Seeking Columbus's origins, with a swab 2

But some petitioners think it is a waste of time to scour the phone book for Columbus's long-lost kin. Insisting that they know who Columbus's father really was, they are asking Lorente to perform a 500-year postdated paternity test. The government council president of Majorca, for instance, has paid him to examine the exhumed remains of Prince Carlos of Viana, the one-time heir to the Catalonian crown who reportedly fathered a son with a woman on the island whose last name was Colom.

The vials of royal DNA in Lorente's freezer also include contributions from two living members of the now deposed Portuguese royal line: those of the Duke of Bragança and the Count of Ribeira Grande who argue that Columbus was a member of their family — the product of an extramarital affair involving a Portuguese prince.

"This is the true story, forget the Italians, forget the Spanish," said Count Jose Ribeira, 47, a real estate developer in Lisbon who attended the dedication of a new Columbus monument last year in the Portuguese town of Cuba that claims to be Columbus's birthplace. If it is, all three samples should contain the same Portuguese genetic imprint.

But this year, anyway, the Columbus Day parade in New York will feature Maserati sports cars, flag throwers from Siena and Lidia Bastianich, the Italian cooking show host, as grand marshal.

Those who had hoped DNA would crash the Italian party expected a genetic pronouncement from the scientists on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's death last May. Or last Columbus Day. Surely by this one. After all those centuries in a crypt, however, a mere trace of DNA was all that could be extracted from Columbus's bones, and Lorente has said he is loath to use it indiscriminately.

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To make things even tougher, he has found that Catalonian Coloms and Genoese Colombos are so closely related it is hard to distinguish them with the standard Y-chromosome tests. So he is searching for more subtle differences that would allow him to link Columbus to a single lineage.

"My heart," Albardaner said, "will not endure so many delays."

Others have accused Lorente of nationalist bias, of covering up results that suggest Columbus was a Jew and of withholding a historical treasure from the Western world.

"Will Lorente continue to hide what the scientists know concerning Columbus's DNA?" asked Peter Dickson, a retired CIA analyst whose self-published book on Columbus argues that he was part French, part Italian, part Spanish and part Jewish, in an e-mail message to fellow Columbus buffs. "Will he remain silent on Columbus Day once again?"

Lorente says he will. And in the absence of data, rumors are flying.

Olga Rickards, a Lorente collaborator at Tor Vergata University in Rome, has been quoted as saying that she "wouldn't bet on Columbus being Spanish." A graduate student of Lorente's who had studied the Colombo DNA led Italian newspapers to believe Columbus was from Lombardy, north of Genoa, although she had apparently never seen Columbus's DNA. And Nito Verdera, a journalist from the Balaeric island of Ibiza, who says the explorer was a Catalan-speaking Ibizan crypto-Jew, cited leaks from Lorente's team that link Columbus to North Africa.

"I'm very sorry about the great expectation among some historians that they all want the DNA to confirm their hypothesis," Lorente said. "But science needs its time and has its pace."

If Columbus was an adopted name, as some scholars believe, tests of Coloms and Colombos will have been in vain. Moreover, with dozens of generations separating all those Coloms, Colombos, princes and counts from Columbus's time, a long-hidden adulterous liaison could have severed the Y-chromosome-and-surname link.

Even with a match questions will remain. What if Coloms moved to Genoa or Colombos to Barcelona? Today's distinct regional identities may not be reflected in the genetic code of the earlier era.

Albardaner still brings Columbus novices to the Historic Archive of Protocols in Barcelona, where they can hold a yellowed note from the 15th century filled with the calligraphic scrawl of the man he believes stumbled upon the Caribbean while looking for a western route to India.

He is less sure now that there will be a precise answer to who Columbus was or where he was from, but he is still hoping it will come from the DNA.