Columbus and His Thieves Almost Wiped Out The Tainos
The Tainos – long before they welcomed Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492, had origins among the Arawak tribes of the Orinoco Delta.
They gradually spread from Venezuela across the Antilles in waves of voyaging and settlement begun around 400 B.C.
Mingling with people already established in the Caribbean, they developed self-sufficient communities on Hispaniola, in what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic; in Jamaica and eastern Cuba; in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas. They cultivated yuca, sweet potatoes, maize, beans and other crops as their culture flourished, reaching its peak by the time of European contact.
Taíno towns were densely settled, well organized and widely dispersed. The Indians were inventive people who learned to strain cyanide from life-giving yuca, developed pepper gas for warfare, devised an extensive pharmacopeia from nature, built ocean going canoes large enough for more than 100 paddlers and played games with a ball made of rubber, which fascinated Europeans seeing the material for the first time.
The Taíno impressed Columbus with their generosity, which may have contributed to their undoing. Columbus established the first American colony at La Isabela, on the north coast of Hispaniola, in 1494. After a brief period of coexistence, relations between the newcomers and natives deteriorated. Spaniards removed men from villages to work in gold mines and colonial plantations.
This kept the Taíno from planting the crops that had fed them for centuries. They began to starve; many thousands fell prey to smallpox, measles and other European diseases for which they had no immunity; some committed suicide to avoid subjugation; hundreds fell in fighting with the Spaniards, while untold numbers fled to remote regions beyond colonial control.
Possibly as many as three million souls—some 85 percent of the Taíno population—had vanished by the early 1500s.
By Neo Makeba
Curated from: Smithsonian
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