Location

The Arawak lived throughout much of the West Indies, the archipelago, or chain of islands, stretching from the southern tip of Florida to the northern tip of South America. The West Indies, also called the Antilles, are now subdivided roughly north to south into (1) the Bahama Islands; (2) the Greater Antilles, including Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Puerto Rico; and (3) the Lesser Antilles, including the Leeward Islands, the Windward Islands, Barbados, and Trinidad-Tobago. These islands in the Caribbean Sea became known as the West Indies because Christopher Columbus, the first European to explore them, was seeking a route to India at the time. He thought he had landed in the East Indies. And this is the same reason he referred to the Native peoples he encountered as Indians.

Christopher Columbus has been referred to as the “discoverer” of the Americas. Since there were already millions of people living in the Western Hemisphere, the term is misused. Moreover, it now is thought that the Vikings reached the Americas much earlier than Columbus did. Yet Columbus brought the Americas to the attention of the rest of the world and set in motion the European exploration and settlement of the “New World,” thus changing the course of history for Europeans and Indians alike. He can thus be called the European discoverer of the Americas. Columbus never reached North America proper, but other European explorers soon did.

On his initial trip across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain, Columbus first landed on a small island in the Bahama Group. The exact location of the first landfall has never been proven. Until recently, it was thought that Columbus first reached Watling Island (now San Salvador). Now some scholars believe that he and his men first touched soil on Samana Cay, 65 miles southeast of Watling Island. After a stopover of a few days, Columbus and his men sailed farther west, sighting Cuba and landing on Hispaniola. He established a colony of men among the Arawak of Hispaniola before returning to Spain. He later led three more expeditions to the Caribbean Sea, among the islands and along the coastline of Central and South America. Island-dwelling Arawak, however, were the only Indians with whom he had extensive contact.

The Arawak lived on many different islands. They also had relatives—people of the same language family, Arawakan (part of the Andean-Equatorial language phy-lum)—living in Central and South America. Before European came to the Americas, the Arawak had migrated northward from South America onto the Caribbean islands, where they became known as Taino, or “good people.”