Columbus’ Route Retraced--to Different Landing Site

When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World nearly 500 years ago, he landed on a tiny island in the Bahamas 65 miles from the one usually credited with this historic event, the National Geographic Society announced today.

Capping a five-year investigation that involved recalculating the route of the voyage across the Atlantic and retranslating old Spanish documents, the magazine said Columbus’ first steps in the New World were on Samana Cay.

The narrow, nine-mile-long island in the far eastern Bahamas is 65 miles southeast of Watling Island, which for decades has been the most widely accepted place for Columbus’ discovery of America on Oct. 12, 1492.

“We believe we have solved, after five centuries, one of the grandest of all geographic mysteries,” Joseph Judge, a senior associate editor of the society’s magazine who led the effort, said at a news briefing.

“We think we have demonstrated conclusively that this matter is finally settled,” he said.

Judge discouraged people from trying to visit the island, describing it as “an awesome, evil place” surrounded by dangerous reefs that is only visited occasionally by local fishermen. Samana, which is owned by the Bahamian government, should be preserved as a historic treasure, he added.

The society said a chain of evidence assembled by Judge and colleagues leads only to Samana Cay as site of the historic landfall, which Columbus dubbed San Salvador.

No fewer than nine islands in the area have been proposed as site of Columbus’ first landfall, and Samana Cay previously was advocated by Gustavus V. Fox in 1882.

However, debate all but ended in 1942 when Samuel Eliot Morison, noted nautical historian from Harvard University and biographer of Columbus, declared that the site was Watling Island, which had been renamed San Salvador in 1926, the society said.