Corpus Columbus : UCI Professor Hopes to Solve Riddle of Remains

Where are the final remains of Christopher Columbus?

Are they in Spain, Italy, Cuba or the Dominican Republic?

With seven years remaining before a global celebration of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America, the historical mystery is of political significance, says UC Irvine professor Jonathon Ericson. He hopes to solve the riddle this summer, using atomic tracing on bones and teeth believed to be those of Columbus.

“It’s a geopolitical issue,” Ericson said in an interview Wednesday. “The countries involved are Third World nations. To them, the importance of having the remains of Christopher Columbus is like the Olympics was to L.A.

Every Nation Involved

“The whole world will be interested in this in 1992. Every country will be marking the Quincentennial (of American discovery). It’s believed, for instance, that Russia will try to establish a lunar colony that year.”

Ericson, 42, a professor of social ecology, has already had a role in historical sleuthing. He was one of the American scientists who helped Peruvian authorities determine the real remains of South American conquistador Francisco Pizarro.

“With Pizarro, the issue was simpler,” said Ericson. “The remains were somewhere in the cathedral (at Lima). But with Columbus, there have been so many moves (of the remains) that several countries are involved.”

Columbus’ exact birthday is not known, but history agrees on the date of his death: May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain. His body was interred in that city. But it was removed in 1509; Ericson said the second interment was in Triana, Spain, but the Encyclopedia Americana says the second burial was in Seville, Spain.

In 1541, the remains of Columbus were again disinterred and shipped to Santo Domingo, in what is now the Dominican Republic. The city is on the island of Hispaniola, which Columbus discovered on his first voyage.

Some historians claim the explorer’s body still rests in the cathedral at Santo Domingo, together with the remains of his eldest son, Diego, who was viceroy of the island after his father’s death.

Crossed Atlantic 4 Times

But Ericson has noted that during excavations at the cathedral in Santo Domingo in 1795, human bones and ashes were found next to the high altar. The remains were presumed to be those of Christopher Columbus, said Ericson, and Spanish authorities early in the 19th Century shipped the remains to Havana. Later still, the remains in Havana were moved to the Cathedral of Seville, said Ericson.

Ericson added that there was yet another reported, but unsubstantiated, disinterment. “There is some belief that the Genovese (people of Genoa, Italy) brought the body back to that city from Seville,” said Ericson. He said the unsubstantiated report claims the explorer’s body was brought back to Genoa early in the 20th Century.

“One priest I have talked with, and who’s an authority on the subject, has jokingly said that Columbus moved more in death than he did in life,” said Ericson. The joke is not based on truth, Ericson noted, even if Columbus’ remains were moved as often and to as many places as some authorities claim. Columbus, in life, crossed the Atlantic four times on voyages to the New World, and before that he had sailed to Ireland and Iceland on his pre-discovery voyages.

Despite the claim that Columbus’ remains were moved from Santo Domingo, Ericson believes that a mistake was made and that someone else’s bones were moved to Havana in the early 1800s. He said that in 1877, a small lead casket was found in the cathedral of Santo Domingo. The casket contained the initials CCA, possibly standing for the Spanish abbreviation for “Christopher Columbus, Admiral.”

It is those remains in Santo Domingo that will be tested this summer, Ericson said. If the testing proves negative, the professor added, the search will then turn to the other reputed resting places of Columbus.

“At any point in the movements (of the remains), there could have been an error,” said Ericson. He said that the wrong body accidentally or deliberately (such as for political reasons) could have been disinterred anywhere along the line.

Method of Proof

Ericson said his proposed proof will be by using “strontium isotope characterization.” Strontium, he noted, is an element that enters into food, and thus into human bodies, in small but lasting amounts. Ericson said that the atomic forms of strontium--the isotopes--vary according to the geography of where the element existed at the time it entered food products.

Thus, he said, he will go to Genoa, Italy, in June this year to learn the isotopic composition of strontium in the plants, animals and soils around that city, where Columbus was born and grew up.

Ericson will then test the “CCA” remains that are in Santo Domingo. If the isotopes of strontium are the same, he said, the proof will have been established.

Ericson has applied for a National Endowment for Humanities grant to finance his anticipated three months of research this summer in tracking the Columbus mystery.

The professor, born in the Bronx of Norwegian immigrants, said that the tracking of Columbus’ final resting place is “a great adventure” as well as a scholarly and scientific undertaking.

And why not such an adventure for this second-generation Scandinavian? “My forebears,” Ericson noted proudly, “were Vikings.” He left unsaid the fact that the Vikings themselves were noted explorers --and possibly discovered America several centuries before Columbus.