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Christopher Columbus, an Italian admiral in the employ of Queen Isabela of Spain, arrived in the Caribbean in the fall of 1492 with three ships, the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, and his Spanish crews. They had crossed the Atlantic from the Canary Islands in about five weeks, believing they had found a shortcut to the Asian East Indies. After scouting out parts of the Bahamas and Cuba, they arrived along the northern coast of the island Columbus called Hispaniola (“little Spain”), where he made note of the exotic beauty of the mountainous landscape, the luxurious plants, and the tropical fish, as well as the friendly and docile nature of the inhabitants. Columbus wrote that the Tainos “ought to make good and skilled servants” and good converts to Christianity.
Christopher Columbus.
The natives threw feasts for the Europeans and indicated that Columbus and his men could find gold and other treasures in the island’s interior. Columbus gathered up sample gold ornaments, plants, spices, dyes from trees, herbal medicines, plus a few native people and animals, and prepared to head back to Spain to show off the “riches of the Indies.” But on Christmas Eve, 1492, the flagship Santa María ran aground on a reef and wrecked near present-day Cap Haitien in Haiti. Columbus was forced to leave 39 men behind at a settlement he called La Navidad, in honor of Christmas. The men erected a fort from the salvaged remains of the ship.
Upon his return the following year with another 1,500 men, Columbus found La Navidad burned to the ground and the 39 settlers all dead. Some had died of disease and in-fighting; the rest had been attacked and killed by a local chief, Caonabo, after the Spaniards had raided and looted Taino villages. Columbus founded a new settlement farther east, along the north coast in the present-day Dominican Republic, calling it La Isabela after the Spanish queen. Although more than a third of its settlers fell ill within the first week, La Isabela survived four years, from 1494 to 1498, long enough for the Spaniards to establish a strong foothold in the area and exploit the Tainos for slave labor, women, and gold.
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