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Abstract:
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An article in the November 1986 National Geographic magazine examined the
question of Columbus's first landfall in the Americas. The author, Luis Marden, was
the first to quantitatively include the effects of the winds and currents in reconstructing
the transoceanic portion of the voyage. There seemed, however, to be two major
weaknesses in his analysis. First, the leeway effect on the ship by the wind was
ignored for that portion of the voyage west of 40W, the whole second half of the
voyage. Second, currents from pilot charts were used with the corresponding speed
determined by the prevailing current. We sought to reanalyze the track using the
leeway effect for the whole transatlantic track and using more appropriate average
vector velocities of the current. Using climatological winds and currents we found
the island of San Salvador (Watling Island) to be the most likely site of the first
landfall of Columbus. This paper discusses the effects of wind, current, leeway, and
magnetic variation on the determination of the landfall. |