One Caribbean island held Europe’s first American towns
Hispaniola, between Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Greater Antilles, is the West Indies’ most populous island and second-largest after Cuba—about 76,192 square kilometres split between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Columbus’s first three voyages planted La Navidad, La Isabela, and lasting Santo Domingo here.
The Dominican Republic takes the eastern 48,445 square kilometres and Haiti the western 27,750, making it one of only two divided islands in the Caribbean alongside Saint Martin. People first arrived roughly 6,000 years ago from Central or northern South America, living mostly by hunting and gathering. Arawak-speaking ancestors of the Taíno followed in the first millennium BC, bringing pottery and farming. By 1492 five Taíno chiefdoms ruled the island, each under a cacique, and villagers slept in hammocks inside round thatched houses, played ball on flat courts and honoured spirits called zemí.
Columbus landed in the northwest on 5 December 1492 and named it Española, since it reminded him of Spain; the chroniclers Bartolomé de las Casas and Peter Martyr d’Anghiera spread the Latin version. Native names included Bohío, meaning homeland, and Haiti, land of high mountains. A third, Quisqueya, is doubted by historians because it does not seem to come from Taíno, yet Dominicans cherish it as a poetic name for their country. Bartholomew Columbus founded Santo Domingo on the Ozama River in 1498, and that city’s name gradually spread to the whole island.
After Spain emptied the west in the Devastations of Osorio in 1605, French buccaneers moved in, and by 1659 Saint-Domingue existed, growing into France’s richest American colony on the labour of enslaved Africans. Spain handed its eastern half to France in the 1795 Treaty of Basel. Revolution from 1791 to 1804 ended French rule, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines revived the name Haiti in the 1805 constitution.
The east declared independence in 1821, was occupied by Haiti from 1822 to 1844, and emerged as the Dominican Republic through a war lasting until 1856. American forces held Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924; in 1918 American officials urged the National Geographic Society to adopt Hispaniola for the island, and that name stuck.
Source: Hispaniola
