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Haiti SPANISH DISCOVERY AND COLONIZATION
The island of Hispaniola (La Isla Española), which
today is
occupied by the nations of Haiti and the Dominican
Republic, was
one of several landfalls Christopher Columbus made during
his
first voyage to the New World in 1492. Columbus
established a
makeshift settlement on the north coast, which he dubbed
Navidad
(Christmas), after his flagship, the Santa María,
struck a
coral reef and foundered near the site of present-day Cap
Haïtien.
The Taino Indian (or Arawak) inhabitants referred to
their
homeland by many names, but they most commonly used
Ayti,
or Hayti (mountainous). Initially hospitable toward
the
Spaniards, these natives responded violently to the
newcomers'
intolerance and abuse. When Columbus returned to
Hispaniola on
his second voyage in 1493, he found that Navidad had been
razed
and its inhabitants, slain. But the Old World's interest
in
expansion and its drive to spread Roman Catholicism were
not
easily deterred; Columbus established a second settlement,
Isabela, farther to the east.
Hispaniola, or Santo Domingo, as it became known under
Spanish dominion, became the first outpost of the Spanish
Empire.
The initial expectations of plentiful and easily
accessible gold
reserves proved unfounded, but the island still became
important
as a seat of colonial administration, a starting point for
conquests of other lands, and a laboratory to develop
policies
for governing new possessions. It was in Santo Domingo
that the
Spanish crown introduced the system of
repartimiento,
whereby peninsulares (Spanish-born persons residing
in the
New World) received large grants of land and the right to
compel
labor from the Indians who inhabited that land.
Columbus, Santo Domingo's first administrator, and his
brother Bartolomé Columbus fell out of favor with the
majority of
the colony's settlers, as a result of jealousy and
avarice, and
then also with the crown because of their failure to
maintain
order. In 1500 a royal investigator ordered both to be
imprisoned
briefly in a Spanish prison. The colony's new governor,
Nicolás
de Ovando, laid the groundwork for the island's
development.
During his tenure, the repartimiento system gave
way to the
encomienda
system (see Glossary)
under which
all land
was considered the property of the crown. The system also
granted
stewardship of tracts to encomenderos, who were
entitled
to employ (or, in practice, to enslave) Indian labor.
The Taino Indian population of Santo Domingo fared
poorly
under colonial rule. The exact size of the island's
indigenous
population in 1492 has never been determined, but
observers at
the time produced estimates that ranged from several
thousand to
several million. An estimate of 3 million, which is almost
certainly an exaggeration, has been attributed to Bishop
Bartolomé de Las Casas. According to all accounts,
however, there
were hundreds of thousands of indigenous people on the
island. By
1550 only 150 Indians lived on the island. Forced labor,
abuse,
diseases against which the Indians had no immunity, and
the
growth of the mestizo (mixed European and Indian)
population all
contributed to the elimination of the Taino and their
culture.
Several years before the Taino were gone, Santo Domingo
had
lost its position as the preeminent Spanish colony in the
New
World. Its lack of mineral riches condemned it to neglect
by the
mother country, especially after the conquest of New Spain
(Mexico). In 1535 the Viceroyalty of New Spain, which
included
Mexico and the Central American isthmus, incorporated
Santo
Domingo, the status of which dwindled still further after
the
conquest of the rich kingdom of the Incas in Peru.
Agriculture
became the mainstay of the island's economy, but the
disorganized
nature of agricultural production did not approach the
kind of
intense productivity that was to characterize the colony
under
French rule.
Data as of December 1989
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