Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (28 page)

In the other time-tested method, called dead reckoning, one simply takes a compass bearing, keeps track of time, judges the ship’s speed, and then plots the distance
and direction covered. Needless to say, dead reckoning cannot be very precise—especially when winds and currents complicate any determination of speed, and when (as on Columbus’s ships) sailors measure time by turning a sandglass every half hour! Columbus, by all accounts, was an unusually skilled and spectacularly successful dead reckoner, but the method still doesn’t allow any precise reconstruction
of his routing.

We are further hindered by a paucity of documents. Columbus’s original log, presented to Queen Isabella, has been lost. A copy, given to Columbus before his second voyage, has also disappeared. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican priest who spoke so eloquently for the lost cause of kindness, made a copy of Columbus’s second version—and our modern knowledge derives from this
document. Thus, we are using a copy of a copy as our “primary” text, and uncertainties therefore prevail on all crucial points.

The best possible source of evidence—artifacts and recorded histories kept by an unbroken line of original inhabitants—does not exist for another reason that motivated this essay. In the first case of New World genocide perpetrated by the Old, Spanish conquerors completely
wiped out the native Bahamians within twenty years of contact, despite (or rather, one must sadly say, enabled by) the warm and trusting hospitality shown to Columbus by the peaceful Tainos.

With so little data to constrain speculation, virtually all major Bahamian islands have been proposed as San Salvador, the site of Columbus’s first landfall. (The Turks and Caicos Islands, just to the southeast
of the Bahamas, form a politically separate entity. They are, however, geographically and ecologically continuous with the Bahamas, and therefore figure in this discussion as well.) The major contenders include Watling Island, Cat Island, Mayaguana, Samana Cay, Grand Turk, and several of the Caicos. Cat Island held an early advantage, and once even bore the name San Salvador in acknowledgment.
But, in 1926, the Bahamian government, persuaded by a growing consensus, transferred Columbus’s designation to Watling Island—the favored site, and Columbus’s name bearer ever since.

Two traditional sources of evidence favor Watling as San Salvador: correspondence of size and topography with the fairly detailed descriptions of Columbus’s log (as known by the Las Casas copy), and nautical tracing
of Columbus’s route for the rest of his first voyage, from San Salvador to other Bahamian islands, and finally to Cuba and Hispaniola. Samuel Eliot Morison’s “semiofficial” case, made in his 1942 classic,
Admiral of the Ocean Sea
, remains the standard expression of this favored hypothesis.

During the past twenty years, archaeology has provided a third source of evidence from excavations made
by Charles A. Hoffman and others at Long Bay, within sight of the favored location for Columbus’s landfall. (A good account of this work, and of virtually all else connected with the discussion of Columbus’s initial landing, may be found in the Proceedings of the 1986 San Salvador Conference on Columbus and His World, edited by Donald T. Gerace and published by the Bahamian Field Station on San Salvador.)
Along with native pottery and other Taino artifacts, several European objects were found, all consistent with Spanish manufacture at the right time, and all eminently plausible as items for trade—glass beads, metal buckles, hooks, and nails. One discovery exceeded all others in importance: a single Spanish coin of low value, known as a
blanca
—the standard “small change” of the times, and surely
the most common coin in circulation among Columbus’s men. Moreover, this particular
blanca
was only issued between 1471 and 1474, and no comparable, copper-based coin was minted again until 1497.

Of course, these finds do not positively identify San Salvador as the first landfall for two reasons: Columbus visited several other Bahamian islands on this voyage, and the local Tainos moved freely
among adjacent islands. In fact, three days after his first landing, and again on open waters, Columbus encountered a Taino in a canoe, carrying some beads and
blancas
received in trade on San Salvador.

Nonetheless, and all other things considered, the archaeological evidence supports the usual view that San Salvador has now been correctly identified. Still, everything cited so far relies upon
European impressions or artifacts. Wouldn’t we welcome some hard data from the other side for corroboration? How about one distinctive item of local history, either natural or cultural?

I do not mean to exaggerate the current uncertainty in this debate. Most experts seem satisfied that Columbus first landed on the island now called San Salvador by the Bahamian government. Nonetheless, several
dogged and knowledgeable opponents still advocate their alternatives with gusto, and the issue remains vigorously open. I recently spent a week on San Salvador, where I sifted through all the evidence and visited all the sites. I found no reason for dissatisfaction with the conventional view. Nonetheless, if only because we prefer near certainty to high probability, I write this essay to announce
that I could truly resolve any remaining doubt about Columbus’s first landfall if only the good admiral had added one little activity to the usual drill of kissing the ground, praising God, raising the flag, claiming sovereignty, and trading with the locals. If Christopher Columbus had only picked up (and properly labeled, of course) a single shell of my favorite animal, the land snail
Cerion
—and they are so common that he was probably kneeling on one anyway!—I would know for sure where he had landed.

No one can be objective about his own children, but
Cerion
truly ranks as a natural marvel, and an exemplar of evolution for a particular reason well illustrated by its potential utility for identifying San Salvador. In shell form,
Cerion
may be the most protean land snail in the world—and
evolutionists thrive on variation, the result and raw material of biological change.
Cerion
ranges in size from dwarfs of 5 millimeters to giants more than 70 millimeters in length (for folks wedded to good old ways, 25.4 millimeters make an inch)—and in shape from pencil-thin cylinders to golf balls.

Naturalists have named more than six hundred species from
Cerion
’s two major geographic centers
in Cuba and the Bahama Islands. Most of these names are technically invalid because members of the respective populations can interbreed, but the designations do record a striking biological reality—that so many local populations of
Cerion
have evolved unique and clearly recognizable shell forms. In particular, nearly every Bahamian island can be identified by a distinctive kind of
Cerion.
Thus,
bring me a single shell, and I can usually tell you where you spent your last vacation.

Marine species, by contrast, generally maintain much larger and more-continuous populations. Broader patterns of variation preclude any pinpoint definition of island coastlines (at Bahamian scale) by distinctive shapes or sizes of clams, snails, corals, or other oceanic forms. Terrestrial species, therefore,
offer our only real hope for distinguishing islands by unique biological inhabitants. Individual Bahamian islands might house an endemic insect, or perhaps a plant, but
Cerion
surely provides the best biological marker for specifying particular locales. Insects and plants are less distinctive and harder to preserve; but if Columbus had just slipped a nearly indestructible
Cerion
shell into his
vest pocket, his trusty scabbard, or his old kit bag, then we would know. Moreover,
Cerion
must have been the first terrestrial zoological object to enter Columbus’s field of vision in the New World (unless a lizard darted across his path, or a mosquito drew first Caucasian blood)—though I cannot guarantee that the Admiral of the Ocean Sea had eyes to see at this scale. For
Cerion
lives right
at the coastline in large populations. As they say, you can’t miss ’em. And all putative landing sites on San Salvador sport large and obvious populations of my favorite snail.

While I was on San Salvador attending a biennial conference on Caribbean geology at the Bahamian Field Station, I played extensive hooky to do a survey of the local
Cerion.
San Salvador houses two major species of
Cerion
—a large, robust, whitish shell, pointed at the top, and found on promontories on the windward east coast; and a smaller, ribbier, brownish shell, barrel-shaped at the top, and found all along the leeward west coast (and most of the island interior). A single shell of either form can easily be distinguished from the characteristic
Cerion
of all other favored sites for Columbus’s initial landfall.

Cerion piratarum
, Mayaguana’s species, belongs to the same basic group as the east-coast
Cerion
of San Salvador, but is bigger, whiter, entirely different in shape, and quite distinct from the San Salvadorian form. Similarly,
Cerion regina
of the Turks and Caicos belongs to the same general division within
Cerion
, but could not be confused with the species on San Salvador. Samana Cay, perhaps
the leading alternative landing site of recent years, also houses a large and distinctive
Cerion
, easily separated from anything living on San Salvador. As a single possible exception, I confess that I could not, from one specimen, unambiguously separate the east-coast windward species of San Salvador from
Cerion fordii
, a species restricted to a few small regions of Cat Island. Columbus almost
surely landed on the leeward west coast of San Salvador, however, and the
Cerion
at this site cannot be confused with the local species of any other proposed landing place. (
Cerion eximium
, the leeward, west-coast species of Cat Island, is longer, smoother, thinner-shelled, and more mottled in color than the leeward form of San Salvador.)

Erection of monuments at putative landing sites has been
something of a cottage industry on San Salvador for more than a century. Three major markers now adorn the island, each located amid a large population of
Cerion
(and all shown in the preceding photographs). The
Chicago Herald
built the first monument in 1891, in preparation for the four-hundredth-anniversary celebrations of Columbus’s landing and the great Chicago Columbian exposition, held a
year late, in 1893. This monument, constructed largely of exotic stones and featuring a limestone globe set within the base of an obelisk, is now eroding away on the largely inaccessible promontory of Crab Cay (a two-mile walk from the nearest path, along a beautiful beach, but then up a narrow and treacherous slope). The monument sits amid one of the densest
Cerion
populations on San Salvador.
I don’t think that anyone would now advocate this reefy, windward site as a conceivable landing place (though the cliff might have reflected moonlight for Rodrigo’s first sight of land)—yet the monument reads: “On this spot Christopher Columbus first set foot upon the soil of the New World. Erected by The Chicago Herald. June, 1891.”

The other two monuments are located a mile or two apart on
more plausible landing sites of the leeward west coast—both among the extensive and distinctive
Cerion
populations of this region. The second monument, placed beside an earlier obelisk erected by a yachtsman in 1951, anticipates the quincentenary of 1992 and celebrates a Japanese voyage of hope and rediscovery:

The plaque on the “official” monument, a cross erected
in 1954 on Long Bay, within site of the excavation that yielded the late-fifteenth-century coin, simply reads: “On or near this spot, Christopher Columbus landed on the 12th of October, 1492. Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison, USNR.” The base contains yet another message of reconciliation:

And so we reach the crux of all the tension, all the triumph and tragedy, all the drama of this great historical tale—however illuminated or alleviated by a little side story about a distinctive land snail. We must not carp. Columbus opened a new world, and began a process that altered human history
in a permanent and fundamental way. He was a brilliant and courageous sailor, and his accomplishments merit all the messages of hope and fortitude proclaimed in unison by the monuments of San Salvador. The messages are therefore “true” in this narrow sense—but ever so partial, and therefore misleading as well.

As I read Columbus’s log, I could thrill to his accomplishments, but I also felt waves
of revulsion at two persistent themes that never find expression on ceremonial tablets, but also set the pathways of later history. First, his lust for gold, his almost single-minded search for the currency that would justify his endeavor and all future exploitation. On San Salvador, he noticed small gold rings in the noses of some Taino natives, and he persistently inquired about the source.
He went from island to island, looking for mines, and thinking that he would soon encounter either the fabled golden isle of Cipangu (Japan), or the rich courts of the grand Khan in Cathay (China). As he visited progressively more powerful caciques (local chiefs), he found more and more gold, but never a source area—and (obviously) never the rich and fabled civilizations of eastern Asia. Finally,
and tragically for the local people, he did discover a source of gold on Hispaniola—and his kinsmen built the mines that precipitated the enslavement and genocide of the Tainos, and the total depopulation of the Bahamas.