The Unknown Pilot Sails Again, by Joseph Judge, The World And I,
December 1991, Vol. 6, No. 12, pp. 372-391.
 
John Dyson's Columbus resurrects a theory discounted by scholars
for centuries.
 
When I met John Dyson during the course of his research on this
book, in Seville and in Toronto, he seemed an affable and
intelligent writer of books rather than a skilled historian, and
so he has proven to be.  I did not expect to find him huckstering
a long-discredited tale on the basis of another man's
demonstrably absurd notions about Columbus' first voyage. 
Usually, these days, when ordinarily decent people do this kind
of thing, there is a lucrative television deal lurking somewhere
in the background, and we are asked to understand that it is
unashamedly "infotainment."
     I must admit, I was sometimes entertained and amused as the
book went along.  Produced by Madison Press, unevenly printed in
Italy by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, and distributed through Simon
& Schuster, it presents, so Dyson claims, thrilling new data that
will "stand Columbus scholarship on its head" - but stay on your
feet, folks, for the book's central tenet is nothing more than
that old familiar yarn, "The Unknown Pilot."
     Dyson places a new twist on this centuries-old theory of the
secret first discovery of America by combining it with a new
route taken by Columbus during the second discovery in 1492, and
thus arrives at a new landfall. (In fact, three.)  This new route
is based on the "nautical researches" of a Spanish seaman, Luis
Miguel Coin Cuenca, who concluded that Columbus followed the
track of the unknown pilot at 19N, west of the Cape Verde
Islands.
     That this does not square with the facts as presented in the
Diario, or log, of the 1492 voyage is easily explained. 
According to Dyson and Coin, Columbus falsified his own log in
order to fool the Portuguese, into whose waters he was sailing. 
Later, the log was again tampered with by Columbus' son Ferdinand
to enhance the reputation of his father.  Still later, a third
falsification occurred at unknown hands, perhaps those of a
lawyer connected to the Columbus family suit against the crown of
Spain.
     Coin was a second mate on a bulk carrier when the
inspiration came to him that the Diario had been fiddled with. 
That insight in turn was based on his own experience in the
Atlantic waters.  He knew that what the log recorded about the
debris, the currents, the birds, and the calms encountered by
Columbus could not represent a passage across the mid-Atlantic.
     In the course of playing out this thesis, hemispheric
geography is disturbed: The Sargasso Sea is moved, Mayaguana
Island is placed in the Caicos, the air over the mid-Atlantic is
filled with pelicans, and all manner of land birds pass in swarms
day after day.  Dyson calls this "a simple, believable story that
fits the nautical and historical facts," but in truth the whole
thing is nothing but bunk.  An examination of its wild claims has
one virtue however: It helps us understand what really happened
in history and where Columbus really went in 1492.
 
Did Columbus know where he was going?
     Ever since 1492, Columbus historians, like congressional
committees, have asked, What did he know and when did he know it?
     Ferdinand, Columbus' son, wrote a biography of his father
(published, unfortunately, only in Italian in Venice in 1571, the
Spanish original having been lost), and he acknowledged this
natural curiosity by listing in detail thirteen "clues" to lands
across the Atlantic that his father had gathered from various
sources.  Most are of things washed up on the Atlantic beaches of
Europe's islands - timber and canes and boats and even corpses
that resembled no "Christian."  Others are sailor's yarns about
sighting lands west of Ireland, and west of the Azores - and a
fabulous tale of a storm-driven Portuguese voyage to the mythical
Island of the Seven Cities, or Antilia.  But he gives only a nod
of his head to the unknown pilot theory, and then connects an
incorrect anecdote to it.
     The first telling of the unknown pilot story was by the
historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo in 1535 in his Historia
general y natural de las occedentales (1535).  He passes it along
as commonly held gossip - "so this story goes about the world,
among the common people."  The caravel was bound for England when
it encountered a great storm and was driven "west for many days
until it discovered one or more of the islands toward the
Indies."  The ship returned to an unspecified part of Europe,
and, "at that moment all of the men on the ship died," except for
a few ill survivors who made their way to Portugal.  Among them
was the unknown pilot, who was Portuguese, Andalusian, or Basque. 
He also was a friend of Columbus, who begged the dying man to
make the map and "he alone heard this secret."
     Oviedo anticipated five centuries of scholarship regarding
the unknown pilot by adding, "As for me, I hold it to be false."
     In 1552, a second great chronicler of the Indies, Francisco
Lopez de Gomara, passed the tale along in his Historia de las
Indias and identified the pilot as an Andalusian sailing between
the Canaries and Madeira, or a Biscayan bound for England, or a
Portuguese returning from the Guinea coast.  He finally washed
ashore half dead in Portugal, or Madeira, or the Azores - but
"all agree that he died in the house of Christopher Columbus,"
who inherited the log and the chart.
     The admiral's other primary biographer, Las Casas (the same
who preserved the Diario in his history), indicated as does
Oviedo that it was a widely held opinion that Columbus must have
known where he was going - "it was spoken of as something true." 
Some said they had heard it from Columbus himself.  Las Casas
gives it an entire chapter and identifies the unknown pilot as a
Portuguese, or a Galician, or an Andalusian from Huelva who was
driven west "by an incessant wind of great strength" for twenty-
eight days and came on an island of the Indies. On the return
voyage he washed ashore from his wrecked ship, all others having
died or drowned, on a beach in the Azores, either Graciosa or
Terceira, or along a Canary Island coast, either Gomera or
Hierro, or on Madeira, or the nearby island of Porto Santo, where
we know Columbus lived for a time.
     The dying man "revealed to Christopher Columbus everything
he knew and told him the routes that had taken him there and
back, with the nautical chart and measurements as well as the
zone where he had found these islands, all things that he had
carried with him in writing."  Las Casas does not explain how
these writings could have survived being washed ashore in a
pounding surf.
     Finally, in 1609, the thoroughly unreliable historian
Garcilaso de la Vega, whose muddled account of the de Soto
expedition has made historians shudder for two centuries, put a
name to the unknown pilot - Alonso Sanchez de Huelva, who was
blown to the Indies in 1484 from a position somewhere between the
Canaries and Madeira and who returned with five companions to
Terceira in the Azores, where he was welcomed and cared for by
Columbus - who never lived in the Azores.
     Some modern historians, reacting to the "Italian Superman"
image of Columbus conveyed by historians like Paolo Taviani - who
insist Columbus did everything out of "sheer genius" with no help
from anyone - have supported the idea that Columbus had secret
help he never acknowledged.  Among them is Juan Manzano Manzano,
former rector of the University of Seville and a noted expert on
Columbus' Spanish years.  He published in Madrid in 1976 an
extensive treatment of the unknown pilot which he called Colon y
su secreto.  The resemblances between Colon y su secreto and
Coin's work are striking.  Both theorize that the unknown pilot
was blown west from the Cape Verde bypass; both land the unknown
pilot in the Virgin Islands; and both move him to the mesalike
peninsula of Monte Cristo, where Columbus claimed he found gold. 
Since Dyson's first chapter, "The Secret of Columbus" offers
similar material, and Manzano's account appeared in Spain just as
second mate Coin's great illumination was taking place, I looked
for it, but in vain, in Dyson's bibliography.  By coincidence,
Taviani's discussion of the unknown pilot is also titled "The
Secret of Columbus," although he is present in the bibliography.
     Coin-Dyson is, to my knowledge, the first work to attempt to
reconstruct the unknown pilot's map.  It describes quite simply
the longest sea voyage undertaken by an Iberian vessel prior to
Magellan's circumnavigation of the planet.  The unknown pilot
makes landfall in the Virgin Islands and skirts the coasts of
Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.  Then he backtracks down the Windward
chain to Trinidad and the Venezuelan coast, which he follows to
Central America and bits of Mexico, making a semicircuit of the
Gulf of Mexico before nicking the tip of Florida and zig-zagging
eastward through the Bahamas and thence into the Atlantic and
home.  He thus covers large parts of all four voyages of
Columbus.
     No one could have mistaken this huge landmass for Asia as it
was known from Marco Polo and the Frau Mauro and Ptolemy maps. 
Let's call it, for lack of a better term, America.
 
Unknown pilot makes 500 miles a day?
 
As reconstructed in Coin-Dyson, the unknown pilot was following a
"secret oceanic bypass" invented by "a team of navigational
experts at the Portuguese court" to avoid the then-Spanish-held
Cape Verde Islands when he encountered a hurricane: "A caravel
trapped in its whirling embrace had no option but to turn west
and run before the wind...west and always west it flew...[at]
speeds of up to twenty knots.  After days of terror it was left
behind by this storm only to be hit by another.  This is not
unusual."
     Not unusual in a comic book.  Dyson admits to a bit of
seamanship - "knocking around the globe in a variety of ships and
yachts" - so he is fully aware that the thought of a caravel
making twenty knots for days on end in 75+ MPH winds without
foundering staggers the nautical imagination.  Running at that
speed, the caravel was making an impossible five hundred miles
per day, as compared with a normal hundred for modern oceangoing
yachts.  From west of the Cape Verdes, the unknown pilot would
have blown into the Virgins with the hurricanes in about four
days - compared to Columbus' rapid, twenty-eight day crossing of
the same region in 1493.
     As Morison and others have pointed out, no ship has ever
been blown across the Atlantic, whether or not pushed by a double
hurricane, and certainly none was ever blown back.
     Dyson tells us that Coin deduced the route of the unknown
pilot's immense voyage from "Columbus's decisions and from other
maps, ..." and he attempts to bring up in support cartographical
evidence that does not exist.  Of the famous Juan de la Cosa
world map of 1500, he makes some conspiratorial observations:
"Mysteriously it includes long stretches of the Venezuelan and
Gulf of Mexico coastline which had not been explored before the
map was published."  Stating that the famous image of Saint
Christopher on the map "seems to be the work of a different hand
and added later," he asks, "What could it conceal?"
     Yet further, the Gulf of Mexico "is presented almost
identically on the Juan de la Cosa and Waldseemuller (1507) maps"
- the result of another triple conspiracy!  This time Columbus
passes along his secret information about the Gulf to Amerigo
Vespucci, who passes it along to Martin Waldseemuller.  None of
this can bear scrutiny.
     Far from being unexplored in 1500, "Little Venice" was both
visited and named by Hojeda's expedition of 1499, of which Juan
de la Cosa was a member.  The coastal nomenclature follows the
1499 exploration from the Gulf of Paris to the Bay of Maracaibo.
     A portion of coast without nomenclature is generalized: in
terms of the map's construction and design, it simply connects
the known coast with the frame.  The brown hue and brushwork of
the frame, in which the cartoon of Saint Christopher appears,
continue into the generalized terrain on either side; thus the
cartoon is not a later addition.  And Dyson's suggestion that it
seems to be the work of a different hand can be dismissed - it is
in the cutline to the cartoon that Juan de la Cosa chose to sign
his work.
     The Gulf of Mexico does not appear.  The "mysterious coast"
may well be Florida, but it is not necessary to postulate an
unknown pilot when the Portuguese explorer Duarte Pacheco
Pereira, who claimed to have found a "large landmass" in 1498,
will do.
 
You don't need a map when you have a guide
 
     Dyson also credit Columbus' knowledge of Martinique and
Dominica on his second voyage to the unknown pilot's map.  This
is another case of deliberately ignoring what the real log tells
us - that Columbus' knowledge of these islands came from Indian
informants during his first voyage.
     On January 13, 1493, in Haiti, Columbus questioned an Indian
about the Caribs, "and the Indian pointed to the east. ... The
Indian said of the island of Matinino that it was...further to
the east of Carib.  He also told of the island of Goanin ... Of
these islands the Admiral says that some days ago he received
information from many persons."
     On January 16, Columbus actually set a course for
Martinique, where he intended to take on ballast.  "The Indians
indicated ... that he would strike the said island to the
southeast.  He wanted to take that course and ordered the sails
trimmed."  After a few miles the wind changed his mind - "very
good for going to Spain."  Columbus noted, however, that on his
previous route "he would find the island of Matinino," that it
was 10 or 12 leagues from Carib, and that "those two islands must
not be 15 or 20 leagues from the place from which he departed."
     On January 18, returning homeward, he noted that a bird
flying SSE might mean islands in that direction.  "And, he said
the island of Carib and that of Matinino and many others lay to
the east-southeast of...Hispaniola."
     It is clear that Columbus had a good idea where the Leeward
Islands were in relation to Hispaniola.  In his letter to the
court, he remarked that Matinino is "the first island met on the
way from Spain to the Indies" and Quaris is the second. 
Christopher Columbus was a cartographer, and he had constructed a
map of the Indies in consultation with his Indian guides - as did
every sane explorer who followed him, up to and including John
Smith in Virginia.
     And since he believed that Carib, Matinino, and Quaris were
loaded with gold, it should come as no surprise that Columbus
bent his course farther to the south in the fall of 1493.
 
How credible a theory?
 
     Over the years, almost every major scholar who has
considered the matter has rejected the unknown pilot and his map
as "a ridiculous invention," "a vulgar fabrication," "a malicious
fable," "an acrimonious legend," "a sailor's yarn...built on
clouds."
     The map of the re-created voyage, if carried by Columbus,
showed him a continent he never believed in.  Of this there is no
doubt - he died believing he had been four times to the Indies,
not to a new place named America.
     That there were Portuguese voyages into the western Atlantic
during the 1470s and '80s following the discovery of the Cape
Verdes, Canaries, Madeira, and Azores is historically attested. 
That one could have gone unrecorded by history is possible.  Such
a discovery would surely have been followed by other efforts, as
all others were and as Columbus' was.  Not all of the four or
five survivors would have died without telling their families
where they had been.  It seems unreasonable that Columbus alone
among men happened to get the goodies - and, according to Dyson,
what goodies: "charts and the heavy pilot books filled with
sketches of landmarks, maps of rivers, reefs and anchorages,
navigation plots and useful comments on the friendliness of
natives and the locations of food and water resources."
     It is not credible that Columbus would withhold such
information from a monarch - to whom it belonged, since all
voyages of discovery had to be crown authorized - nor that, if he
possessed it, he would have needed eight years to "sell" it.  It
is not credible that the Portuguese king would reject a voyage in
the face of such evidence, nor is it credible that he would have
killed Columbus for possessing it - Dyson's rationale for
Columbus' having withheld knowledge of the map.  And to many who
have a measured view of the man, it does not seem credible that
the devout Columbus would steal another man's discovery,
especially a friend's and especially a discovery of this
magnitude.
     The unknown pilot provided Coin with a convenient reason for
a different departure point for Columbus in 1492, and he had
already (I assume) decided that the log of the voyage had been
faked, and faked again.  But there are no valid reasons for
thinking so, and Coin's analysis of the log's evidence is, for a
seaman, astonishingly ill-informed.
 
Flotsam, jetsam, or bunkum? 
 
     No one will maintain that we have a perfect document in the
Las Casas Book of the First Navigation.  Oliver Dunn and James
Kelley, Jr.'s recent thorough transcription and translation show
the many crossouts, strikeovers, corrections, and additions that
afflict the text.  But as geographer and historian Robert Fuson
writes, also in a new translation: "Without doubt this was the
most accurate and complete ship's log ever produced up to its
time. ...Nothing in the log suggests anything less than a
completely truthful account of the voyage, from beginning to
end."
     So what does Coin find at fault with the document?
     First, he objects that a piece of wreckage - part of a mast
- found on September 11, six days and 365 miles out, "would be
hard to account for...in the clockwise current so far to the west
of the Canaries."  If however, the ships were sailing "roughly in
the direction of the Cape Verde islands ... they would be close
to Portuguese shipping routes."
     As shown on modern pilot charts, the fleet's position at sea
on September 11 was in the direct path of the Great Atlantic
Gyre, that huge movement of waters around the ocean's outer
"clock."  To that position would be delivered debris from the
active shipping lanes between Madeira and Portugal and between
the Canaries and Spain - even from the triangular trade,
described by David Beers Quinn, between the Azores, Bristol, and
Lisbon.  The log's estimate of the size of the ship from which
the piece of mast came would indicate an oceangoing trading
vessel.
     This same gyre would also ensure that the opposite of what
Coin says would be true.  Debris from ships lost while taking the
"secret oceanic bypass" around the Cape Verdes that he postulates
would be swiftly carried away toward South America.
     We can toss this objection overboard.
     The line that "first set Dr. Coin on the quest to penetrate
Columbus's smoke screen" and that he cites as further evidence
that the fleet was sailing south, not west, occurs in the entry
for September 13: "The currents were against him (las corientes
lo era contrarias)."  Coin's reasoning is that the currents west
of the Canaries always move west and could not have been against
Columbus, while "from his professional experience" he himself
knew of "a current that does set strongly to the northeast,
flowing from the vicinity of the Cape Verde Islands toward the
Canaries between the months of July and October."
     As every blue-water sailor will testify, the track from the
Canaries toward the Cape Verde islands is in the very heart of
the trade winds.  The ships are also carried southwest by the
Canary Current, which joins the North Equatorial Current in the
mid-Atlantic.
     In their striving to maintain a westward heading by the set
of the sails and the angle of the rudder, Columbus' ships were
being acted on by the ocean currents upon which they were
carried, as is every cork on the seas.  But without an external
reference in the form of pilot charts or electronic aids to
navigation, they had no way of determining how currents were
affecting the ships.
     The log's references to currents being "against" or "for"
can refer only to seas running before the wind and breaking at
angles to the desired course.  Recent studies on the Columbus
voyage done by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution have revealed that the general movement of winds and
currents across the Atlantic at 28 degrees is interrupted, when
examined very locally, by temporary calms, contrary winds and
thus "contrary currents."
     The log's bottom line is that on the day Columbus noted the
current was "against him," he ran a mile short of one hundred
miles!
     A third objection raised by Coin is to a logged statement on
September 17 - "They found the seawater less salty since leaving
the Canaries. ..."  Coin claims that a cold-water upwelling "on a
line between the Canaries and Cape Verdes" could create less
saline seawater.  Yet the track given in the book for the
proposed 1492 voyage indicates the fleet was nowhere near the
presumed upwelling.  The reason for this is that Coin also has
the ships running due west from the Canaries for several days
before turning southwest - this to avoid enemy Portuguese ships
waiting to intercept and arrest them.  This reach to the west and
subsequent angle to the southwest place them considerably
northwest of any possible contact with an upwelling between the
Canaries and Cape Verdes.
     The log's remark must remain forever curious.
 
Avian evidence deserves the booby prize
 
     To prove his point that the ships had to have been near some
land like the Cape Verdes, Dyson presents a menagerie -
"pelicans, a turtledove, river birds without webbed feet, even a
duck" - that the ships encountered during their days of crossing
"the empty zone of the mid-Atlantic."
     There are no pelicans in the log.  The bird mentioned in
many places as the alcatraz is the blue-faced booby.  The
alcatraz is identified by Columbus' description, which may be
compared with that of the Audubon Encyclopedia.
     First, Columbus:
 
     They say a bird that is called a frigate bird (rabiforcado)
     which makes the boobies (alcatraces) throw up what they eat
     in order to eat it herself, and she does not sustain herself
     on anything else.  It is a seabird, but it does not alight
     on the sea nor depart from land 20 leagues.
 
     Audubon:
 
     a blue-faced booby is likely to be pursued by a frigate
     bird, which will even yank at the booby's tail until it
     disgorges the catch.  The lost meal is then seized by the
     tormenter in mid-air.  Blue-faced boobies have been spotted
     far from land.
 
     The boobies were dining on their favorite meal, the presence
of which is described by the log: "Many flying fish flew into the
ship."
     The "river birds without webbed feet" turn out to be a
single bird with webbed feet.  The incident occurred on September
20: "They caught by hand a bird which was like a tern; it was a
river and not a sea bird, the feet being like a gull's..."
     The "duck" was actually a flight of birds seen on October 8
at some distance "off to the southwest."  The generic word for
duck, anades, is used.  The flock could have been anything moving
fast in a group.
     The "dove" (tortolo) seen on September 23 obviously could
not have been a land dove (whether near or far from islands) but
could well have been a dove look-alike that the seaman had never
seen, and with good reason - the dove-shaped and dove-colored
south polar skua, which spends our summer, until early November,
in the North Atlantic and its summer in the Antarctic.  Its bold
white wing bars are an almost identical match for those of the
largest "dove" in Spain, the wood pigeon.
     I must add that almost invariably when large flocks are
sighted (September 18, October 7) they are flying westward - away
from the Cape Verde Islands.
     Thus there is nothing unusual in the ornithology of the log. 
The descriptions are of pelagic species that frequent the open
Atlantic - sooty terns, tropic birds, boobies, petrels
(pardales), and frigate birds - with a black noddy representing
the "river bird."  (Columbus also noted picking up "a river crab"
from the Sargasso Sea.)  As the ships drew closer to the Bahamas,
they picked up flights of birds going west - very probably sooty
shearwaters.
     There was a single occasion when mysterious birds appeared
the same day (Thursday, September 20) they caught the "river
bird."  At dawn there had appeared "two or three land
birds...singing," which departed that day at sunset.  We are
reminded of Ferdinand's comment that during the second voyage, "a
swallow visited the fleet, to the surprise of all," when it was
"more than 400 leagues west of Gomera."  But no one has a clue
what these night-flying migrants of 1492 might have been, and
speculation is idle.
     What is not speculation is Dyson's summary of this bit of
"evidence" in which one black noddy doth a thousand make: "Land
and river birds were seen hundreds of miles from land - not the
waifs and strays occasionally encountered in mid-ocean, but whole
flocks, day after day."
     This is a deliberate flight of fancy.
     Equally fanciful is the notion that calm seas are not to be
encountered in the 3,000-mile passage of the Atlantic -
especially in the Sargasso Sea, where the log places Columbus,
and Coin does not.  Coin-Dyson points to Columbus' frequent
references to the ocean as being "smooth as a river" and "like
the river of Seville" and to the various times he is in a calm
yet making good progress.
     Dyson singles out for special mention the entry for Tuesday,
September 25: "His seamen went swimming when the navigational
data implies that the fleet was averaging a speed of five or six
knots, yet no sailor in his right mind jumps over the side unless
his ship is dead in the water."
     Dyson has never heard of the statistician who drowned in a
river that averaged three feet in depth.  The log entry for that
day begins, "This day there was much calm ..."  We can even guess
when the men went swimming - while Columbus and Martin Alonso
Pinzon were having a conference regarding their position in
reference to the chart that Columbus had loaned Pinzon three days
before.  Since one sailed on the Santa Maria and the other on the
Pinta, the seas were obviously calm enough for them to visit. 
There is even a suggestion that they were talking ship-to-ship;
when Columbus asked for his chart back, it was "sent over by
means of some cord."  Because of the calm and the time taken for
the conference, they made only 4 1/2 leagues during the day.
     It was following his talk with the admiral the Pinzon, at
sunset, sent up a cry that he saw land to the southwest.  The
admiral ordered the course changed from west to southwest and set
off in pursuit of the Indies at a much faster clip, making 17
leagues.  Dyson averages these distances and thus has sane men
jump overboard from a rapidly moving ship.
 
The evidence indicates Columbus was where he said he was
 
     Coin has no evidence of a southern voyage.  The mast, the
currents, the birds, the calms - all point to a more northern
route, where Columbus says he was.
     Further, to make a southern voyage feasible, Coin has to
rearrange the log entries by the artificial device of passing
them through three sets of changes, all motivated differently:
Columbus to confuse the Portuguese, Ferdinand to increase his
father's reputation, and a lawyer to help win a case.  The
saintly Las Casas has to agree to participate in the deception.
     The history of the log tells us without much doubt that such
a conspiracy could not have happened.  By the time the original
Diario was presented by Columbus to Queen Isabella in Barcelona
in April 1493, the entries, according to Coin-Dyson, had been
scrambled.  But think about that.  How?  And why?
     The entries in the log as we have it are daily and
continuous, spontaneous, coherent in terms of the geography
through which Columbus traveled.  Some are double entries - two
descriptions of the same day's events.  There is only one way
such a document could have been faked: Columbus had to have
composed an entirely new, fictitious log sometime after March 15,
1493, the date of the last entry.  But by then his motive for
falsification of the log, to fool the Portuguese in the event of
arrest, no longer existed.
     Portuguese waters extended south of the Cape Verdes in the
eastern Atlantic, but jurisdiction of the western Atlantic would
not be settled until 1493.
     As to Ferdinand's involvement, in his precis of the log he
did exactly the opposite of what Coin-Dyson accuses him: He
removed all references to Cathay and the Grand Khan.  He even
went so far as to say that Hispaniola was named Cipango in 1492.
     Ferdinand was writing against the background of what would
prove to be the longest and most acrimonious lawsuit in history -
the Spanish crown, treasury, and Pinzon family on one side and
the Columbus family on the other.  The titles, rights, and
privileges that Ferdinand's family would derive from the Americas
for generations were at stake, and the less said about Asia the
better.
     To succeed, Ferdinand would have had to change something
beyond his power to change - the letter Columbus wrote to the
court from Lisbon on March 4, 1493.  It had received wide and
immediate publication in Europe: "When I came to Juana, I thought
... it must be mainland, the province of Cathay."
     The role of the third faker, the lawyer, is not spelled out. 
It must be, however, that once Coin had rearranged all of the log
entries to his liking, trying to make them fit a Cape Verde
latitude voyage, there were many loose ends.  Someone had to be
made to blame.  This is implied by Dyson's remark that the faker
was "certainly no sailor" and that his work left behind "nautical
impossibilities" - much like Coin's, I must add.
     For if the Coin-Dyson voyage of the unknown pilot strikes
one as nothing less than fabulous, that proposed by Coin for
Columbus in 1492 is a howler.  Cast Off!
     As the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria prepared to depart
Gomera, a Spanish caravel came "rushing to intercept them with
the urgent news that a squadron of Portuguese warships was
lurking over the horizon to the southwest."
     By this time we have been with Dyson long enough to know
what that really means:  Three caravels had been sent out to
divine Columbus' purposes if he turned south into Portuguese
waters.  They were not lurking on the horizon but at the island
of Hierro, thirty miles away.  Still, Columbus felt the way "was
blocked."  The way where?  To his intended route.  Route to
where? America.
     But why not get out the secret map?  I have it right here on
page 212, and it shows me that if I keep due west from Gomera I
will come to America anyway!
     So why would Columbus choose to turn southwest, into the
teeth of his enemies, a move that also caused him to falsify his
journal, when his secret map showed he could reach America by
going straight ahead?
     Straight ahead he went for a day or two and then peeled off
to the southwest and picked up the latitude of Cape Verde, and on
September 25, Martin Alonso Pinzon cried - Land!
     "Faint but unmistakable, an island was discernible on the
horizon with the flare of the setting sun at its back."
     America!
     Not yet - perhaps tiny Sombrero Island in the Virgin
Islands.
     But when anxious eyes scanned the sea at sunrise, the
horizon was bare.  During the night the ships had drifted forty
miles or more without realizing it, because "fierce currents of
up to five knots run toward the north or northwest in that
vicinity.  Dyson thus ends the landfall story and when the
narrative resumes ten pages later (pictures in between), he takes
a powder: "The rest of this chapter is based on the logbook as it
has been reconstructed by Dr. Coin..."
     The narrative continues: "On the morning of September 26,
with land no longer visible ... Columbus gave no orders to turn
southwest toward the land. ...Instead he carried on to the west."
     The Diario leaves no doubt that after Pinzon's claim to have
seen land (you will recall this was the day the men went
swimming), Columbus thought so, too, but at some distance away -
seventy-five miles - and "ordered the ships to leave their
course, which was west, and for all of them to go southwest where
the land had appeared."
     Of course.  He would not have sailed away from a landfall in
the Indies.  But they found no land that night and turned west
again until that afternoon, when again they looked - "they went
to the southwest until it was found that what they had said was
land was not land but only cloud."
     By Coin's analysis, the ships kept on "north of west, along
the line of islands stretching toward Florida," each night being
"unwittingly carried to the west-northwest by currents."  In this
way, they unwittingly passed huge Puerto Rico and gigantic
Dominican Republic and Haiti without seeing them.
     But wait, these islands were on the secret map Coin places
in Columbus' hand.  Not only that; Cibao, the place where a gold
mine is reported, was marked with an X.  Why didn't Columbus, who
was mad for gold, turn to it?
     It is not conceivable that with the unknown pilot's secret
map in hand, Columbus would have passed up the great island that
now is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and that
contained a great gold mine marked with an X, in order to land on
a flyblown speck of sand in the reef-strew Turks and Caicos.
     On October 1, Pinzon again sighted land - "the thin black
profile of a low and flat island - probably one of the Caicos
group - almost covered by darkness and clouds."
     America?
     Not yet.  He knew there were islands around, and he did not
want to "delay matters by beating to windward" to find them.  He
was anxious to press on ... but do you see what that clever
Columbus did?  These events that Coin tells us happened on
October 1 are recorded in the log as having happened on September
18 and 19.  So Coin just tucks that handy little entry up
forward.
 
Third landfall disappears in a haze
 
     On October 3, the men threatened to mutiny because they had
seen no land - neither Sombrero nor that smudge of Caicos
apparently counted to them as land.  But then, on October 7, land
was sighted again, this time by Vincente Yanez Pinzon in the Nina
but shucks!  By the time the Santa Maria came up to confirm, "It
would appear that the haze caused when the rising tropical sun
sucked moisture into the air had reduced visibility to a mere
four or five miles." 
     This third lost landfall island is identified as "possibly
Mayaguana."  Dyson describes it as "a low and flat island
surrounded by coral reefs in the Caicos group."  Surely he knows
better.  Mayaguana is one of the eastern Bahamas group, not the
Turks and Caicos.  It is a very large island, twenty-four miles
long and six miles wide.  It is not low and flat - Southeast
Point is 90 feet high, Abraham's Bay Hill 110, which would have
been visible to the Santa Maria for a distance of thirty miles,
or, at five knots, six hours.  It would have been impossible to
miss.  Unless one postulates an even-greater impossibility - the
morning miasma lasted all day, which gives us the pretty picture
of the fleet making almost ninety miles while completely
surrounded by fog.
     But even that mad postulation is directly contradicted by
the Diario's entry for that date: "He had also ordered that, at
sunrise and at sunset, all the ships should join him since these
are the two periods when it is most possible to see for a
distance..."
     Coin-Dyson's Mayaguana scenario is absolute fiction:
Undaunted by missing three landfalls in a row, and again defying
every tenet of human curiosity by not even bothering to follow up
on Pinzon's assumed landfall, the ships incredibly sailed on -
not toward this huge island of Mayaguana but westward.  Or,
maybe, eastward - back where they had come from?  Perhaps, being
carried along unwittingly on west-northwest currents, and subject
to strong northeasterly trades, the fleet performed a miracle by
sailing east?
     What other explanation can there be when Coin leaves off his
tale with Mayaguana disappearing in the morning mist on October 7
and Dyson has them landing at Guanahani on October 12?  I have a
real secret for the readers: Mayaguana, which is not located on
any map in this book, lies a hundred miles west of Dyson's
implied landing site of Grand Turk, and between them are gathered
across the sea the hundreds of islands of the Caicos group (to
which Dyson unwittingly, or maybe not, assigns Mayaguana).  The
ships could not have sailed from Mayaguana to Grand Turk without
seeing hundreds of islands.
 
A small matter of moving the Sargasso Sea
 
     All this while, ever since the ships reached their Cape
Verde latitude and started across, a major and material witness
has been missing; the Sargasso Sea.
     Columbus' ship first picked up the floating weed on
September 16 and thought it had been "torn loose from land."  The
log noted the presence of weed every day thereafter and always in
connection with "very calm seas," and "light winds."  Five days
later "they found so much weed that the sea appeared to be solid
with it," and "the sea was very smooth, like a river."
     But had the ships been on the track described by Coin at
19N, the Sargasso Sea would have been well north of them. 
Staying on that track would require the biblical feat of moving
the sea.  No problem.  Writes Dyson: "Mariner's reports dated
early in the sixteenth century suggest that it lay considerably
farther to the east and south than it does in modern times."
     But those unidentified flying mariners were mistaken.  This
scenario is plainly impossible, and for the very reason that
Dyson gives - the Atlantic currents have not changed, and the
currents create the sea.
     It is the very period during which the ships were in the
thickest part of the Sargasso Sea that Coin-Dyson finds so
confounding.  These September dates are singled out by Dyson to
illustrate his contention that "these extraordinary light winds
which would amaze any sailor with experience of trade winds
voyaging, are ... one of the log's puzzling features."
     Oceanographer Clifford Barnes, writing of the Sargasso Sea,
says all that needs saying: It is "relatively still" and "winds
are light."
     The log, so puzzling to those who would place him somewhere
else, is proof that Columbus was where he said he was - west of
the Canaries.
 
The one impossible landfall
 
     Columbus could not have landed at Grand Turk from either
direction.  Of the three islands discussed as possible landfalls,
Dyson ranks Watling Island as "increasingly shaky," Samana Cay as
"equally tenuous," and Grand Turk as "gaining recognition."
     A more informed opinion is that of Robert Fuson in his Log
of Christopher Columbus (1987, reissued in paper 1991): "Recent
research has cut the number of serious candidates to two: Watling
and Samana. ... Of all the islands and cays in the Bahamas only
by starting at Samana Cay will you be able to follow the Admiral
to Cuba."
     The truth of the matter is that, with the recent death of
Robert Power, its chief advocate, Grand Turk has no supporters in
the scholarly community.  Fuson, who tried very hard to build a
rationale for a Grand Turk landfall, walked away from it and
opted for Samana Cay.  The archaeologist William Keegan, whose
discovery of a Lucayan Indian site last year gave Power cause to
make claims of legitimacy, has produced his final report
indicating the site was occupied by Taino tribes - far later than
the Columbus era.  Keegan believes that archaeology alone
disqualifies Grand Turk, but what really does the job is the fact
that one cannot follow the Diario from there to Cuba.  The third
and largest of the Columbus islands, Fernandina, is entirely
missing from the Grand turk track.
     The same problems exist for Watling, the choice of the late
Samuel Eliot Morison, who published his opinion in 1942, and of
his surviving colleagues who defend it.  Here it is the second
island - named by Columbus Santa Maria and described as measuring
fifteen by thirty miles - that is missing.  In its place is tiny
Rum Cay, with a seven-mile coast that Columbus presumably took
six hours to sail in fine weather.  Also missing along the track
are other geographical features described in the log - an Indian
village on Fernandina west of Santa Maria, a shallow harbor that
boats could enter, an east-west coast.  The track also requires
the ships to sail for sixty miles, a feat unmentioned in the log,
in weather so bad that Columbus says he is going to anchor.
     The sound reasoning of Gustavus V. Fox (probably the best
mind ever to address the question), when he first identified the
landfall island a century ago, still applies: "The track which I
have laid down [from Samana Cay] was chosen because it appears to
be the only one that can be made to fit the courses, distances,
and descriptions in the logbook."
     That most cogent of arguments still applies, both ways; The
track as given in the Diario, when run backwards from a known
point in the Ragged Islands, leads only to Samana Cay.
     Last years, some poor soil (or wise P.T. Barnum) came along
(or was solicited) and believed the Coin-Dyson opera to the
extent of paying for them to sail the mid-Atlantic in a
reconstructed Nina in June 1990.
     It is not clear why they chose the wrong month to make the
sail, unless to meet media production schedules; nor, from the
track they took, is it clear why they did it at all except to
serve as a platform for photography.  The voyage did nothing to
bolster Coin's theory, as the new Nina crossed many miles south
of the track proposed for Columbus.  This is explained in a
single cryptic phrase in a map caption: She was "forced southward
by heavy swells."  Apparently no one on board could sail well
enough to get her back on the right course.
     Although much of the first chapter is given over to the
launching of this 1990 voyage, we are not told until the
concluding sentences of the book, two hundred pages later, where
they finally fetched up - at St. Bartholomew's in the Virgin
Islands, six hundred miles from Grand Turk.
 
Did Columbus have a secret map? (kind of)
 
     There is a legitimate reason for believing that Columbus had
extra help on his voyage - the much-debated chart drawn by the
Italian scientist Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli.
     Dyson claims that Columbus could never reveal that he had a
secret map showing the western way to the Indies to the king of
Portugal, because "the King would have immediately claimed it for
Portugal and probably had Columbus executed for stealing it."
     Turns out the king and Columbus already had a map showing
how to cross the Atlantic to the Indies, at the latitude of the
Canaries that Columbus eventually used in 1492, and giving in
fact the proper mileage from the Canaries to the first landfall.
      At some time in the late 1470s or early 1480s, Columbus was
shown a letter that had been written by Toscanelli to a friend of
his named Fernao Martins (variously Hernando-Fernando-Fernam
Martins-Martinez-Martinz), a canon of the cathedral in Lisbon who
had the ear of the king, Alfonso V.  The letter came in response
to a request from Alfonso that Toscanelli put in writing some of
the provocative ideas that Martins had been passing on. 
Toscanelli obliged on June 25, 1474, and his ideas read thusly:
 
     One could sail west to the Indies instead of going all the
way around Africa, and it would be a lot shorter than most people
think.  Furthermore, there were two places on the way - Antilia
(or the Isle of Seven Cities) and Cipangu (Japan) - where the
ships could be rested and outfitted for the final push to Cathay. 
He figured Antilia was about 2,500 miles out from Lisbon, and
Cipangu was another 2,500, with a final leg of 1,000 to Cathay.
     After obtaining or seeing a copy of the letter to Martins,
Columbus wrote directly to Toscanelli.  The latter responded
graciously with a copy of the Martins letter, a cover letter to
Columbus praising his plans and courage, and a chart.
     Oh, to have that chart!  Columbus carried something like it
on the first voyage.  He makes three references to it and shared
it with Martin Alonso Pinzon.
     Both Las Casas and Ferdinand testified that this chart was a
major influence on Columbus' thinking.  "This letter encouraged
the Admiral much to go on his Discover," says Ferdinand, and Las
Casas, who claimed to actually own the chart ("I, who have
written this history, have in my possession the navigational
chart"), believed that "his whole voyage was based on this
chart."
     There are those scholars who believe the whole Toscanelli
correspondence was faked for one reason or another, but most
modern doubters were quieted when a copy of the Toscanelli letter
was found bound into a book owned by Columbus.  The copy, in
Latin, is in Columbus' hand.
     Toscanelli and his chart are of course a thorn in the side
of Coin-Dyson, since one can't follow two secret maps to the
Indies.  First, Dyson misrepresents it: "The map ... showed the
distance to Asia to be about four thousand miles."  "Asia" in
this context is a nicety.  The chart actually showed a landfall
at Antilia after 2,400 miles (right where Columbus and Pinzon
were looking for it).  Then Dyson pooh-poohs it: "Much has been
made of this map by some historians but based as it was on pure
fantasy, it could have been of no practical use for navigation."
     Actually, the map was based on the latest and best
information that Toscanelli (d.1482) could retrieve from his
scientific friends, like Regiomontanus, and from conversations
with people like Niccolo de' Conti (d.1469), who had visited
China and "Giapone" (Japan). In terms of "pure fantasy," Dyson's
secret map wins hands down over the Toscanelli chart.
And as for being navigationally useful, Columbus managed to
follow it to America.