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The Unknown Pilot Sails Again
| Article
# : |
18760 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
8,353 Words |
| Author
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Joseph Judge
Joseph Judge is senior associate editor emeritus of National
Geographic. Judge is the author of "Our Search for the True
Columbus Landfall," published in National Geogrphic's November
1986 issue, claiming Samana Cay as the site of Columbus'
landfall. |
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 demonstrable 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 tent 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 rote 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 facts as presented in the Dario, 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 water 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 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 Dario had been fiddled with. That insight in turn was based on his own experience in 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
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