enth and eighteenth centuries, and it has
had the support of Irving and Humboldt in later times. Captain Alexander
Slidell Mackenzie of the United States navy worked out the problem for
Irving. It is much larger than any of the other islands, and could
hardly have been called by Columbus in any alternative way a "small"
island, while it does not answer Columbus's description of being level,
having on it an eminence of four hundred feet, and no interior lagoon,
as his Guanahani demands. The French canonizers stand by the old
traditions, and find it meet to say that "the English Protestants not
finding the name of San Salvador fine enough have substituted for it
that of Cat, and in their hydrographical atlases the Island of the Holy
Saviour is nobly called Cat Island."

The weight of modern testimony seems to favour Watling's Island, and it
so far answers Columbus's description that about one-third of its
interior is water, corresponding to his "large lagoon." Munoz first
suggested it in 1793; but the arguments in its favour were first spread
out by Captain Becher of the royal navy in 1856, and he seems to have
induced Oscar Peschel in 1858 to adopt the same views in his history of
the range of modern discovery. Major, the map custodian of the British
Museum, who had previously followed Navarrete in favouring the Grand
Turk, again addressed himself to the problem in 1870, and fell into line
with the adherents of Watling's. No other considerable advocacy of this
island, if we except the testimony of Gerard Stein in 1883, in a book on
voyages of discovery, appeared till Lieutenant J. B. Murdoch, an officer
of the American navy, made a very careful examination of the subject in
the _Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute_ in 1884, which is
accepted by Charles A. Schott in the _Bulletin of the United States
Coast Survey_. Murdoch was the first to plot in a backward way the track
between Guanahani and Cuba, and he finds more points of resemblance in
Columbus's description with Watling's than with any other. The latest
adherent is the eminent geographer, Clements R. Markham, in the bulletin
of the Italian Geographical Society in 1889. Perhaps no cartographical
argument has been so effective as that of Major in comparing modern
charts with the map of Herrera, in which the latter lays Guanahani down.

An elaborate attempt to identity Samana as the landfall was made by the
late Captain Gustavus Vasa Fox, in an appendix t