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Columbus’ Remains Are a Bone of Contention

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Times Staff Writer

Who is buried in Columbus’ tomb?

Italian-born, Spanish-bankrolled, Orient-obsessed and Caribbean-besotted, the navigator celebrated and castigated for bringing European culture to the New World may have traveled as much in death as he did in his wayward search for a westward passage to Asia. He was buried and disinterred so many times that his whereabouts is one of history’s most enduring mysteries.

Now, science is trying to put to rest those bones of contention. DNA tests are underway on remains that Spaniards insist are those of Christopher Columbus, long enshrined in Seville’s cathedral.

But Dominicans have their own entry in the Columbus sweepstakes. Depending on what happens in Spain, Dominicans could test the contents of a chest-like tomb found 126 years ago hidden in Santo Domingo, in the Americas’ first cathedral, and now displayed in a towering sepulcher that evokes comparison with the pyramids of Egyptian pharaohs.

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While the Spanish remains were grudgingly given up for testing in June, officials controlling the Columbus legacy in Santo Domingo have been, well, cryptic with their colleagues across the Atlantic Ocean. A commission was established more than a year ago to consider how to deal with the foreign requests for exhumation and DNA extraction, but it has yet to decide whether to allow either. Previous attempts by Spanish scientists have been rebuffed.

“There is resistance to this idea of opening the tomb again. A lot of people don’t like remains being disturbed, especially church leaders,” said Carlos Batista, a Tourism Ministry official who oversees international collaboration to preserve memorials to Columbus. “It took two years just to get the tomb moved from the cathedral to the lighthouse.”

The Faro a Colon, the mammoth lighthouse mausoleum equipped with 157 high-powered searchlights that can project a blinding cross onto the night sky, is the second-most-visited tourist attraction in the country after the cathedral. The tomb was moved there from the cathedral in 1992.

“Some people here aren’t going to want to believe that the real remains are in Spain, if that is what the Spanish investigators determine,” said Batista, one of the guardians of the explorer’s memory in this capital, which touts itself as the Cradle of the New World.

Like much of the history surrounding Columbus, that municipal title is up for grabs.

Columbus made his first landfall on an island of what is now the Bahamas on Oct. 12, 1492, then sailed on to explore Cuba before setting foot on Hispaniola seven weeks later. The first settlement was actually on the north coast in what is now Haiti, the western side of the shared island -- a spot picked for pitching tents after a storm sank the Santa Maria.

Those sailors who couldn’t be accommodated on the Nina and the Pinta for the return voyage to Spain founded La Navidad, or the Nativity, which Columbus found razed and all its inhabitants slaughtered when he returned 11 months later. Undeterred, he took his 17 new ships and their 1,200 gold diggers to start another colony at La Isabela, 100 miles east near today’s tourist resort of Puerto Plata. It wasn’t until 1496 that Columbus dispatched his brother Bartholomew to move the settlement and found a new city, Nueva Isabela, now Santo Domingo.

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Contributing to Columbus’ travels after death were the power plays that ravaged the Caribbean for centuries.

Although he wrote in his last will and testament that he wished to be buried in his beloved Hispaniola, Columbus was first interred in Valladolid, the Spanish city where he died May 20, 1506. Later, his remains were moved to a family mausoleum in Seville. It was only in 1537 that his daughter-in-law, Maria de Toledo, made the voyage to Santo Domingo to bury Columbus and his recently departed eldest son, her husband, Diego. Both were entombed in the Cathedral Primada de America that had just got a proper Gothic-ribbed roof to replace the leaky cover of wood and palm fronds.

There Columbus stayed, a monument to Spanish conquest of the New World until the island was ceded to France in 1795 in one of many colonial games of the era. A royal delegation was dispatched from Seville with orders to evacuate national treasures, including Columbus’ remains, but the mission became snarled in confusion. To protect the coffins from foreign plunderers, like British explorer Francis Drake, the Spanish custodians had long ago scrubbed off the names of the colony’s founders from their coffins.

Dominicans now insist that the wrong tomb was evacuated amid the panic of the French takeover.

“The removals were done in great haste and by people unfamiliar with what they were looking at,” explains Elpidio Ortega, historian and administrator of the Faro a Colon monument constructed for the 1992 anniversary of America’s founding. “There are indications from the delegation’s reports and inventories that they took the wrong remains, mistaking those of Don Diego for Columbus.”

Whether they were of father or son or someone unrelated, those remains were relocated to Havana, then the capital of Spanish holdings in the Caribbean. When the Spanish-American War gave Cuba its independence in 1898, the Spaniards were again chucked out along with the vestiges of their rule. The tomb that had stood in a columned pavilion for more than a century was shipped back to Seville and ensconced four years later in the 15th century cathedral.

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In 1877, Bishop Francisco Billini was supervising renovation of the cathedral in Santo Domingo when a trunk-sized tomb was discovered in a chapel to the left of the altar. Markings had been scraped off, but when the prelate ordered it opened an inscription inside was found honoring “The Illustrious and Distinguished Baron, Don Cristobal Colon,” as the explorer is called in Spanish.

“For our part, we are certain that he is with us,” insisted Ortega, predicting the Spanish scientists will come to the same conclusion. Outside his office in the huge lighthouse monument, naval sentries guard the black metal tomb under a marble canopy at the junction of corridors that form a cross inside the museum’s 47 exhibit halls.

Manuel Feliz, a researcher at the cathedral in Santo Domingo, contended that the discovered bones were taken to Cuba the year Billini exposed them. “He had a wound in his left leg that we believe led the examiners to make their determination,” Feliz said. He draws visitors’ attention to an unsigned floor-to-ceiling oil painting in the chapel where the tomb was found, a late 19th century chronicling of the discovery.

Officials of the Dominican Culture Ministry guiding the special investigative commission said only that discussions continued about whether to undertake DNA testing on the remains at the lighthouse.

The DNA samples collected from the Seville tomb are being compared with those from remains of Columbus’ brother, also named Diego, and illegitimate son Hernando, both disinterred in recent years to provide a familial bench line.

The Spanish tests began five months ago, when authorities allowed a brief opening of the ornate Seville cathedral tomb for forensic scientist Jose Antonio Lorente to extract pea-sized samples from the skeletal remains.

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Lorente’s Granada University legal medicine department estimated that it would take at least eight months for the initial studies, then at least a year for corroborating research by German and Italian laboratories. He also expressed concern that the remains might be too decomposed to retain sufficient DNA for positive identification.

That possibility of continued uncertainty fails to daunt most Dominicans, who seem unwavering in their assertions that the explorer’s only journey since 1537 was the brief trip to Cuba for forensic study and the scant mile across the Ozama River for reburial at the lighthouse 11 years ago.

That 400,000 visitors annually make the lighthouse pilgrimage is testimony to the esteemed place Columbus holds among Europeans and their descendants throughout the Caribbean. That the explorer and his contemporaries also brought disease, slavery and eventual extinction of the indigenous Taino people are consequences that Dominicans accept as part of their past, just as more recent dictatorial abuses helped form a national identity.

“As can be said of most historical figures, Columbus had both lights and shadows,” says Octavio Amiama, historian, bibliophile and creator of the work in progress that he hopes next year to open as the Columbus Museum. “Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Tamerlane -- they all fought wars and killed millions of people. With his discovery, Columbus brought death to the island. But we still have to honor him as our first leader.”

Four times more visitors partake of the white-sand beaches, but healthy tourist traffic to Santo Domingo is focused on the memory of Columbus. The Alcazar de Colon residence built by his son has been restored to its 16th century splendor, and the fortress that was the first home of the Spanish settlers is being refurbished. A statue of Columbus graces a namesake park in front of the cathedral, where guides peddle tours along with souvenir books and CDs of merengue music.

Those working the most popular sights insist that there is no doubt their country is host to the real remains of the explorer.

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“Columbus was much taller than Diego, and scientists can easily tell them apart,” said Estela Castillo, who has worked as a guard at the Alcazar for two decades.

She contends that visitor interest would be unaffected even if it turns out that Spain has the real bones “because this is where he asked to be buried. This is where his heart is.”

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