The orthodox explanation of where Columbus first landed was carved in textbook stone more than forty years ago by the dean of Columbus historians, Samuel Elliot Morrison. Morrison declared incontrovertible the evidence that Columbus first set foot on Watling Island in the eastern Bahamas. But if the question were closed for Professor Morrison, now dead, it was not for numerous other students on nautical history.
For the last five years, the National Geographic 's Joseph Judge, has dispatched teams of historians, oceanographers, archaeologists and translators to find the true location and thereby to set straight the first footsteps of the American saga.
"The famous fleet of Columbus—the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria—made its first landfall and its landing in the new world in 1492 at a small island in the eastern Bahamas, named today, Samana Cay."
The basic problem in identifying Columbus' landing point, which he named San Salvador in 1492, is that he left no clear markings. Moreover, the log of Columbus' voyage now exists only in a transcription made by the Spaniard Bartolomay de las Casas, and many of the descriptions are either vague or use archaic terminology.
Professor Morrison had based has conclusions on a straightforward reading of the log. But he took no account of how Columbus' route would have been affected by constant ocean currents and winds. When the Geographic team took the same data and then adjusted them for the effect of wind and current, they arrived at Samana Cay, to the southeast of Watling Island. Then to collaborate their findings, they went to points further down on Columbus' voyage, then backtracked according to the log notations, and again found that they landed not on Professor Morrison's Watling Island, but on Samana Cay. Once on Samana, the team then returned to Columbus' log, to compare what they saw to Columbus' own visual description, recounted here by writer Judge in a film clip:
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