The History of Haiti in Brief

On December 6, 1492, during his first voyage of exploration, Columbus and his crew landed on the northwestern shores of an island called Ayiti by the Tainos, the island's native inhabitants.' The island reminded Columbus of Spain so much so that, after laying claim to it in the name of the Spanish throne as an "emblem of Jesus Christ and to the honor of Christendom," he renamed it Hispaniola or "Little Spain" (Christopher Columbus 1989: 94). The island at that time was divided into five chiefdoms (Heinl and Heinl 1978; Madiou 1989), home to an estimated two to three million people. Although cordial, initially, this first encounter between the Europeans and the island's natives proved to be fateful for the Tainos. Tempted by the gold adornments the natives wore on their almost nude bodies, the Europeans took advantage of the gentle disposition and good nature of their hosts, s~bjugatedth em, and condemned them to a life of hard labor through the encomienda system.2 As a result, less than fifty years after Columbus' arrival in the New World, the Tainos were rapidly decimated by the combined effects of slave labor in the mines and the fields and by the ravages of the diseases that had traveled with the Europeans, against which they had no natural resistance (Heinl and Heinl 1978). To replace the rapidly dwindling Taino population, in the early 1500s, Spain began importing significant numbers of Africans, better suited than the Tainos, they believed, for slave labor.