1986 issue of National Geographic, Luis Marden argued, after an exhaustive examination of the evidence and navigational techniques available to Columbus, that Morison and others might well have been mistaken about the most basic unit of measurement, the sea league, which Marden puts at 2.82 nautical miles, which ruled out Samana Cay as the first landfall by some ten miles. He concluded, “We cannot say that we have established with absolute certainty the precise point of Columbus’s landfall. Currents may vary, and there are still unknown factors.” Nevertheless, the uninhabited island of Samana Cay remains the choice of Dr. James B. Garvin, chief scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, based on his careful analysis of satellite data of Columbus’s track.

All of these choices share an assumption: Columbus meant to indicate the actual location of his first landfall. On this basis both Morison and Judge insisted that the answer must closely fit Columbus’s description in the log. But that approach might well be flawed. Columbus’s description was curiously generic, as if he were not paying close attention, or deliberately trying to be vague. And what about erosion altering the reefs, shoals, harbors, and beaches, as was likely to happen over time? What if Columbus camouflaged the location to protect his claim, as if it were buried treasure that he wanted no one else to find? He was not above manipulating data in the log to suit his purposes, and what more likely occasion than his first landfall to throw others off his track? Or was he sincere, but having one of his delusional episodes ? Keep in mind that this is the same Columbus who, on a later voyage, believed the seas sloped upward in the vicinity of paradise. He wrote about that phenomenon with as much conviction as he reported any of his other findings. Who is to say exactly when Columbus was delusional and when he was not? Because of these questions, it seems unlikely the exact landfall will ever be determined with complete assurance.

For another consideration of the erratic history of the first landfall, see John Noble Wilford’s The Mysterious History of Columbus, pages 129 and following.

Chapter 1: Thirty-three Days

Luis de Torres was not, as has been sometimes claimed, subsequently the owner of an enormous estate in the New World.

Tobacco is mentioned in Journals and Other Documents on the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, page 91, note 2. Fernández de Oviedo discusses pineapples on page 99 of Oviedo on Columbus.

The subsequent journey, beginning around December 16, was as follows, based on Columbus’s log:

Daring to enter “an arm of the sea” reaching inland aboard one of his longboats, he observed villages consisting of attractive dwellings, all the while terrifying their dwellers. One look at the approaching Europeans and their weapons, one whiff of their unfamiliar scent, and “they all fled.” The explorer assumed “those people must have been persecuted because they had so much fear.” Persecuted by whom? Columbus did not say, but his guess was a good one. As soon as he and his crew drew nigh, “signal fires” illuminated ubiquitous lookout posts, warning of, rather than heralding, his arrival in this strange land. “These people must have been