FOREWORD 



When Columbus stepped ashore on Guanahani and renamed it San 

 Salvador on that portentous day of October 12, 1492, he could not 

 have dreamed of the confusion he was creating. He could not have 

 guessed that the discovery was to be traced dozens of times by 

 scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries in as many places. Practically 

 every island in the Bahamas has been nominated to tbe honors of 

 first landfall. 



In 1958 the Smithsonian Institution published A New Theory on 

 Columbus's Voyage through the Bahamas, by Edwin A. and Marion 

 C. Eink. 1 It suggested that Columbus had in fact landed on the Grand 

 Caicos. This paper and others revived the landfall question which had 

 lain dormant for a considerable period of time. As a result, Mrs. Ruth 

 Wolper, a sometime resident of Watling Island, who has had a long 

 interest in the island and who has established there a museum on 

 its history, decided on some field tests to confirm the theory that 

 Watling was indeed the landing place of Columbus, as Admiral 

 Morison had concluded in his Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Her tests 

 centered around the light which was supposed to have been seen 

 from the Santa Maria at about 10 o'clock the night before the land- 

 fall. Admiral Morison had concluded that the light must have been 

 a hallucination. Mr. and Mrs. Link concluded that it must have been 

 on the northern tip of Turks Island, 4 hours' sailing time from the 

 beaches of Grand Caicos. In the paper presented here Mrs. Wolper 

 gives an account of the test which she believes proves that \\ atling 

 Island is in truth San Salvador. 



It is perhaps appropriate to quote from the Foreword which I wrote 

 for the Links' paper : "In publishing this monograph the Smithsonian 

 Institution of course takes no sides in the major problems con- 

 sidered." It wishes only to assist in making available to interested 

 scholars this new theory to explain the light seen before Columbus's 

 landfall. 



MENDEL L. PETERSON 



Head Curator, Department of Armed Forces History 



Museum of History and Technology 



Smithsonian Institution 



1 Smithsonian Misc. Coll.. vol. 135. No. 4, January 20. 1958. 



