V 
Washington 25, D.C. 
ne wT" release date 
Tuesday afternoon, July 12, 1955 
Washington, D. C., July 12,^95)5 • -—Christopher Columbus first sailed to the 
New World by a map. 
It was a chart of the Atlantic with the "Spice Islands," Japan, and the 
continent of Asia on its western side. Curiously enough, it was not a bad repre- 
sentation of the West Indies, Cuba, and the eastern shore of North America, con- 
sidering that the man who drew it was working entirely from conjecture and vague 
rumors. He was the Florentine physician and cosmographer Paolo del Toscanelli, 
who had sent his map to the discoverer of the New World 18 years before the first 
momentous voyage. 
A map showing the actual journey of Columbus through the Bahamas is a feature 
of an exhibit opened recently at the U. S. National Museum, Smithsonian Institu- 
tion, illustrating with original materials Indian life among the historic tribes 
of Latin America. A notable part of the exhibit is a reconstruction of a Lucayan- 
Arawak village on the present Long Island in the Bahamas, called Fernandina Island 
by Columbus. The settlement, one of those described in some detail in the dis- 
coverer's journal, was on approximately the site of the present small village of 
Burnt Ground. 
The reconstruction was made on the basis of Columbus's description and on the 
archeological work of the Ernest N. May-Smithsonian expedition of 19U7 under the 
direction of Herbert W. Krieger, Smithsonian curator of ethnology. Before direct- 
ing this reconstruction. Museum ethnologists made an extensive study of all rec 
ords available from the late 15>th and early 16th centuries. 
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