Hispaniola After 1492
1Before 1492, the island the Spanish later called Hispaniola, now shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was home to the Taíno people. Taíno farmers planted cassava, sweet potatoes, maize, beans and squash in fields of piled-up earth mounds called conucos. They grated and squeezed cassava roots and baked them into a flat bread that kept for months. The Taíno also fished and grew cotton and tobacco.
2Columbus reached the island in 1492. On his second voyage, in 1493, his ships carried horses, cattle, pigs and sugarcane. Pigs and cattle multiplied quickly on the island. They roamed loose across the land, and the Taíno's conucos had no fences.
3Spanish colonists came looking for gold. The Spanish crown gave many colonists groups of Taíno to work for them, under a system called the encomienda. Taíno men were sent to dig and wash gold in the mines for months at a time, often far from home, while others farmed for the colonists. In late 1518, smallpox, a disease from the Eastern Hemisphere that the Taíno had never faced, broke out on the island. Many Taíno resisted. Some fled to the mountains, and from 1519 to 1533 a Taíno leader named Enriquillo led a revolt that ended in a peace agreement with Spain.
4As the number of Taíno workers fell, colonists turned to other workers and other products. Ships brought growing numbers of enslaved Africans to work in the mines, on ranches and in the fields. By the 1520s, sugar mills worked mostly by enslaved Africans were running on the island, and cattle ranches shipped hides to Spain. Plants and words crossed the ocean the other way as well: tobacco became popular in Europe, and English words such as hammock, canoe and hurricane come from the Taíno language. Today, many people in the Caribbean have Taíno ancestors, and some identify as Taíno.