Dispute Over The Tomb Of Columbus.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19271, 7 January 1931, Page 6

Dispute Over The Tomb Of Columbus.

The hurricane that recentl}’’ devastated San Domingo has stirred rip another storm in its wake —an intellectual one. News that the Tomb of Columbus in the Cathedral of San Domingo was not damaged, has re-opened the old quarrel—“ Where are the remains of Christopher Columbus?” Spain says, of course, the Tomb of Columbus was not damaged in the San Domingo hurricane. It is in the Cathedral of Seville. San Domingo and other parts of the New World dispute that. Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain, May 20, 1506. Ignoring his wishes to be buried in the New World he had discovered, and not in Spain where he had been put in prison, Columbus was interred in the Fransciscan Monastery of Santa Maria de las Cuevas. In 1530,twenty-four years after, his son Diego, resentful of the high clergy of the Cathedral against the burial of the Discoverer of America under the High Altar, caused them to omit marks or names on the leaden caskets.

i nnu® hi® ism®®® hi®® sms®®®® mm According to the Spanish Academy of Science, Columbus was again exhumed towards the end of the 18th century, when his remains were removed to Havana. At the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Spain lost Cuba, the Spanish assert that they again took up Columbus, brought his remains to Spain and placed them in a tomb in the Cathedral of Seville. San Domingo authorities claim that Columbus still rests in the Cathedral of San Domingo, and that he was never removed from there. They point out that during restoration work in the Cathedral in 1877, four tombs, three with a leaden coffin in each and one empty, were discovered under the Altar of the Cathedral. One was identified as that of Don Luis, nephew of Columbus, another as that of Captain-General Ramirez who died in 1811, and on the third coffin on the inside, was found the name “Christoval Colon,” also a small silver plate among the bones, with that name on it. The empty tomb, the coffin of which had been removed to Havana and then to Seville, is believed by the San Domingo authorities to be that of Don Diego, Columbus’s son. Spain will not admit that. (Anglo-American N.S.—Copyright.)