nineteenth century, had selected Grand Turk island as 

 Columbus's San Salvador. Washington Irving, soon after, 

 in the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, sited 

 Cat island as the first landfall, while others had selected 

 Watling and Atwood islands. Of course, the variety of 

 choices had resulted in the selection of completely differ- 

 ent paths which the Santa Maria might have sailed 

 through the Bahamas before her tragic end on an un- 

 known reef off the north shore of Hispaniola. 



None of these earlier writers had ever visited these 

 Bahama waters. Their theories had been evolved only 

 from reading Columbus's Journal and from a study of the 

 very unreliable charts of the centuries following his dis- 

 covery. Captain Verhoog, on the other hand, had the ad- 

 vantage of having sailed these same waters, although 

 from the high deck of a fast-moving steamer. And Dr. 

 Morison had made a special voyage from Spain and later 

 through the Bahamas, where he had traced out the course 

 which he believed Columbus had followed, checking each 

 leg of the route with the Journal. 



Here again there was much chance for error, for 

 there are no charts in existence today of the track of the 

 original voyage; and the early maps of this area were 

 grossly inaccurate, the islands being charted in most un- 

 realistic positions, their names bandied back and forth in 

 a welter of confusion. 



Furthermore, we learned, Columbus's Journal as it 

 exists today is not the original but a rendition from the 

 original made by Las Casas in his Hisforia de las Indias 

 many years later, in which he abridged most of the original 

 log, quoting in detail only the day of the first landfall and 

 the following twelve days. Las Casas condensed all other 

 entries, and recorded them in such a way that references 

 to Columbus are generally in the third person. 



142 Sea Diver 



