Guanahaní (meaning "small upper waters land") was the Lucayan name of an island in the Bahamas that was the first land in the New World sighted and visited by Christopher Columbus' first voyage, on 12 October 1492. It is a bean-shaped island that Columbus called San Salvador. Guanahaní has traditionally been identified with Watlings Island, which was officially renamed San Salvador Island in 1925 as a result, but modern scholars are divided on the accuracy of this identification and several alternative candidates in and around the southern Bahamas have been proposed as well.
Primary sources
Letter from Columbus himself Upon his return to Spain in the spring of 1493, Columbus wrote a letter to Luis de Santangel, one of his patrons at the Royal Court of Castile. The letter was printed widely and translated into many languages, spreading the news of the discovery throughout Europe. In the letter, Columbus mentions Guanahani as the name of the first island he discovered, but provides no other details. Nevertheless, this single mention in a widely printed letter would have been enough to make the name Guanahani widely known at an early date.
Map of Juan de la Cosa
Juan de la Cosa was the owner and master of the Santa María and as such sailed with Columbus on the first voyage. He was also a cartographer, and in 1500 de la Cosa drew a map of the world which is widely known as the earliest European map showing the New World. The Caribbean portion of the map shows Cuba and Hispaniola clearly, and a much more confused rendering of the Bahamas. Nevertheless, Guanahani is drawn in the Bahamas in a form that appears to show a group of islets rather than a single island, lying due north of the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, in the central part of the Bahamas islands chain.
Diario
Columbus' so-called log, more properly referred to as the Diario, is an abstract made by Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish monk and friend of the Columbus family, probably sometime in the 1540s.
When Columbus returned to Spain after his first voyage, he reported to the royal court at Barcelona and presented his original log to the Spanish sovereigns. Queen Isabella ordered that the log be copied. The original soon disappeared, but the so-called 'Barcelona copy' was returned to Columbus prior to his second voyage and was in his possession at the time of his death in 1506. It then passed to his son Fernando and remained in his vast library for many years. At some point, Las Casas obtained the Barcelona copy and made the abstract now called the Diario. Although most of the Diario is written in the third-person of Las Casas, nearly all of that portion dealing with Columbus' movements in the Bahamas is in the first person of Columbus himself, and is (according to Las Casas) a direct quote from the Barcelona copy.
The Barcelona copy disappeared late in the 16th century, but Las Casas' Diario was discovered intact in 1795 by Ferdinand de Navarette and published 30 years later. The Diario remains the most authoritative and detailed account of Columbus' movements and activities on the first voyage.
Biography by Sebastian LaFrance and Fernando Colón In 1571, a biography of Christopher Columbus, written in Italian, was published in Venice. The book was a translation of a Spanish manuscript written by Columbus' second son, Fernando Colón, between 1537 and 1539. The Spanish manuscript eventually was translated into Italian and published by Alfonso Ulloa, a Spaniard making his living in Venice as a professional translator.
It is clear from the context that Fernando must have been working from the Barcelona copy when he wrote the portion of the biography describing the first voyage, as many details in the biography agree precisely with the Diario. In that sense, the primary utility of the biography is as a validity check on the Diario, a test which vindicates Las Casas in many respects. However, there are a few descriptions in the biography that are not already in the Diario. Most importantly, the biography asserts that Guanahani was fifteen leagues (45 miles) long, which seems contrary to Columbus' implication in the Diario that he had seen the entire island on a single day's boat trip.
Description of San Salvador/Guanahani Columbus calls the island "very flat and with very green trees",Dunn & Kelley 10r21-22 which is true for all of the islands proposed by historians. His next statement is more problematic. He says Guanahani has "muchas aguas y una laguna en medio muy grande"Dunn & Kelley 10r23-24 – many waters and a very large laguna in the middle (or "in between"). The word laguna creates many problems. It is uncertain whether it means lagoon or pond. In any case, most of the proposed islands have either a lagoon or a pond; only East Caicos lacks one.
On 14 October, Columbus made a boat trip to "the other part, which was the eastern part"Dunn & Kelley 10v9-10 of Guanahani. Therefore, he went the length of the island in a north-northeast direction. This is possible only at Plana Cays, Conception and Egg, and to a very minor extent at Samana Cay. Columbus noticed a reef that completely surrounded the island. All proposed islands have a reef, but the ones on Cat and Watling's do not completely surround the island. Between the reef and the island was a harbor "large enough to store all ships of Christendom." This could easily have been an exaggeration. The harbor on Egg is definitely too small, although it is fairly appropriate for the impressive harbor at the neighboring islet of Royal Island, which could have been considered part of the same larger island he named "San Salvador" (the other "part, which is the eastern part"). Columbus went on land and saw "a piece of land, that looked like an island, but actually wasn't one." This is difficult to track, because it may have become a real island in the past 500 years.
One Island or Two?
One question in dispute is whether Guanahani was one island or more than one as proposed by Keith Pickering, an independent researcher who did an exhaustive analysis of where Columbus first made landfall. Pickering made the novel suggestion that Guanahani appeared to be two islands and not one on the De la Cosa map, though he also noted that other researchers, including Jim Kelley, hypothesized loss of pigmentation on the map. Pickering never documented a visit to the Naval Museum in Madrid, Spain, where the De la Cosa map is on display to verify this hypothesis. A subsequent researcher, Graham Balch, observed the De la Cosa map in person and produced photographic evidence in line with Jim Kelley's assertion showing not only that Guanahani, in person and with better photographic equipment, appears to be one island, but that other islands depicted with the same ink color as Guanahani also showed similar loss of pigment patterns in the oxhide parchment.
Evidence from the Diario supports one island instead of two, but not conclusively. Columbus notes, "This island is rather large and very flat." But the next day he writes that he went along the coast "to see the other side, which was on the other side to the east"; and to explore that eastern part, he used a boat rather than walking. The use of a boat to reach the eastern part could be due to distance or there being separate islands unreachable by foot.
Transatlantic track The first way to locate Guanahani is to follow the distances and directions Columbus gave in his log. This procedure is difficult because of the uncertainties in knowing the length of Columbus' league, the speed and direction of ocean currents, and the exact direction his magnetic compass would have pointed in 1492.
John McElroyMcElroy, John W. (1941) The Ocean Navigation of Columbus on His First Voyage. The American Neptune, I 209-240. was one of the first to attempt this in 1941, using a speculative magnetic chart for the year 1500 and currents from pilot charts. His vast overrun in distance was corrected by a fudge factor, leaving his endpoint in the vicinity of Watling's Island. This result was substantially confirmed by Doug Peck's sailing voyagePeck, Douglas T. (1993) Christoforo Colombo, God's Navigator, Columbus, WI: Columbian Publishers. of 1991.
In 1986, Luis MardenMarden, Luis. (1986) The First Landfall of Columbus. National Geographic, 170 (November) 572-577. of the National Geographic Society applied currents to the first half of the voyage (but not the second half) and determined Samana Cay as the most probable landfall. In 1992, Goldsmith and RichardsonGoldsmith, Roger A. and Philip L. Richardson, (1992). Numerical Simulations of Columbus' Atlantic Crossings. Woods Hole Oceanog. Inst. Tech. Rept., WHOI-92-14, February 1992. used vector average currents (rather than prevailing currents) along with an updated magnetic field, and found a track that ended in the vicinity of Grand Turk Island. In 2004, Keith PickeringPickering, Keith A. The Transatlantic Tracks of Columbus. Society for the History of Discoveries lecture, Cody, Wyoming September 11, 2004 applied magnetic declinations from a more modern source and found a track that ended in the vicinity of the Plana Cays.
Light seen on the evening preceding the discovery At 10 p.m. on 11 October Columbus saw a light "like a small wax candle that rose and lifted up".Dunn & Kelley 8v7-8 He pointed it out to other people on board, some of whom were able to see the light, while others did not. The actual landfall was about 35 miles from the location Columbus saw the light, so if taken that the light was from a ground-based source, then it could not have been from Guanahani, but must have been from another island farther east. For the Plana Cays theory, the light would have been on Mayaguana. For Conception, it could have been on Cat Island, Watlings Island, or Rum Cay. For Caicos, it could have been on Grand Turk. For Providenciales, it could have been North Caicos. For Cat Island, it could have been on Watlings Island, and for Lignum Vitae Cay it could have been Eleuthera Island. The Watling's, Grand Turk, and Egg Island theories have no ready explanation.
Inter-island track
Besides the transatlantic track, the other important method for determining the location of Guanahani is the inter-island track, which can be traced either forward (from Guanahani to Cuba) or backward (from Cuba to Guanahani). Given the numerous descriptions of courses, distances, and directions in the log, this method seems more likely to pinpoint the location, and has been by far the method most frequently used by historians.
It was common practice among 20th-century historians to refer to the various Bahamian islands visited by Columbus by Roman numerals to avoid confusion: Island I being Guanahani, Island II being the second island visited by Columbus (which he named Santa María de la Concepción); followed by Island III (named Fernandina by Columbus) and Island IV (called Samoete by the Indigenous inhabitants and renamed Isabela by Columbus).
Following these four islands, Columbus next visited a string of seven or more islands in a line running north–south (which historians generally agree must be the modern Ragged Island, Bahamas) before landing on the north coast of Cuba. A successful inter-island track must therefore navigate from Guanahani to the Ragged Islands in a way that fits the descriptions of the log without serious infidelity. Strictly speaking this is impossible, as there are a few places where the log seems to contradict itself.
Island II Leaving Guanahani late on 14 October, Columbus said "I saw so many islands I did not know how to decide which one I would go to first".Dunn & Kelley 11r13-14 Aiming for the largest, he estimated its distance by eye at five leagues, while other islands were both nearer and farther than that.