Where Columbus landed in 1492 is still disputed

Christopher Columbus first reached the Americas at about 2 a.m. on October 12, 1492, when Rodrigo de Triana, a sailor aboard the Pinta, sighted an island in the Bahamas that its Lucayan inhabitants called Guanahani. Columbus went ashore later that morning, claimed it for Castile and renamed it San Salvador. He thought he had reached the edge of Asia, about ten weeks after leaving Palos in August and five after his last stop in the Canaries.

The log adds a self-serving detail. At 10 p.m. the previous evening, it says, Columbus saw a light “like the light of a wax candle moving up and down,” too faint to call land; one of the two men he pointed it out to could not see it. The stakes were real. Ferdinand and Isabella had promised the first person to sight land an annuity of 10,000 maravedís, and Columbus had offered a silk jacket on top. By recording his own earlier glimpse, the Admiral put his claim on paper ahead of the sailor’s.

Why the landing island is still argued over

Scholars agree that Guanahani lies in the Bahamas, and on little else. Ten different islands have been put forward, out of only about 20 plausible candidates, along with more than 25 proposed routes for the rest of the voyage. Cat Island was suggested first, in 1625. Watling Island was proposed in 1793, won the name San Salvador after a dispute with Cat that began in 1926 and was settled by the Bahamas legislature, and had the support of historian Samuel Eliot Morison. National Geographic argued for Samana Cay in 1986.

The weak link is the source itself. Columbus gave his original log to Queen Isabella, and both it and the copy made for him are lost. What survives is a thirdhand manuscript by the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, full of erasures and margin notes. That is why even the famous sighting comes to us in the third person. Europeans had been here before: Norse sailors had reached North America around 500 years earlier.