WHERE IN THE WORLD WAS CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS? : The Pope, the King of Spain and Other Luminaries Will All be There to Commemorate the 500th Anniversary of Columbus’ Discovery. If They Can Only Find the Right Place.

SHORTLY AFTER 2 a.m. on Oct. 12, 1492, a sailor named Rodrigo de Triana, standing lookout on the forecastle of the Spanish caravel Pinta, saw the shadowy outline of an island against the moonlit horizon. It was the first time anyone had sighted land in the 33 days since Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria had left the Canary Islands on their famous voyage westward under the command of Christopher Columbus. De Triana shouted, “ Tierra , tierra !” He should have added, “Where in the world are we?” because, to this day, no one knows for sure.

For centuries, no one other than a few curious sailors and historians really cared to find the island where Columbus first set foot on the sand of the Western Hemisphere. Columbus himself gave the site only a 38-word description in what survives of his logbook: “This island is quite large and very flat and with very green trees and many waters and a very large lake in the center, without any mountain and all of it green, which is a pleasure to see.” It would be a hazy guide for those who followed.

To Columbus’ contemporaries, the island quickly became inconsequential as the action of exploration and conquest moved to the rich mainlands of the Americas. To scholars, its location paled in comparison to the political, social and moral effects of the great navigator’s four voyages of discovery at the cusp of the 15th Century. Among other things, the journeys spawned centuries of bitterness concerning colonialism, slavery, genocide, exploitation and despoliation while opening the way to seemingly endless opportunities for human development. With such grand themes to consider, it was enough to put aside the mystery of the precise location of the first landfall and settle for a vague fix somewhere in the chain of islands called the Bahamas.

But with the 500th anniversary of the landing fewer than three years away, solving the mystery has taken on a sense of urgency. At stake are not only the reputations of assorted academicians and the National Geographic Society but also the fortunes of the three locales that claim to be the site of Columbus’ first landfall. The official dot on the map representing that location will be the focal point of hemisphere-wide celebrations running throughout 1992. Spain, Italy and most of the governments of the Western Hemisphere, including that of the United States, have appointed official groups, similar to the U.S. Bicentennial Commission of 1976, to hype the anniversary as a world-class media event. Sometime around Columbus Day, 1992, scores of tourists will descend on the area, and many of the world’s luminaries, including the King of Spain, the Pope and heads of state of the nations of North and South America, will be asked to visit the site where old and new worlds first collided. If they can find it.

IT SIMPLY WILL not do to have the King of Spain land on the wrong island,” says Mauricio Obregon, a Columbus scholar and diplomat from Bogota, Colombia. Obregon is one of a handful of contentious historians, navigators and geographers, including a few gifted amateurs, who for the past two years--and before such august groups as the Royal Geographic Society in London--have been debating their solutions to the landfall mystery. By Oct. 12, 1992, all hope to achieve a consensus backing their own favorite theory. But lately, the Great Landfall Debate, as some of them call it, has become so emotional and tangled with charges of scholarly chicanery that agreement on a single solution seems impossible.

Over the centuries, nine different islands along a 400-mile sweep of the Bahamas chain from Egg Island to Grand Turk have been identified as the “true” landfall, according to National Geographic magazine. More recent scholarship has narrowed the contenders to three: San Salvador-Watling Island and Samana Cay, both in the east-central portion of what is now the independent nation of the Bahamas, and Grand Turk, capital of the British Turks and Caicos islands at the extreme southern end of the Bahamas chain.

But no one yet can offer the kind of solid proof that would declare one side of the debate the winner. Given the uncertain navigation tools of his day, Columbus couldn’t take a precise celestial fix that would have pinpointed his longitude and latitude. Even if he had established the location, surviving records of the voyage are too uncertain to pin it down conclusively. The original copy of the great navigator’s finely detailed log of the voyage vanished after he submitted it in 1493 to Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Only an error-littered abstract of it, copied in the 16th Century by a Spanish priest, and some additional direct quotations copied by Columbus’ son, Ferdinand, survived to constitute what scholars now refer to as the Columbus diario . Although the abstract quoted extensively from Columbus’ original log, including his descriptions of the Bahamian islands that he saw and the compass courses that he sailed, the fragmentary journal, peppered with demonstrable mistakes by the priest-copyist, wasn’t enough to authenticate any possible landfall.

Even if they had the original log, daring sailor-navigators who wanted to follow his path across the Atlantic couldn’t confidently hit the true landfall, because there is no record of currents and magnetic compass variations along that route in 1492. No one knows how far ordinary leeway, the sideslip from the push of the wind that is experienced by all sailboats, shoved the tiny vessels off course. But these obstacles haven’t prevented scholars from trying to retrace the voyage.

One, America’s most respected naval historian, the late Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard, put the true landfall at San Salvador “once and for all” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Columbus biography, “Admiral of the Ocean Sea,” published by Little, Brown in 1941. “The first land of the Western Hemisphere sighted by Columbus, or by any European since the voyages of the Northmen, was the eastern coast of one of the Bahamas now officially named ‘San Salvador or Watling Island.’ . . . There is no longer any doubt,” Morison wrote.

While researching the book in 1940, Morison and three other men, calling themselves the “Columbus-in-Cuba Expedition,” sailed the ketch Mary Otis through the Bahamas to Cuba. Strongly implying that during the voyage they had followed Columbus’ compass bearings and fully retraced the great navigator’s route, the celebrated historian wrote that “the position of San Salvador and of no other island fits the course laid down in his Journal, if we work it backward from Cuba.” San Salvador could fit the general description that can be gleaned from Columbus’ writings: It has a number of interior ponds or lakes, one of which is at its center, and further has a natural rock formation that resembles an abandoned quarry, a reef and a peninsula attached to the island by a narrow strip of land.

Obregon, a former overseer of Harvard who presently serves as Colombia’s ambassador-at-large to the Caribbean and professor of history at the University of the Andes, worked with Morison on the 1964 book “The Caribbean as Columbus Saw It.” As a result of their collaboration and close friendship, Obregon later refined Morison’s Columbus track through the Bahamas, both to erase some inconsistencies that had been criticized by National Geographic magazine and to reinforce Morison’s choice of San Salvador-Watling as the landfall. Since then, Obregon says, he has made five additional cruises and piloted his own plane on a number of flights through the Bahamas to refine the track even further. He is the principal advocate of what is now called the Obregon-Morison track to the first landfall.

But his conclusions--and even his honesty--are being challenged by the weighty National Geographic. In 1986, its senior associate editor, Joseph Judge, a one-time Kennedy Administration official with a passion for Christopher Columbus, published the results of a five-year quest by a Geographic team that included a historian, a navigator, an archeologist, a sailing captain, a computer programmer and a cartographer. Judge proved to the magazine’s satisfaction that Morison and Obregon erred and that the true landfall was Samana Cay, a scrubby, waterless island about 80 miles southeast of San Salvador.

“Christopher Columbus first came to the New World at reef-girt, low and leafy Samana Cay, a small outrider to the sea lying in haunting isolation in the far eastern Bahamas, at latitude 23 degrees 05 minutes north, longitude 73 degrees 45 minutes west,” Judge wrote in the exhaustive 44-page article presenting the findings of his team. “It has taken me five years to write that sentence. . . . Morison was wrong.” The physical features of Samana Cay certainly matched those described by Columbus: “It was, as Columbus said, very low lying,” Judge wrote. “Beyond a tiny cay that divided the southern shore into bays, asterisks of coconut palms floated over gentle ridges with large trees that moved in the wind. It was, as he said, very green. . . . A long, linear lake lies in a great swale behind the old dune line north of the bay. This lake, broken into ponds during the dry season, was one of the most surprising of all Samana’s features when we beheld it.” The word laguna in Columbus’ log, Judge pointed out, meant “low-lying lake” in 15th-Century Spanish.

To clinch his case, Judge presented computer simulations of Columbus’ journey and fresh archeological finds suggesting that the same Indians who greeted the tiny fleet after its near-mutinous transatlantic voyage once lived on now uninhabited Samana Cay. The world-renowned maps of the National Geographic Society have since identified Samana Cay as the authentic site. It would be embarrassing not only to the bulldog-persistent Judge but to America’s premier geographic institution if the maps had to be changed.

The third principal in the fray is Robert Power, proprietor of the Nut Tree restaurant near Davis, Calif., and a respected amateur historian--he authenticated the Vinland map that demonstrated Norsemen visited this continent long before Columbus did. Power, a member of the California State Historical Resources Commission, is far removed from the Caribbean, but his passion for historical puzzles has made the landfall mystery irresistible. Power has staked his reputation as a non-professional historian on a carefully reasoned argument that descriptions of the island upon which Columbus landed, and others that he described in the following 12 days before pressing on to Cuba, fit the Turks and Caicos islands to a tee. He frequently notes that Grand Turk, like Samana, resembles a bean pod in shape, which fits a contemporary description of Columbus’ first landfall by Bartolome de las Casas, the priest-historian who abstracted Columbus’ log and wrote the monumental 16th-Century “History of the Indies.” Until recently, many critics had dismissed the Grand Turk argument because Columbus had reported being met by Lucayan Indians, but no one had found a trace of Indian artifacts on the island.

Then, with uncanny timing, the missing piece fell into Power’s puzzle. Midway through a major symposium on the Great Landfall Debate that he directed at Grand Turk just before Christmas, the respected archeologist William F. Keegan, himself a partisan of San Salvador, discovered Lucayan pottery shards on Grand Turk, indicating there had once been an Indian settlement there. Although they were invited, both Obregon and Judge boycotted the symposium. And even with the Lucayan pottery discovery, each continued to dismiss the Grand Turk theory because it does not fit the distances and directions to Cuba that they believe Columbus charted.

But different interpretations of the log had led each of the groups to entirely different ends. Morison had charted the course straight across the sea from east to west and hit San Salvador-Watling. Judge’s team had used a sophisticated computer program to add presumed currents, compass variations and leeway and hit Samana Cay. Power and his supporters had plotted a course based on what his scholarship shows to be the likely compass errors and distance measurements of Columbus’ time and hit Grand Turk on the nose. Others had sailed the course with mixed results. So they began looking for another approach to settling the dispute.

AT THE ISLAND he called Isabela, the fourth he encountered, Columbus wrote: “And here and in the whole island they are all green and the vegetation is as in April in Andalusia, and the song of the little birds would (make it) seem that a man would never wish to leave here, and the flocks of parrots which darken the sun, and the large and small birds of so many species and so different from our own that it is a wonder. And after, there are trees of a thousand kinds, and all (with) fruit according to their kind, and they all give off a fragrance that is a marvel. That I am the saddest (man) in the world for not knowing them!”

The Bahamas are almost treeless today, the forests ravaged for fuel, but the three combative Columbus experts recently agreed that despite the changes of the centuries, such poetic descriptions might still yield clues. After more than two years of public debates in Nassau, Genoa, Seville and London, they decided to shift their focus to the great navigator’s own descriptions of islands that he saw and named and to his sometimes vague record of compass headings through what he thought were the islands of the Indies.

Like Morison, they agreed that the logical approach would be to retrace the journey backward, starting from Columbus’ known landing place in Cuba, and compare his descriptions of the Bahamian islands that he saw to the islands we know today. The end-point should be the true landfall.

However, some of the descriptions could fit scores of Bahamian islands, and some seem partial fantasies. At the island he called Fernandina (now known as Long Island), for example, Columbus wrote: “I saw many trees, very different in proportion from ours. And many of them have their branches of different kinds, and all on one trunk. And one little branch is of one kind and another of another. . . . For example, one branch had its leaves like canes, and another like mastic; and thus, in only one tree, five or six of these varieties, and all so different.” Not even the Guinness Book of Records could handle that one.

Some descriptions, such as that of the towering south cape of Fernandina, do fit the present-day landmark, but not enough others could be identified to satisfy proponents of the three proposed landfalls. Columbus’ vague entry fit Samana Cay about as well as San Salvador-Watling or Grand Turk, which is to say that none matches it exactly if you take “many waters and a very large lake in the center” literally. San Salvador has many waters and several lakes, not just one, that could be described as large. Samana lacks “many waters” but has a large, swampy lagoon. Grand Turk’s topography has been altered by the construction over the centuries of scores of commercial salt pans, but like the other two it is “quite large and very flat.”

At a renewal of the running debate in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., last November, Obregon, Judge and Power each charted and defended a different course, sometimes overlapping but always involving different landmarks and bringing each, of course, to his own favored landfall. The two-day session began with polite verbal sparring but quickly turned into an academic brawl.

The soft-spoken Judge accused Obregon and Morison of fudging their Salvador evidence by altering Columbus’ measurements to suit their own theory and by blaming its admitted inconsistencies on “errors” made by the 16th-Century priest-copyist of the diario . Judge cited in particular Morison’s and later Obregon’s versions of the only clear, and therefore presumably findable, landmark fix that Columbus recorded during his voyage through the Bahamas.

To a layman, the general location of the fix established by Columbus at dusk on Oct. 24, 1492, appears easy to locate if his description in the diario is correct. After 12 days of meandering in the Bahamas during which he landed on and named five islands, Columbus took a bearing on Cape Verde, the towering southern tip of Fernandina. “It bore to the northwest, seven leagues from me,” wrote Columbus. (A Spanish league in Columbus’ day was between 2.82 and 3.18 nautical miles, experts say.)

But without explaining why he did it, Morison corrected Columbus’ Cape Verde fix, writing that it was 12 miles, not seven leagues. Obregon, in turn, corrected Morison and Columbus, insisting that the Cape Verde fix probably was seven leagues as stated, but it was to the north east, not the northwest, and that the 16th-Century priest-copyist had simply transcribed the log inaccurately. In both cases the revisions of Columbus’ log were essential to support the Obregon-Morison track.

Judge charged that Obregon and Morison further stretched credulity by arbitrarily re-measuring the second island that the Genoa-born navigator saw in the Bahamas on Oct. 14 as he sailed away from his first landfall. Columbus, known for his accuracy at judging distances, described the unnamed island as measuring “more than 10 leagues” east to west and five leagues north to south. Morison, followed by Obregon, altered the measurement to miles instead of leagues. The change was necessary to fit the measurements of Rum Cay, the only island Columbus could have passed if his first landfall was, in fact, San Salvador. If tiny Rum Cay was not the second island, then Salvador could not be the first and the theory upholding it would collapse. Morison and Obregon had argued that Columbus “consciously or unconsciously” measured the island by use of a land league of about 1 1/2 nautical miles instead of the standard sea league that he used throughout the rest of his voyage.

“It does not fit the Columbus description in any way, shape or form,” protested Judge, who dismisses Rum Cay as an island Columbus never saw and sets his own Cape Verde fix at about the same measurement Columbus made.

Then, Judge darkly added that Morison, and Obregon after him, had concealed records that would cast doubt on their work, a cardinal scholarly sin.

“Let’s play with a full deck of cards here,” he cried.

To the sober academic audience of about 100 distinguished guests it was as if the combative magazine editor had dropped his pants in church.

“Joe stoops to make veiled accusations,” retorted Obregon, a slight man with a powerful voice, a gray Vandyke beard and a commanding presence. “I must ask you not to use the Goebbels technique.”

In interviews after the debate, the National Geographic editor charged that “out of hubris or just plain stubbornness,” Morison had made what amounted to a false claim when he implied in “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” that he had duplicated Columbus’ course through the Bahamas in the ketch Mary Otis. A copy of the log of the Mary Otis would prove the accusation, Judge said, but the only copy known to exist apart from the original in possession of Morison’s heirs had been entrusted to him in confidence, and he was honor-bound not to publish or display it. Recently, however, the historian’s grandson, Samuel Loring Morison, permitted Los Angeles Times Magazine to study a copy of the log. Judge was right. In the log of the Mary Otis, Morison’s entries show that he did not duplicate or even try to retrace Columbus’ voyage through the Bahamas.

In a carefully detailed critique of the Morison log, Judge said: “Columbus took two weeks to make the voyage; we find Mary Otis did it in four days. To have claimed to have followed the Columbus log on Mary Otis is ludicrous. They never attempted to follow the Columbus course, never anchored where Columbus should have anchored along this fictitious track.”

After convincingly bruising Morison’s reputation for integrity, Judge charged Obregon with committing the same unscholarly sin.

Obregon said in an interview that his last sailing trip undertaken to refine the Obregon-Morison track was in May, 1987, on a yacht called Sanderling. He recited his observations of the research voyage two months later during an international conference on Columbus in Puerto Rico. After hearing Obregon, the conferees unanimously voted to accept San Salvador as the true landfall. Reporting on the meeting, the San Juan newspaper, Lecturas Dominicales, quoted Obregon: “I have just sailed the route of Columbus through the Bahamas to Cuba. In spite of the difficulties I have managed to do it at the speed described in (Columbus’) diary, and have landed in all the places described. The yacht was furnished by Mr. Roger Stone of the International Conservation Fund.”

Actually, Judge said, Roger Stone’s log of the voyage of his yacht demonstrates that the cruise came nowhere close to Obregon’s reported description.

“Obregon’s claim to have run down the Watling track is as phony as Morison’s was in 1940,” Judge scoffed. “No one, no exponent of a Watling track, has ever sailed it.”

Obregon said he deplores the personal level to which the debate appears to have sunk, at the same time dismissing both Judge and Power as “amateurs.”

“Neither of them approaches this in an academic fashion, and both suffer from lack of academic training in history,” he said. Power, he said, is “a wonderful guy but very disorderly in his arguments.” Judge, he says, delivered “a low blow” in his criticism of the Mary Otis and Sanderling voyages. Obregon says he was misquoted by the San Juan newspaper and had actually said he had made five voyages on five different vessels to achieve a cumulative reproduction of the Columbus trip. “I’ve been to all of the places,” he insists.

THERE IS A LOT riding on which, if any, of the three sites is finally and officially accepted as the right choice. The government of the Bahamas has a major financial and political stake in San Salvador because of its potential for tourism and votes. When it was still a British Colony in 1926, the Bahamas confidently renamed Watling after the landfall that the pious Catholic Columbus called San Salvador in honor of The Savior. The present independent government of Prime Minister Lynden Pindling still stands so firmly behind the colonial decision that it has put much of its political and financial clout behind promoting the construction of two major landfall tourist resorts there, one of them a Club Mediterranee, in time for the quincentennial. Without the mystique of Columbus, low-slung San Salvador-Watling doesn’t offer much as a tourist attraction. Samana Cay, although also Bahamian, offers even less: It is uninhabited and has no fresh water.

There is pride and money at stake on Grand Turk, too. The lightly populated Turks and Caicos--the islands’ population totals 9,000--only recently got in on the boom in Caribbean tourism, mainly snorkelers and scuba divers entranced more by the area’s spectacular reefs and sea life than by its 30 relatively featureless islands, only six of which are inhabited. The capital, Grand Turk, has so few attractions that virtually all tourism investment in recent years has gone to the larger, beachier sister island of Providenciales. According to local developers, proof of the Columbus landfall could fuel enough hotel investment to rival the capital island’s lucrative offshore banking industry and inspire tourist developments on some of the other Caicos islands as well.

A somewhat wistful Obregon says that to end the debate once and for all, “the ideal would be for somebody to find Columbus’ original log.” And although most scholars believe that that is unlikely, Obregon’s ideal is not impossible. According to another renowned historian, Dr. Eugene Lyon, a specialist in ancient Spanish documents who has translated the Columbus diario, Spanish archivists of the period saved just about everything, so the original log may be tucked away somewhere gathering dust along with 15th- and 16th-Century real estate transactions and marriage bans. “There is a possibility of finding it, but, one must admit, an unlikely one,” said Lyon, who flew to Seville in December to look for it under the auspices of the Mapfre-America Foundation established by a Spanish insurance company.

With or without the help of the conclusive piece of evidence, by Columbus Day, 1992, a ceremonial site will be chosen, the debate quelled, at least for a moment. To those such as Lyon, who look at the larger questions of history, the actual first landing place of Columbus seems unimportant. “The greatest and most important thing is not the place,” he says, “but the fact of the encounter, the tremendous meeting of two worlds that were changed forever.” But some outside the academic community fear their own worlds will change once the official landfall has been somehow determined. And development-minded islanders shudder to think of the consequences if theirs is the site that is proved wrong.