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In Quest of the True Columbus
By Jay Mathews
The Washington Post
October 13, 1986, p. A1
'Scientists Hope to Settle 4 Cities' Claims of Having Explorer's Remains'
Confronting a mystery that has embroiled four cities on two
continents, a team of U.S. scientists is preparing to launch a
high-tech search for the true remains of Christopher Columbus.
The effort, begun in earnest three years ago by a California
anthropologist, has produced heartbreak, diplomatic intrigue and
a taste of East-West conflict. The prize is a share of the glory
during the international celebration of the 500th anniversary,
now only six years away, of Columbus' landing in America.
In death as in life, the celebrated admiral was quite a
traveler. For centuries after he died in Valladolid, Spain, his
body remained such an object of political and family contention
and underwent so many reported sea voyages that no one is quite
sure anymore where it is.
Those claiming to have some part of Columbus' remains
include not only Seville, Spain--which allegedly acquired them
after they had been in the Caribbean for 357 years--but also
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Havana and Genoa, Columbus'
Italian birthplace.
On this sunny campus of the University of California at
Irvine, at the far reaches of the old Spanish conquests that
Columbus initiated, a soft-spoken associate professor of social
ecology named Jonathon E. Ericson has hatched a plot to pin the
admiral down for good.
The plan involves not only Ericson's work analyzing the
ratio of different strontium isotopes in teeth, but help from a
group of other Americans who work in forensic anthropology and
analysis of nuclear and mitochondrial DNA.
Ericson, 44, whose doctorate is in anthropology, suffered a
stomach-churning setback in 1985 when diplomatic maneuvering
forced him to cancel a crucial trip to examine the remains in
Santo Domingo. He speaks cautiously now, but Dominican and
Spanish authorities seem to be warming to his idea again, and he
has not lost any of his enthusiasm.
"The people of the United States, as tourists and as a
people, have the greatest interest in the authentication of
Columbus' remains, and they have a right to know," he said.
The idea first came to him in 1980, when Peruvian
archeologist Hugo Ludena suggested that Ericson's work with
strontium samples might help settle the longstanding dispute over
Columbus.
According to biographer Samuel Eliot Morison, Columbus died
May 20, 1505, in Valladolid. His son, Diego, moved the body from
a church there to a monastery chapel in Triana, now part of
Seville, in 1509. His brother, Bartholomew, and Diego were
buried there.
In 1541, in accordance with Diego's last wishes, both his
and his famous father's remains were placed in small lead caskets
and shipped to Santo Domingo, where they were interred in the
cathedral, the oldest in the New World.
When Spain ceded Santo Domingo to France in 1795, a Spanish
descendant of Columbus, the Duke of Veragua, asked that Columbus'
body be taken to Cuba so it would not be at the mercy of hated
French republicans. The excavators assumed that bones and ashes
they found in a stone vault were the right ones, and shipped them
to the cathedral in Havana.
After Cuba won independence from Spain in 1898, Morison
said, the coffin was taken to Seville, where it is now displayed
in the local cathedral, raised high off the floor on the shoulders of four intricately sculptured knights. In a good-will
gesture, the Spanish sent some of the ashes to Genoa, where, the
mayor told Ericson, they are kept locked in a city hall vault.
Spanish and Italian authorities support the view that
Columbus' remains, or some portion of them made the long journey
to the New World and back.
A research paper sent to Ericson by Eusebio Leal Spengler,
official Havana city historian, ignores the reported trop back to
Spain and says city authorities successfully resisted later
efforts to move the remains back to Santo Domingo.
Morison argued that the 1795 workmen dug up the wrong
remains and that Columbus' bones never left Santo Domingo. In
1877, he noted, workmen found a small lead casket containing
bones, dust and a small lead bullet that had the letters CCA,
"probably standing for Crist"bal Col"n Almirante, (Admiral
Christopher Columbus)." An inscription inside the lid referred
to "the illustrious and famous gentleman Don Crist"bal Col"n."
Ericson, leaning toward Morison's theory, had persuaded the
authorities in Santo Domingo by early 1985 to let him examine the
remains and take a portion of a tooth back to his laboratory here
for analysis. He would look for strontium, an element whose
isotopes occur in different ratios in the food grown and digested
in different parts of the world. Strontium ratios in bones "may
change if the individual moves from one area to another, but in
teeth they are basically fixed," Ericson said.
With the aid of a National Endowment for the Humanities
grant, Ericson collected soil and plant samples in Genoa and
Seville, as well as three teeth from Genoese contemporaries of
Columbus. He determined that the strontium ratios in the two
areas were quite different.
Using mass spectrometry, Ericson could determine the strontium isotope ratio in the Santo Domingo tooth and compare it to
ratios in the two cities. If the ratio matched Genoa, where
Columbus was living when his adult teeth grew in, then that would
provide powerful evidence of Santo Domingo's claim. If it
differed markedly from the ratio in Seville, where Diego grew up,
it would add weight to the argument, because Columbus' son would
be the most likely other occupant of the Dominican tomb.
Preparing to leave for Santo Domingo after visiting relatives and attending a conference in Norway in June 1985, Ericson
received a message to call the U.S. Embassy.
U.S. cultural officer Fred Becchetti, who drafted the cable,
told Ericson that "the plan here has fallen apart" and recommended he not even come as a tourist "since your presence might
merely stir up a situation which everybody seems to want to drop
swiftly and quietly." Dominican officials, Becchetti indicated,
had decided that they preferred not to embarrass Spain with an
investigation that might discredit the remains in Seville.
But now, Ericson and U.S. officials in Santo Domingo said
this week, a change of government in the Dominican Republic has
improved the atmosphere. Historians visited by Ericson in Spain
this summer offered their support and he has expanded his team of
physical anthropologists Jane E. Buikstra, George J. Armelagos,
William Maples, William Ortner and Kathleen Deagan and geochemists R.W. Hurst and Terry Davis to include Allen Wilson, a
Berkeley biochemist expert in the analysis of DNA.
Wilson, reached by telephone while on sabbatical in
Scotland, said that if proper samples are found in Santo Domingo,
he might be able to determine--if two individuals are still
buried there--whether they were genetically related, a boost to a
theory that neither Columbus' father nor son were unearthed in
1795. "I'm happy that Ericson is starting early," Wilson said.
"It's 1992 that we are preparing for. If we get to do it, it's
going to take a lot of work."
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