Florida Scholar-Sailor Tracked Columbus and Came Up With His Own Theory

Samana Cay Was Likely ‘Island Two,’ Donald McGuirk Argued

Peter Swanson Oct 11

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San Salvador is the first place Christopher Columbus set foot in the Western Hemisphere, and we know this because the great 20th century sailor-historian Samuel Eliot Morison said so, and all contrary theories crumbled under scrutiny.

But the dude may have been wrong about the second island where Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria dropped anchor. Morison contended Island Two was Rum Cay. But Loose Cannon’s favorite sailor-schoolar, the late Donald McGuirk of Bradenton, Florida, begged to differ. McGuirk argued that it was actually Samana Cay.

By now some readers are probably thinking, “Who gives a flying farthing which cay came in second?” I could reply that a voyage which is still more consequential for civilization than the Moon landings deserves to be understood in granular detail. That probably would have been McGuirk’s position.

Forget Statues, Columbus Is Still the Most Consequential Sailor Ever Peter Swanson   ·   October 10, 2022 Read full story

But, hey, who am I kidding? I’ve liked the idea of Samana Cay ever since I read in an old Bahamas cruising guide about how someone in a Morgan Out Island 41 once rode out a hurricane behind Samana Cay’s fringing reef. I never made it there myself, but always thought it would be enormously satifisfying to anchor my own OI 41 there for a couple of nights.

(Another irrational attraction to McGuirk’s scholarship is the fact that the veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps named his 33-foot Southern Cross cutter Gooney Bird. That was the nickname for the C47 transport aircraft—my father flew in C47s throughout World War II and the Berlin Airlift.)

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McGuirk wrote a paper on the subject entitled, “Why Samana Cay is the Second Island Visited During Christopher Columbus’s Sail Through the Bahamas on his First Voyage to the New World,” which you can download below.

McGuirk investigation report is the kind of writing that would appeal to any nerd who is happiest at the intersection of history, geography and sailing.

Debated for centuries, most historians now accept San Salvador (previously Watling Island) Bahamas as the first “New World” island visited by Columbus in 1492.1 His course through the additional three Bahama Islands visited before reaching Cuba has received less critical attention. There are two reasons for this. First, the standard translation of Columbus’s log leaves few choices for the three islands beyond San Salvador. Second, the current and widely accepted course has the approval of Samuel Eliot Morison, a luminary in his field.2 He baptized the other three islands visited, as Rum Cay (Island Two), Long Island (Island Three), and a combination of Crooked Island and Fortune Island (Island Four).

Columbus’s log, transcribed by Bartolomé de las Casas, can be interpreted in more than one way when it talks about what happened after the fleet left San Salvador, according to McGuirk. One of the interpretations has Columbus bypassing Rum Cay en route to another island anchorage.

Also, as anyone who has sailed there can attest, Rum Cay is nowhere near 15 by 30 miles in size, yet these are the dimensions attributed to Island Two.

The Las Casas diary is often referred to as the only primary source for Columbus’ first voyage, but McGuirk contended that Juan de la Cosas map from around 1500 provided important clues, while perhaps meeting the definition of a primary source better than that of the Diario.”

Since Morison’s final word on this subject in 1974, three subsequent works have attempted to match current Bahama Island placenames with their original Taino counterparts. These works match Guanahani with current-day San Salvador,26 Samana with Samana Cay, Yumay (Yuma) with Long Island, and Someto (Samoet) with Crooked and Fortunate Island. The position of the unnamed island on the La Cosa map suggests Rum Cay.

The fact that the placename Samana appears on the la Cosa map, and a likely unnamed Rum Cay does not, suggests Samana Cay is Island Two, found after bypassing an unnamed Rum Cay.

Island Order: Morison Versus McGuirk

Here McGuirk makes a dead-reckoning argument:

On October 22, Columbus mentioned that he named the southwest cape of Island Three “Cabo Verde.” Had Columbus sailed west from Samana Cay to Long Island, this cape would have been precisely where Columbus would have arrived. On a Rum Cay approach to Long Island, Columbus never arrives at Cabo Verde.36 The cape doesn’t fit into Morison’s route.

If Rum Cay is Island Two, then Columbus must arrive at the north end of Long Island. Joseph Judge and the National Geographic Magazine have done an excellent job of recognizing the inadequate match of the Diario’s description of Fernandina with this location, while also demonstrating an excellent match of that geography with the south end of Long Island.

Support for Rum Cay is also debatable on the proposition that the diary transcriber kept mixing up similarly spelled compass points. “In all, the Las Casas transcription has twelve corrections of compass points. These corrections document Las Casas’s difficulties in transcribing sailing directions from a scribe’s copy,” McGuirk wrote.

The author goes on to note all manner of inconsistencies regarding times and distances, and I would invite anyone wishing to descend into these weeds, download McGuirk’s paper, which ends with:

Morison has always had a robust theory of Columbus’s route through the Bahama Islands. That theory, however, does have its inconsistencies. Ife’s translation has opened the possibility of an alternative route. The information above and the Bahama toponyms on the Juan de la Cosa map, a primary source of information, strongly suggest That Samana Cay is Columbus’s Island Two. The inconsistencies within the Diario will always hamper any attempt to recreate Columbus’s route. Any route envisioned by researchers will depend on which Diario information they accept and which they choose to ignore.

	Why Samana Cay Is The Second Island Visi… 282KB ∙ PDF file
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