Intelligencer Journal
Lancaster, PA  17604
Edition:  Monday, October 16, 1989
 
Geographer says Columbus didn't land at accepted site
     Nearly 500 years after the world's most famous explorer
landed in the New World, a geographer is challenging accepted
thinking with his own theory about where Christopher Columbus
first stepped ashore.
     John Hathaway Winslow, after spending three years studying a
controversy addressed often by historians, has concluded that the
expedition landed in 1492 on Lignum Vitae Cay, far to the north
of the other most-accepted sites in the Bahamas.
     Based on the geographic descriptions Columbus wrote in his
diary, and literature on the subject, Winslow said he believes
the Ni$a, Pinta and Santa Maria first sighted a light from an
Indian village at the southern tip of Abaco Island.
     Continuing west, he argues, they next encountered Great
Harbour Cay, and sailed around its northern coast to find a
harbor on the west side away from the northeast winds.  The ships
then landed at adjacent Lignum Vitae Cay.
     The ideas advanced by Winslow, who presented them last week
in a lecture at Towson State University, contradict two pre-
vailing theories on where Columbus landed.
     In 1986, the National Geographic Society adopted the theory
that Columbus made his landfall at Samana Cay, which was first
advanced in the 1890s by Gustavus Fox, assistant secretary of the
Navy under President Abraham Lincoln.
     The view accepted officially by the Spanish-speaking Latin
American states is that the famous explorer made land at San
Salvador Island.
     Joseph Judge, the senior associate editor of the National
Geographic who promulgated the Samana Cay hypothesis after
visiting the island and using a computer model of Columbus'
course based on a translation of his log and diary, said Winslow
must be mistaken.
     "He cannot be right," Judge said, saying Lignum Vitae Cay
"is much too far north."
     Judge, who does not know Winslow and was unaware of his
theory, suggested that the professor had not paid enough atten-
tion to the effects sailing would have had on Columbus' course.
     "He ought to pay more attention to sailing and less to
geography," Judge said.  "We paid very particular attention to
the geography in the log."
     Winslow, whose father was in the diplomatic service, was
born in Trieste, grew up and was educated in cities around the
world, earning his doctorate in geography from Cambridge in 1973.
     He has since taught in the United States, Ireland, Papua New
Guinea, and last month he completed a term as assistant chairman
of the Department of Social Sciences at the College of the
Bahamas.
     Winslow moved to Baltimore from Nassau because a son lives
here, and aware that Towson State has an active geography depart-
ment, he telephoned James E. DiLisio, the chairman, seeking a
forum to present his views.
     "It's like a detective story," Winslow said, "Not whodunnit
but where was it?  Where . . . did Christopher Columbus land?"
     He said San Salvador Island and Samana Cay do not fit
Columbus's descriptions, and that Great Harbour Cay and Andros
Island were the only ready sources of the fresh water the ex-
plorers needed.
     Most of the Bahamas are dry, without the lush appearance
Columbus described, Winslow said, but Great Harbour Cay and
Lignum Vitae Cay fit the bill and there was a secure anchorage
deep enough for the ships.
     Beyond setting the historical record straight, Winslow said
he has a second motive in trying to publicize his theory that
Columbus handed first on Lignum Vitae Cay--to save the island
from development as a luxury resort.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                                                      WINSLOW.ART