How I Rediscovered the ‘Lost Harbor of Christopher Columbus’

Modern Science Had Misplaced ‘Port Jackson’ in the Dominican Republic

Peter Swanson May 25

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Poring through historical records was an essential first step, but properly researching an anchorage required a boat with a depthsounder. CocoKite, the 28-footer I had hired, lacked a sounder, so I brought a nifty portable model, which transformed the tourist boat into a proper research vessel to probe the coastal waters of the Dominican Republic.

Before becoming a marine journalist, I had toiled for 20 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, a profession wired for a perverse combination of public service and personal poverty. I am also a history buff and a lifelong sailor, specializing in the Bahamas and Greater Antilles. My investigation into a forgotten seaport had the potential to help cruisers move down island more comfortably and safely—maybe even save someone’s life.

This professional trinity—journalist, history buff, sailor—was knocking along in tandem, as CocoKite thundered westward, parallel to the North Coast of the Samana Peninsula. At the key moment, native guide Francisco Paulino, a fisherman from a local fishing family centered our 28-footer between reefs breaking about 300 feet apart. Paulino pulled back the throttles and slipped the old outboards into neutral.

As we drifted and exhaust fumes rolled over the boat, I dipped the end of a pole into the water, enabling the attached transducer to transmit data to the handheld sonar display, which read 27. Twenty-seven feet was deep enough for a Navy frigate to pass through! Paulino throttled up and into Port Jackson we went.

As he nosed the center console across the placid harbor, the seabed deepened to 40 feet before it became shallow again. We approached to within a couple hundred feet of post-card pretty Jackson Beach, which was shaded by coconut palms. The sounder read 20 feet, a good spot to drop the hook.

Like Leonard Nimoy narrating a low-brow TV documentary, I declared our ragtag expedition a success. The CocoKite crew had rediscovered what I half jokingly had dubbed “the lost harbor of Christopher Columbus.”

I wondered how many passagemakers might have taken refuge in Port Jackson’s protected basin were its existence better known? Though Jackson is a familiar destination for tour operators ferrying vacationing foreigners to its secluded beach, thousands of cruisers sailed by over the decades, never knowing that shelter was nearby.

A friend of mine had investigated these waters decades ago. Bruce Van Sant is the quirky gringo author who wrote “A Gentleman’s Guide to Passages South: The Thorny Path to Windward,” in the 1980s, a decade after the stalwart cruisers of the 1970s began transiting Dominican waters en route from Florida to Puerto Rico and the Lesser Antilles. Van Sant’s book discussed the gnarly nature of Dominican waters in great detail.

The North Coast of the Domincan Republic has one of the world’s great hurricane holes at Luperon Bay, which is 88 nautical miles west of Port Jackson. The next decent refuge is 60 nautical miles east of Jackson and up into Samaná Bay. Various anchorages between Luperon and Samaná Bay are open to the north, exposed to thousands of miles of fetch over the North Atlantic Ocean.

When storms from as far away as the Azores send rollers into these semi-protected places, they become death traps for small craft. Those lonesome waters east of Luperon comprise the thorniest leg of the “thorny path” Van Sant wrote about. Bereft of good shelter, eastbound boats face relentlessly contrary trade winds, with waves and current also on the nose.

Christopher Columbus experienced danger in this region, having lost his flagship Santa Maria on a reef off the northern coast of Hispaniola. And yet he must have been feeling that his luck was changing when his remaining ships, Niña and Pinta, made way eastward from Luperon, benefitting from a favorable—and extremely rare—westerly breeze. The year was 1493, and the first Columbus expedition was just a few days from heading back to Spain.

Lookouts atop the rigging spied an island between two headlands against a rising mountain range. The low island capped a mass of coral reefs indicated by breaking waves. What caught the attention of these experienced seamen was the inky blue basin between the island and the beach, and the fact that a wide avenue of dark water indicated a five-fathom entrance.

It was deep and wide enough for a squadron of Spain’s biggest ships. Columbus named the harbor Puerto Santo, the Sacred Port, but he did not take his ships inside. Disinclined to squander his westerly breeze, Columbus piloted his little fleet right past the harbor, cracking along at eight knots.

Two centuries later, French pirates were thick as thieves around Hispaniola. They used the Samaná Peninsula as a place of rendezvous. Mostly they used the great bay on the south side of the peninsula as their base, but they would have been aware of the sheltered anchorage on the north side.

The participant in an 1840s social experiment involving transplanted former American slaves, a man named Jackson called the Columbus island after himself. The port became Port Jackson; the headland on its east side, Point Jackson, and the high hills behind, Jackson Mountain. Eventually, this port was used for commerce, shipping out coconuts and copra. Port Jackson was also an ideal place for ships to take on drinking water, from a gin-clear, spring-fed pool on the beach, which could be seen from the deck of CocoKite.

Now, about that island: While Cayo Jackson is referenced in historical records, it’s no longer present in Port Jackson.

Like mythological Atlantis, it sunk beneath the waves. That event occurred on August 4, 1946, when an earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter scale hit Samaná, spawning a 12- to 16-foot tsunami that inundated lowlands. More than 2,500 people were killed.

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Fifty-two acres of rock and scrubby foliage became a shallow reef sunk three to five feet under. No one told the cartographers, however. Cayo Jackson can still be found on tourist maps, government charts and derivative products from C-Map, Navionics and NV Charts, 80 years after its disappearance.

Van Sant told me about the time he went looking for Port Jackson. Charts and U.S. Navy Sailing Directions placed it behind a protective island, but Van Sant didn’t find the anchorage nor could anyone else because they were all looking for the island first. Another impediment was the fact that waters in the vicinity were poorly charted. With reefs all around, exploration without local knowledge was risky.

So, because of a longstanding charting error, modern science managed to misplace one of the first harbors in the New World documented by Europeans.

The loss is unfortunate because even with the island gone, Port Jackson still makes a pretty good anchorage, although my East Coast friends may be skeptical. They wonder how you can have all-around protection without being surrounded by land. The truth is, Port Jackson was never as good as Luperon Bay, which is surrounded not just by land but high ground.

Cayo a No-No

Even before the sinking of Cayo Jackson, the island was so low-lying that it never offered protection from north winds, only from ocean swells. But today, those swells break over a 52-acre reef that sits behind two miles of shallows ranging from just a few feet to 20 feet deep before the drop-off. Unlike their East Coast brethren, voyagers from the South Pacific appreciate this kind of shelter, many having anchored within the coral-ringed atolls of the South Seas.

Reef anchorages are better-than-nothing options for cruisers. To bolster that assertion, I ran it by weather router Chris Parker of Marine Weather Center in Lakeland, Florida. Parker said that as the water gets shallow, there is friction with the bottom, so waves get steep and then break. That dissipates a lot of the wave energy, so the waves are not as steep in the anchorage.

Patrick Florens, owner of CocoKite Tours, is a Frenchman who went native long ago. He was aboard his party barge the day we steered a course to Port Jackson. I asked Florens to begin our approach from Las Ballenas (Whale Rocks in English), which stand prominently about five miles to the east of the entrance. U.S. government sailing directions from 1918 and 1954 recommend using this prominent feature as a starting approach.

I told Florens that I wanted to test the accuracy of these directions. I learned they are not so useful anymore. As already mentioned, the principal point of reference is an island that is not there anymore. Old U.S. Government sailing directions also suggest taking bearings to a white patch on a cliffside. That wasn’t going to work either, because the white patch was gone. probably overgrown with foliage.

We decided to forgo the Navy way. Instead, Paulino took us his way instead. We then documented the approach from the east by taking soundings and recording GPS coordinates. That worked fine for the eastern approach.

The charts, as flawed as they are, suggest a second approach to the anchorage from the west with a controlling depth of 10 feet. But Paulino knew a different way and took CocoKite into deep water beyond the reefs. His route was indirect and difficult to explain. I asked if we could try to find the pass suggested by the charts, but by then it was too late. A hex nut had worked its way off the steering linkage, and the bolt fell into the water. The emergency repair was a bit sketchy, and we lost our appetite for exploration. Maybe next time, we all agreed.

As unlikely as it may seem, my quest to find Port Jackson began because the Dominican government opened a new highway along the Atlantic side of the Samaná Peninsula back in 2009. Driving on the Mountain Road a few years ago, I indulged my curiosity about the Dominican island with the Scots-Irish name.

I pulled the car over roughly abeam the GPS coordinates for Cayo Jackson, took a short hike, and there it was—not!

Instead, a greenish shape shimmered just below the surface. And so my mission began.

Columbus gets a bad rap nowadays, but I cannot help but appreciate him as the first European to take note of Porto Santo. His “discovery” happened on January 12, 1493, 462 years before I was born, on that same date. I like to think of the story of Port Jackson as a birthday gift paid forward by the Great Navigator himself.

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