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Caribbean Islands THE EUROPEAN SETTLEMENTS
European settlements in the Caribbean began with Christopher
Columbus. Carrying an elaborate feudal commission that made him
perpetual governor of all lands discovered and gave him a
percentage of all trade conducted, Columbus set sail in September
1492, determined to find a faster, shorter way to China and Japan.
He planned to set up a trading-post empire, modeled after the
successful Portuguese venture along the West African coast. His aim
was to establish direct commercial relations with the producers of
spices and other luxuries of the fabled East, thereby cutting out
the Arab middlemen who had monopolized trade since capturing
Constantinople in 1453. He also planned to link up with the lost
Christians of Abyssinia, who were reputed to have great quantities
of gold--a commodity in great demand in Europe. Finally, as a good
Christian, Columbus wanted to spread Christianity to new peoples.
Columbus, of course, did not find the East. Nevertheless, he called
the peoples he met "Indians," and, because he had sailed west,
referred to the region he found as the "West Indies."
However, dreams of a trading-post empire collapsed in the face
of real Caribbean life. The Indians, although initially hospitable
in most cases, simply did not have gold and trade commodities for
the European market. In all, Columbus made four voyages of
exploration between 1492 and 1502, failing to find great quantities
of gold, Christians, or the courts of the fabled khans described by
Marco Polo. After 1499, small amounts of tracer gold were
discovered on Hispaniola, but by that time local challenges to his
governorship were mounting, and his demonstrated lack of
administrative skills made matters worse. Even more disappointing,
he returned to Spain in 1502 to find that his extensive feudal
authority in the New World was rapidly being taken away by his
monarchs.
Columbus inadvertently started a small settlement on the north
coast of Hispaniola when his flagship, the Santa Maria,
wrecked off the Môle St-Nicolas on his first voyage. When he
returned a year later, no trace of the settlement appeared--and the
former welcome and hospitality of the Indians had changed to
suspicion and fear.
The first proper European settlement in the Caribbean began
when Nicolás de Ovando, a faithful soldier from western Spain,
settled about 2,500 Spanish colonists in eastern Hispaniola in
1502. Unlike Columbus' earlier settlements, this group was an
organized cross-section of Spanish society brought with the
intention of developing the Indies economically and expanding
Spanish political, religious, and administrative influence. In its
religious and military motivation, it continued the
reconquista (reconquest), which had expelled the Moors from
Grenada and the rest of southern Spain.
From this base in Santo Domingo, as the new colony was called,
the Spanish quickly fanned out throughout the Caribbean and onto
the mainland. Jamaica was settled in 1509 and Trinidad the
following year. By 1511 Spanish explorers had established
themselves as far as Florida. However, in the eastern Caribbean,
the Caribs resisted the penetration of Europeans until well into
the seventeenth century and succumbed only in the eighteenth
century.
With the conquest of Mexico in 1519 and the subsequent
discovery of gold there, interest in working the gold deposits of
the islands decreased. Moreover, by that time the Indian population
of the Caribbean had dwindled considerably, creating a scarcity of
workers for the mines and pearl fisheries. In 1518 the first
African slaves, called ladinos because they had lived in
Spain and spoke the Castilian language, were introduced to the
Caribbean to help mitigate the labor shortage.
The Spanish administrative structure that prevailed for the 132
years of Spanish monopoly in the Caribbean was simple. At the
imperial level were two central agencies, the Casa de Contratación,
or House of Trade, which licensed all ships sailing to or returning
from the Indies and supervised commerce, and the Consejo de Indias,
the royal Advisory Council, which attended to imperial legislation.
At the local level in the Caribbean were the governors, appointed
by the monarchs of Castile, who supervised local municipal
councils. The governors were regulated by audiencias, or
appellate courts. A parallel structure regulated the religious
organizations. Despite the theoretical hierarchy and clear
divisions of authority, in practice each agency reported directly
to the monarch. As set out in the original instructions to Ovando
in 1502, the Spanish New World was to be orthodox and unified under
the Roman Catholic religion and Castilian and Spanish in culture
and nationality. Moors, Jews, recent converts to Roman Catholicism,
Protestants, and gypsies were legally excluded from sailing to the
Indies, although this exclusiveness could not be maintained and was
frequently violated.
By the early seventeenth century, Spain's European enemies, no
longer disunited and internally weak, were beginning to breach the
perimeters of Spain's American empire. The French and the English
established trading forts along the St. Lawrence and the Hudson
Rivers in North America. These were followed by permanent
settlements on the mid-Atlantic coast (Jamestown) and in New
England (Massachusetts Bay colony).
Between 1595 and 1620, the English, French, and Dutch made many
unsuccessful attempts to settle along the Guiana coastlands of
South America. The Dutch finally prevailed, with one permanent
colony along the Essequibo River in 1616, and another, in 1624,
along the neighboring Berbice River. As in North America, initial
loss of life in the colonies was discouragingly high. In 1624 the
English and French gave up in the Guianas and jointly created a
colony on St. Kitts in the northern Leeward Islands. At that time,
St. Kitts was occupied only by Caribs. With the Spanish deeply
involved in the Thirty Years War in Europe, conditions were
propitious for colonial exploits in what until then had been
reluctantly conceded to be a Spanish domain.
In 1621, the Dutch began to move aggressively against Spanish
territory in the Americas--including Brazil, temporarily under
Spanish control between 1580 and 1640. In the Caribbean, they
joined the English in settling St. Croix in 1625 and then seized
the minuscule, unoccupied islands of Curaçao, St. Eustatius, St.
Martin, and Saba, thereby expanding their former holdings in the
Guianas, as well as those at Araya and Cumana on the Venezuelan
coast.
The English and the French also moved rapidly to take advantage
of Spanish weakness in the Americas and overcommitment in Europe.
In 1625, the English settled Barbados and tried an unsuccessful
settlement on Tobago. They took possession of Nevis in 1628 and
Antigua and Montserrat in 1632. They planted a colony on St. Lucia
in 1638, but it was destroyed within four years by the Caribs. The
French, under the auspices of the Compagnie des Iles d'Amerique,
chartered by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, successfully settled
Martinique and Guadeloupe, laying the base for later expansion to
St. Bartholomé, St. Martin, Grenada, St. Lucia, and western
Hispaniola, which was formally ceded by Spain in 1697 at the Treaty
of Ryswick (signed between France and the alliance of Spain, the
Netherlands, and England, and ending the War of the Grand
Alliance). Meanwhile, an expedition sent out by Oliver Cromwell
(Protector of the English Commonwealth, 1649-58) under Admiral
William Penn (the father of the founder of Pennsylvania) and
General Robert Venables in 1655 seized Jamaica, the first territory
captured from the Spanish. (Trinidad, the only other British colony
taken from the Spanish, fell in 1797 and was ceded in 1802.) At
that time Jamaica had a population of about 3,000, equally divided
between Spaniards and their slaves--the Indian population having
been eliminated. Although Jamaica was a disappointing consolation
for the failure to capture either of the major colonies of
Hispaniola or Cuba, the island was retained at the Treaty of Madrid
in 1670, thereby more than doubling the land area for potential
British colonization in the Caribbean. By 1750 Jamaica was the most
important of Britian's Caribbean colonies, having eclipsed Barbados
in economic significane.
The first colonists in the Caribbean were trying to recreate
their metropolitan European societies in the region. In this
respect, the goals and the world view of the early colonists in the
Caribbean did not vary significantly from those of the colonists on
the North American mainland. "The Caribbee planters," wrote the
historian Richard Dunn, "began as peasant farmers not unlike the
peasant farmers of Wigston Magna, Leicestershire, or Sudbury,
Massachusetts. They cultivated the same staple crop--tobacco--as
their cousins in Virginia and Maryland. They brought to the tropics
the English common law, English political institutions, the English
parish [local administrative unit], and the English church." These
institutions survived for a very long time, but the social context
in which they were introduced was rapidly altered by time and
circumstances. Attempts to recreate microcosms of Europe were
slowly abandoned in favor of a series of plantation societies using
slave labor to produce large quantities of tropical staples for the
European market. In the process of this transformation, complicated
by war and trade, much was changed in the Caribbean.
Data as of November 1987
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