Christopher Columbus

In 1493 Columbus sailed on his second expedition from Cadiz to find new territories, this time with 17 ships carrying supplies and about 1,200 men to colonise the region. This time he followed a more southerly course. On November 3rd he sighted land, a rugged island which he named Dominica which is the Latin for Sunday. His exact course through the Lesser Antilles is unknown but he certainly discovered Montserrat, Antigua, Redonda, Nevis, St Kitts, naming them all after Churches and Monasteries in Spain, though Nevis comes from the Spanish for snow because he thought that the clouds over Nevis peak resembled a snow capped mountain.

He landed at Puerto Rico on November 19th 1493. This was the scene of his first encounter with the natives of this region when he rescued two boys who had been castrated by their captors.

He then sailed on to return to Hispaniola where he wished to visit Fuerte de la Navidad (Christmas Fort) built during his first voyage and located on the north coast of Haiti. However he found the fort in ruins having been destroyed by the native Taino people. Columbus moved 70 miles to the East where he established a new settlement which he called La Isabella. However the situation was poorly chosen and the settlement was short lived.

Columbus left Hispaniola on April 24th 1494 and arrived at Cuba naming it Juana on April 30th. He retraced his route to Hispaniola and finally set off on the voyage home to Spain. One can only imagine the excitement of each new discovery on this trip and the ability to name new islands as he found them and thus leave his mark on the world for evermore.

However all was not quite so rosy when one considers the legacy of the policy he instituted in Hispaniola which has been referred to by numerous historians as genocide. The native people on the island were systematically enslaved and murdered. Hundreds were rounded up and shipped to Europe to be sold and many died en route. Columbus also demanded that the Taino people should bring him and his fellow Spaniards gold, and those that didn’t had their hands cut off. Since there was little gold to be had in Hispaniola, the Taino tended to escape before the Spaniards hunted them down and killed them. The Taino tried to fight back but the weaponry of the Spaniards was so much superior and European diseases began to ravage their numbers. The Taino resorted to mass suicides even killing their own children to save them from the Spaniards. Within two years, half of the native population were dead and the remainder were set to work on plantations where the mortality rate was very high. By 1550, 60 years after Columbus first landed only a few hundred Taino were left on the island.

Two years later Columbus set off on his third voyage of discovery this time with six ships and this time he was to reach the South American mainland. More of this remarkable man’s adventures in part 3.

Tony Rice-Oxley