Thank heavens that some people ship copies of my columns around. Interested people get to see them and often write, and there it goes again. I have a new pen pal and a whole new set of facts with which to work.

The current breakthrough comes because Betty Peterson of Worcester, Mass., sent copies of a couple of columns to Manuel Luciano da Silva in Rhode Island. a medical doctor, be it noted. He fired off to me a flattering letter and two enormously interesting articles that I will be discussing for you for a week or two.

One title is "Columbus was 100 % Portuguese. The other is "The True Antilles: Newfoundland and Nova Scotia." Either can be obtained from the author by writing to him at the Bristol County Medical Center, 1180 Hope St. Bristol, R.I. 02809. $3.00 for the piece on Columbus and $2.00 for the Antilles article. They are well worth the price. [They are both sold out now, 2002]

I will start with the True Antilles. Anyone who has looked at old maps knows that islands fill the Atlantic and seem to float around at the whim of the map makers. Da Silva focuses on a map which shows that I have not been keeping up on The Olde Map situation. How could I not hear of a map of 1424 that shows most of the north Atlantic? It is dated and signed Aug. 22, 1424, by Zuane Pizzigano. Two large islands with satellite islands are shown. They are north and west of the Azores. The Azores are in the latitude of southern Portugal. These islands fall in the latitudes of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, opposite the English Channel at the north and of middle Portugal to the south.

Now if these are the Antilles, the islands in the Caribbean, then an enormous error has been made, a couple of thousand miles, in fact. Is that expectable? If it were longitude, distance east and west, it might be excused. But north and south? Never! From the noon height of the Sun or of stars, it is easy to locale yourself as to north and south. I suppose that with the naked eye one comes within 100 miles, or at the worst 200. Surely they would not be off by a couple of thousand miles! Distance east and west is much more difficult, and good measures of that waited on accurate clocks. But even these distances were sometimes surprisingly good, for the kept quite accurate records of their day’s run.

The map maker, Pizzigano, was Italian but the names that he put on the islands are Portuguese: Antilia, Satanazes. Saya and Ymana. Antilia is especially interesting. The name is composed of ante (before) and ilia (island). Thus the name says that this island lies off something. and that fits nicely for Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The implication is that the Portuguese knew the continent that lay beyond these islands.

Details of the islands are interesting. They are oriented northeasterly; that is, leaning toward Europe. The contrast with the West Indies is great. Those islands in the main run off toward the northwest. These are exactly the kinds of things that a navigator pays attention to.

Well, how does this fit with other knowledge? Historical geographers have always thought that the Portuguese preceded Columbus to America and were on the Grand Banks well before 1492, but there was no hard evidence. Some will wonder about an ancient map as hard evidence. It looks pretty impressive to me. The Portolano charts, with their myriad lines connecting one point with another, are an excellent way to locate things. And there is no question the mariners were quite good at obtaining correct latitudes. Da Silva finds a considerable discrepancy in the angular plotting of the islands and does not mention that the north pole wanders around. Its past locations are known, and it would be interesting to see if a correction might make the orientations of the islands come closer to reality