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[[preprinted]]
from the 
SMITHSONIAN
INSTITUTION

[[image - Smithsonian logo, 'For the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men, Smithsonian Institution Washington 1846]]

Washington 25, D. C.
NEWS RELEASE DATE
[[/preprinted]]

Tuesday afternoon, July 12, 1955

Washington, D.C., July 12, 1955 --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 representation of the West Indies, Cuba, and the eastern shore of North America, considering 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 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 Institution, 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 Bahama, called Fernandina Island by Columbus. The settlement, one of those described in some detail in the discoverer'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 1947 under the direction of Herbert W. Krieger, Smithsonian curator of ethnology. Before directing this reconstruction, Museum ethnologists made an extensive study of all records available from the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

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