History of Haiti

The recorded history of Haiti began on 5 December 1492, when the European navigator Christopher Columbus landed on a large island in the region of the western Atlantic Ocean that later came to be known as the Caribbean. It was inhabited by the Taíno and Arawakan people, who variously called their island Ayiti, Bohio, and Kiskeya (Quisqueya). Columbus promptly claimed the island for the Spanish Crown, naming it La Isla Española (\"the Spanish Island\"), later Latinized to Hispaniola.
Christopher Columbus established the settlement, La Navidad, near the modern town of Cap-Haïtien. It was built from the timbers of his wrecked ship, Santa María, during his first voyage in December 1492. When he returned in 1493 on his second voyage he found the settlement had been destroyed and all 39 settlers killed. Columbus continued east and founded a new settlement at La Isabela on the territory of the present-day Dominican Republic in 1493. The capital of the colony was moved to Santo Domingo in 1496, on the south west coast of the island also in the territory of the present-day Dominican Republic. The Spanish returned to western Hispaniola in 1502, establishing a settlement at Yaguana near modern-day Léogâne. A second settlement was established on the north coast in 1504 called Puerto Real near modern Fort-Liberté – which in 1578 was relocated to a nearby site and renamed Bayaja.
Following the arrival of Europeans, La Hispaniola's indigenous Taino population suffered greatly to near extinction, in possibly the worst case of depopulation in the Americas. A commonly accepted hypothesis attributes the high mortality of this colony in part to European diseases to which the natives had no immunity. The Taino population declined by up to 95% in the century after the Spanish arrival, from a pre contact population of tens of thousands to to 8,000,000. Many authors have described the treatment of the Taino in Hispaniola under the Spanish Empire as genocide.

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