Landfall Debate Intensifies : Team Hopes to Dig Up Key to Columbus Riddle

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. If where he landed you thought you knew, you wouldn’t be the first to think it true.

Nine islands in the Bahamas have been proposed during the last 194 years as the Italian explorer’s first landfall in the New World. As the 500th anniversary of that moment approaches, two researchers hope to find their own place in history by proving which island it really is.

“This is one of those questions that people are never going to let die,” Bill Keegan, assistant curator for Caribbean Pre-History at Florida State Museum in Gainesville, said in a telephone interview.

Five years of research by Keegan and Steven Mitchell, chairman of the geology department at California State University at Bakersfield, leads them to suspect Conception Island may have been Columbus’ first landfall.

Excavations Planned

With $30,000 from the Massachusetts-based Earthwatch organization, Mitchell said they plan six weeks of excavations throughout the Bahamas this summer. They hope to unearth the most complete physical documentation ever done on Columbus’ trek, of which 13 routes have been proposed. Their route is the 14th.

The two hope to match Columbus’ island descriptions with geography, but only after reconstructing prehistoric coastlines through earth samplings and archeological digs.

Conception was first suggested by British naval officer R. T. Gould in 1927, although he offered no original research. Keegan and Mitchell propose that Columbus sailed from there to Rum Cay, to Long and Crooked islands, and finally to Cuba.

The expedition follows a five-year-study by National Geographic Society, which concluded last year that Columbus didn’t land on the island of San Salvador, as generally had been accepted, but 65 miles to the south.

Senior Associate Editor Joseph Judge relied largely on computer sailing scenarios and a new translation of fragments of Columbus’ lost logs when pronouncing in the society’s magazine, “The solution to the mystery is Samana Cay.”

Judge proposed that Columbus sailed from there to Crooked and then Long islands before returning to Crooked and then going to Cuba.

Mitchell, Keegan and many other researchers say they resent “the finality” of Judge’s claim.

“The question most definitely has not yet been finally answered,” said Louis De Vorsey Jr., a leading Columbus authority and author of “In the Wake of Columbus.”

De Vorsey said there has not been widespread acceptance of Judge’s conclusion among Columbus experts.

“Judge primarily followed just one line of evidence, that of Columbus’ navigational directions, which many experts aren’t inclined to accept as very reliable,” he said in a telephone interview from the University of Georgia in Athens, where he teaches geography.

“There’s simply no way if you look at Samana Cay that you can make it fit Columbus’ physical description.”

The surviving pieces of Columbus’ logs are copies made in the early 1500s by Spanish monk Bartolome las Casas, who was not a navigator, De Vorsey said.

Judge contends Samana matches Columbus’ descriptions, adding he has irrefutable evidence of how accurate the navigational directions are.

“A captain can sail from Samana Cay to Cuba using only the log as a guide. We take Columbus at his word,” he said in a letter to Earthwatch magazine.

In 1988, Mitchell hopes to lead an expedition to Seville, Spain, to document soil characteristics.