Columbus took ten Taínos to Europe at the end of his first voyage. For upcoming Indigenous Peoples’ Day, I reconstruct what the ten “discovered” during their first days after arrival, in and around Lisbon, Portugal, from March 4–10, 1493, a parallel to Columbus’s...

Chief Manicoatex burned down the original wooden Fort Concepción at the time of the battle of Santo Cerro (March 1495). The precise site of this original fort is unknown, but it was erected adjacent to Chief Guarionex’s hometown of Guaricano near the base of Santo...

By the summer of 1495, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand had grown sufficiently concerned with Fray Buil’s, Pedro Margarite’s, and others’ criticisms of Columbus’s governance and the failure of gold shipments home to appoint an investigator to review his conduct and...

Following the hurricane (see prior post), Columbus ordered Isabela’s shipwrights to construct two new caravels, the first ships so designed made in the Americas. He’d survived violent storms—during the return ocean crossing of the first voyage and the Cuban...

A tremendous storm ravaged “Española” in the summer of 1495 (528 years ago), and the Spaniards adopted the Taínos’ word for it—hurakán—as the storm’s fury and swirl so distinguished it from storms they knew. As depicted in Columbus and Caonabó, the hurricane uprooted...

Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand’s instructions to Columbus at the commencement of the second voyage required that all trade with “Indians” be conducted by barter. In practice, the key barter envisioned was trading items such as hawks’ bells, bead necklaces, and...

The four ships bearing 550 Taíno captives that Columbus dispatched from Isabela on February 24, 1495 (see posts of February 1 and 25) arrived at Cádiz, Spain, on April 7, 1495. As depicted in Columbus and Caonabó, the ships had labored two weeks skirting east from...

As depicted in Columbus and Caonabó, Taíno peoples fought the first major battle of four centuries of wars between Amerindians and Europeans on March 27, 1495 (528 years ago), beneath the hill now known as Santo Cerro (Holy Hill) north of La Vega, Dominican Republic....

Columbus’s letter to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of October 15, 1495 (first available in 1985, as discussed in the post of February 25) reveals that he felt Chief Caonabó’s capture was essential to “Española’s” conquest. He reported that Caonabó was “truly the...

Columbus’s letter to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of October 15, 1495 (first available in 1985, as discussed in prior post), reports that, after parleying with Chief Guarionex, “I went to Santo Tomás to capture certain principal caciques of the Cibao because they...