The First Voyage Log

Columbus's log of the first voyage has not survived, although we do have a good abstract of it, written in the 1530's by Bartolome de las Casas. (The best English version of this work is Dunn & Kelley's 1989 transcription: see the bibliography. An earlier translation of the entire log can be found here.)

On the westward passage, Columbus kept two sets of distance figures in the log. According to Las Casas, this was done to allay the fears of the crew that they had sailed too far from Spain. In 1983, James E. Kelley suggested that the real reason for the two sets of figures was that Columbus was converting between Italian Leagues (of 2.67 nautical miles) and Portuguese Maritime Leagues (of 3.19 nautical miles). The two league measures differ by a ratio of 6-to-5, and it is significant that the two league figures in the log tend to cluster around just this ratio. In the table below, these two figures are listed as True and Reported leagues. I have also included my own corrections to Las Casas, listed as Reconstructed. The reason for these reconstructions can be found in my paper on Columbus and longitude.

The eastward passage below is based on a reconstruction by James E. Kelley, Jr., but with some corrections of my own.

A summary of the log during his explorations of the West Indies can be found in the section dealing with landfall clues.

The table below is adapted from "An analysis of the Homebound Leg of Columbus's First Voyage to America," copyright 1992 by James E. Kelley, Jr. and used by permission. Kelley's paper is item number KLWP890908 in The Working Papers of the Columbus Round Robin, compiled by David Henige and James E. Kelley, Jr., 1993 [Three reels of microfilm with introduction and index. Madison: University of Wisconsin Libraries, $45]. All distances are given in leagues.

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