The question of how Christopher Columbus and his contemporaries navigated has long been held captive by the ongoing debate about his momentous 1492 landfall. Most historians today favor landfall locations at least 90 nmi south of the latitude implicit in Columbus' journal. To justify this discrepancy, they must assume Columbus ignored the celestial sphere and allowed his "errant" compass to pull him far off his western track. Yet evidence from various sources-Columbus' sailing Routes and dates, contemporary accounts, unbiased Navigation experts, early cartography, and even the Sometimes ambiguous island descriptions from his Journal-combine to give overwhelming support to the Concept that Columbus sailed a fixed latitude using the Culminations of circumpolar stars.
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