Hispaniola

Originally the home of 1 million Taino, Hispaniola became the base for Spanish conquest in the Americas during the first decades after contact in 1492.

The Taino originally inhabited the island of Hispaniola. Before the arrival of Europeans, they developed a complex society built on manioc horticulture and supported by trade on the island itself and with other islands in the vicinity. In a very unique environment and in isolation, the Taino established a hierarchical system of chiefdom leadership similar to those found in some mainland areas of the Americas. After contact with Europeans in 1492, Taino society collapsed in the face of the Spanish colonization effort.

Christopher Columbus landed at Hispaniola on his first voyage to the Western Hemisphere and established a garrison there called Navidad. He returned in late 1493 to find the town destroyed and the inhabitants dead. In January 1494 he founded the town of Isabella, which never developed into a significant settlement. After the Spanish established Santo Domingo in 1496, Hispaniola developed into the primary staging area for Spanish expansion into the Caribbean. From 1492 to 1530, the Spanish on Hispaniola developed the processes and methods by which they would successfully build and maintain their American empire.

Santo Domingo served as the Spanish base of operations for 20 years as the Spanish conquered the nearby islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico and moved to the mainland territories of Mexico, Panama, and Peru.

From the beginning the Spanish took advantage of the Taino inhabitants of the island by forcing them to work as slave labor (see slavery) in gold mines on the island as well as on the plantations, or encomiendas, of Hispaniola. For a period of time in the late 1490s, the Taino rebelled against Spanish control and ruthlessness, but ultimately their horticultural society disintegrated when they could no longer support both themselves and the voracious Spaniards. As a result of Spanish abuse and the introduction of epidemic diseases from Europe, the Taino population in the first 20 years of Spanish occupation dropped from a precontact high of 1 million people to only a few hundred. Eventually, they became extinct. Later, the French established a colony on the western side of the island as the Spanish began to focus on their more productive holdings in the West Indies and on the mainland. The French side of the island eventually became the nation of Haiti, and the Spanish side became the nation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic).

Further reading: Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, “The Aboriginal Population of Hispaniola,” in Essays in Population History, vol. 1, eds. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah (Berkeley: University of California, 1971), 376-410; Robert D. Heinl and Nancy G. Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492-1971; revised and expanded by Michael Heinl (Boston: University Press of America, 1996); David Henige, “On the Contact Population of Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 217-237; Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Carl O. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1992); Samuel M. Wilson, Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990).

—Dixie Ray Haggard