The History of Early Dead Reckoning and - New World Explorers

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in current academic and lay literature on the subject. The continuing controversy over the true landfall of Columbus in the Bahamas and the true landfall of Ponce de Leon on the shores of Florida. Both Columbus and Ponce de Leon left detailed logs of their voyages giving accurate navigational data that can be followed by a knowledgeable navigator to accurately trace their track from the departure point to the destination. Yet historians in their study of these logs have been unable to agree on their landfall sites and their conclusions vary hundreds of miles from the actual landfall site clearly indicated in the logs. The basic reason for this wide disagreement on the landfall sites is a misunderstanding and a misinterpretation of the navigational data in the logs because the most widely published academic historians in the discipline lack meaningful expertise in fifteenth and sixteenth-century navigation and seafaring methodology. . The location of the landfall of Columbus in the Bahamas has generated the most controversy, in some cases more emotional than rational, spurred on by the recent Columbus Quincentennial Celebration. This controversy started in the eighteenth-century when Juan Bautista Munoz in writing the official history of Spain s overseas empire named Watlings/San Salvador in the central Bahamas as the Indian island of Guanahani, where Columbus first landed in the New World. Munoz was followed by a spate of historians who named nine different islands ranging for hundreds of miles through the Bahamas and Turks islands. These different views with the date and the island proposed are as follows: -- Munoz (1779) Watlings/San Salvador; Navarrete (1825) Grand Turk; Irving (1828) Cat Island; Gibbs (1846) Grand Turk; Becher (1856) Watlings/San Salvador; Varnhagen (1864) Mayaguana; Fox (1880) Samana Cay; Murdock (1884) San Salvador; McElroy (1941) San Salvador; Morison (1942) San Salvador; Gould (1943) Conception Island; Verhoog (1947) South Caicos; Weems (1950) South Caicos; Link (1958) South Caicos; Fuson (1961) South Caicos; Power (1983) Grand Turk; Molander (1981) Egg Island; Fuson (1986) Grand Turk; Judge (1986) Samana Cay; Fuson (1987) Samana Cay; Peck (1992) San Salvador; Mitchell (1992) Conception Island; Keegan (1992) San Salvador; and Pickering (1994) Plana Cays. All of these widely different views are based on interpretation of the navigational data in the same source document, - Bartolome de Las Casas s summary of Columbus s log. The reason for the widely different conclusions is not due to inaccurate data in Columbus s log, but due to a misreading and misinterpretation of that data. And one of the primary reasons that fuels the misinterpretation is the mind-set among historians that early dead reckoning navigation was inherently inaccurate, therefore the logs of the navigators were inaccurate. 12
Figure 2 Chart of Columbus s 1492 voyage: The perceived track, as plotted and recorded in the log, is shown as a dotted line with an X at day s end.. The actual track over the bottom, as corrected for fifteenth-century magnetic variation, Columbus s Genoese mile and nautical mile differential, and effect of the ocean currents, is shown as a solid line with a dot at day s end. This chart graphically illustrates why historians wrongly conclude that Columbus s log is inaccurate, since the uncorrected (or improperly corrected) track plotted directly from the data in the log (dotted line) ends a considerable distance northeast of any possible island landfall. When corrected for influencing factors, - unknown to Columbus, - the data in the log is then revealed as accurate, and leads to San Salvador as the landfall island in his 1492 discovery voyage. From Peck, Cristoforo Colombo - God s Navigator. It is beyond the scope of this study to give a dialectic analysis of each proposed landfall site and provide an argument to eliminate those with no merit and then an argument to support the San Salvador site. But such a study does exist in available publications: Cristoforo Colombo - God s Navigator, (1993), and in Rethinking the Columbus Landfall Problem, Terrae Incognitae, Vol. 28, (1996). The empirical reconstructed track of Columbus which substantiates San Salvador as the landfall island, contained in these publications, is graphically portrayed in Figure 2. The landfall and landing site of Juan Ponce de Leon on the shore of Florida has produced a controversy similar to that of the Columbus landfall and for the same reasons. Anton de Alaminos was Ponce de Leon s pilot (navigator) and his navigational data for the voyage is contained in Antonio de Herrera s account of the voyage. Herrera s account, which is the only source giving substantial details of the voyage, is in his, Historia General de los Castellanos en las Islasi Tierra Firma del Mar Oceano, published around 1601. There are several English translations of Herrera s account available, but the latest and best of these is that by James E. 13
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