Colon En Puerto-Rico

In 1893, Puerto Rican historian Cayetano Coll y Toste turned his scholarly attention to one of the island's most contested historical questions: where exactly did Columbus first set foot during his second voyage to the Americas? The answer mattered deeply, because three towns claimed the honor Aguada, Mayagüez, and Guayanilla each insisted their harbor welcomed the admiral in 1493. Rather than indulging local pride, Coll y Toste assembled documentary evidence, weighed the fragmentary surviving accounts, and applied rigorous philological analysis to a puzzle complicated by the loss of Columbus's original diary. The result is neither polemic nor patriotic mythology but something rarer: a historian's honest attempt to separate legend from likelihood, using the tools of 19th-century scholarship. This slim volume illuminates not only the specific question of a landing site but also reveals how nations construct identity through selective memory, and how difficult it remains to recover truth from the colonial record.