How it all got started: In order to understand today’s Dominican Republic it is vital to be knowledgeable about the roots in which this beautiful country stems from. Here are five things I want you know about the settlement of the Dominican Republic.
1.Geography: The Dominican Republic is located on the island of Hispaniola. In addition to being the place Dominicans call home, Hispaniola also houses the country of Haiti. The Dominican Republic occupies the Eastern two-thirds of the island and Haiti occupies the Western third. This island is the second largest in the Caribbean, falling only behind Cuba. On the map you can find the Dominican and the island of Hispaniola sandwiched in between the countries Cuba and Puerto Rico.
2.The first people to ever inhabit the Dominican Republic and the island of Hispaniola were the Taino population in approximately 600 AD. Taino is a branch of the Arawak migrants, the people who are thought to have been the first people in the Caribbean. Tainos in Hispaniola became very skilled agriculturally and grew the main portion of their diet. In addition to being farmers, Tainos are also thought to have fished and hunted for a portion of their food.
3. Christopher Columbus discovered the island of Hispaniola in 1942 on his first expedition funded by the Spanish crown. His goal for the expedition was to discover efficient trade routes for Spain. The Spanish hoped that Columbus’s discoveries would give them the trading advantage over their Portuguese competitors and bring enormous amounts of wealth to their country. On December 25, 1942 one of the three ships under Columbus’s command, the Santa Maria, hit a coral reef and sank off the coast of modern day Haiti. With help from the local population much of the destroyed ship was recovered and turned into a fort for the Europeans. This fort provided a home base for Columbus’s crew and was later named La Navidad (Christmas) due to the date of the shipwreck.
4. Initially, relations between Europeans and the local people of Hispaniola (Tainos) were pleasant and beneficial to all that were involved. Columbus left thirty-nine men of his crew with orders to trade for gold with the Taino Indians. Columbus then returned home to Spain with the two remaining ships and the news of his discoveries. Columbus called the people of Hispaniola Indians in letters to the Spanish royalty because he was under the impression he had landed on the country of India.
5. On Columbus’s second voyage he returned to the island of Hispaniola with his fleet of seventeen ships only to find La Navidad had been destroyed. It was thought to have been destroyed by the once peaceful Tainos because the European men were constantly demanding gold, food and women from them. These relations continued to worsen after the establishment of the new settlement Isabela when, under Columbus’s leadership, the Europeans started demanding a gold quota from the Tainos.
Wait till next weeks entry to find out what becomes of this Taino and European interaction!
Sources:
Ferguson, James. South America, Central America and the Caribbean 2002. 10thth ed. London: Europa Publications, 1985. Accessed September 2, 2011. Retrieved from http://books.google.com/books pages 335- 339
Symcox, Geoffrey, and Blair Sullivan. Christopher Columbus and the Enterprise of the Indies. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.
Taino people. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Sept. 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%C3%ADno_people
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