1
Francis Augustus MacNutt, ed.,
De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera
, vol. 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912), 94â95; J. M. Cohen, ed.,
The Four Voyages of Columbus
(New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 170â71; and John Harmon McElroy, ed.,
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Washington Irving
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 239â42.
2
MacNutt,
Martyr
, 94â97, Carl Ortwin Sauer,
The Early Spanish Main
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 58; and Samuel M. Wilson,
The Indigenous People of the Caribbean
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 54.
3
Hortensia Pichardo Viñals, ed.,
Documentos para la historia de Cuba
, tomo 1 (La Habana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación), 1984, 51.
5
Peter Martyr reports that Columbus had taken this interpreter, whom he named “Diego Columbus,” off “Guanahani (an island near by Cuba)”; ibid.
6
Cohen,
Four Voyages of Columbus
, 169â70.
7
The province of Guantánamo was among the densest areas of TaÃno settlement in Cuba. (See
www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/41/311.html
.) Exactly how dense TaÃno settlement was in the immediate vicinity of Guantánamo Bay is hard to say. Strained Cuban-U.S. relations at the bay over the past fifty years and U.S. development at likely archaeological sites at the U.S. naval base have hampered archaeological investigation. See Timothy R. Sara and William F. Keegan,
Archaeological Survey and Paleoenvironmental Investigations of Portions of U.S. Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, Cuba
(Newport News, Va.: Geo-Marine, 2004), chap. 3.
8
McElroy,
The Life and Voyage of Christopher Columbus
, 239â42; Cohen,
Four Voyages of Columbus
, 169â71; Sara and Keegan,
Archaeological Survey
, 15â41, 155â56, 170â71. Cf. Irving Rouse,
The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), chap. 3, 4, and 6; Samuel M. Wilson, ed.,
The Indigenous People of the Caribbean
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), chap. 12â14; and Samuel M. Wilson, “Cultural Pluralism and the Emergence of Complex Society in the Greater Antilles,” paper delivered at XVIII International Congress for Caribbean Archaeology, St. George's, Grenada, July 1999 (available at
uts.cc.utexas.edu/~swilson/wilson_iaca99.html
).
9
Wilson,
Indigenous People of the Caribbean
, 17; and Rouse,
The Tainos
, 20.
10
Wilson, “Cultural Pluralism.”
11
Franklin Knight, “Slavery and the Transformation of Society in Cuba, 1511â1760,” Elsa Goveia Memorial Lecture, University of West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, March 22, 1988, 3; Anthony Pagden,
Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present
(New York: Modern Library, 2001), 52.
12
Knight, “Slavery and the Transformation of Society in Cuba,” 3; J. H. Elliott,
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492â1830
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 17â19; and C. H. Haring,
The Spanish Empire in America
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947), 23â27.
13
The term “long argument” is borrowed from Stephen Foster,
The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
14
Carl Sauer has written that relations between Spaniards and Indians at Hispaniola began to fall apart in the spring of 1494, when one of Columbus's lieutenants removed the ear of a TaÃno vassal in response to an alleged theft by Indians of Spanish clothing. If, indeed, this is the first case of formal violence perpetrated on the Indians of the New World, one must still reckon with the psychological upheaval and disorientation that the Spaniards' arrival exacted on TaÃno communities; Sauer,
Early Spanish Main
, 84. Cf. Dave D. Davis, “The Strategy of Early Spanish Ecosystem Management in Cuba,”
Journal of Anthropological Research
30, no. 4 (Winter 1974): 294â314.
15
Juan Tomás Tavares K.,
The Indians of Hispaniola
(Santo Domingo: Editores de
Santo Domingo, 1978), 48. See also Julia Tavares,
On the Trail of the Arawaks
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975).
16
Sauer,
Early Spanish Main
, 149.
17
Ibid. Dave Davis argues that Velázquez and the Crown learned from its annihilation of the Indians on Hispaniola, introducing a milder form of encomienda in Cuba; Davis, “Early Spanish Ecosystem Management in Cuba,” 298â99.
18
Las Casas was one of several well-known critics of the Indian genocide. He came to his beliefs slowly, after first participating in the Spanish conquest of Cuba. To spare the Indians, Las Casas endorsed African slavery, though he came to regret this, too. At the time that he endorsed African slavery as an alternative to the forced labor of Indians, he was unaware of the cruelty of the African slave trade then under way at the hands of the Portuguese and Spanish slave traders, including Columbus himself. Once aware of it, he withdrew his endorsement, insisting that it was the only logical conclusion for a man of his religious and philosophical beliefs. Haring,
Spanish Empire in America
, 43â56; Pagden,
People and Empires
, 64â72; Robin Blackburn,
The Making of New World Slavery
(London: Verso, 1998),135â36; Lawrence Clayton, “Bartolomé de las Casas and the African Slave Trade,”
History Compass
7, no. 6 (July 2009): 1529â30.
19
Ladislao Guerra Valiente,
Las Huellas del Génesis: Guantánamo Hasta 1870
(Guantánamo: Editorial El Mar y Montaña, 2004), 11; Bartolomé de las Casas, “Hatuey,” in Pichardo Viñals, ed.,
Documentos para la Historia de Cuba
, 51â53.
20
Las Casas, “Hatuey,” 51â53.
21
Manuel A. Iturralde-Vinent, “Meso-Cenozoic Caribbean Paleogeography: Implications for the Historical Biogeography of the Region,”
International Geology Review
48 (2006): 791â827; Walter Alvarez, “Eastbound Sublithosphere Mantle Flow Through the Caribbean Gap and Its Relevance to the Continental Undertow Hypothesis,”
Terra Nova
13, no. 5 (2001): 333â37; and J. Pindell, L. Kennan, K. P. Stanek, W. V. Maresch, and G. Draper, “Foundations of the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Evolution: Eight Controversies Resolved,” in M. A. Iturralde-Vinent and E. G. Lidiak, eds., “Caribbean Plate Tectonics: Stratigraphic, Magmatic, Metamorphic, and Tectonic Events,”
Geologica Acta
4, nos. 1â2 (2006): 303â41. The geological composition of Cuba is immensely complicated, hence there is much division and debate about Cuba's paleogeological origin. See, for example, K. H. James, “Arguments for and Against the Pacific Origin of the Caribbean Plate: Discussion, Finding for an Inter-American Origin,” in Iturralde-Vinent and Lidiak, eds., “Caribbean Plate Tectonics,” 279â302. For schematic illustrations of the process described here, see
www.scotese.com
.
22
Levi Marrero,
GeografÃa de Cuba
(La Habana: Editorial Selecta, 1957), 610â18, Jacobo de la Pezuela,
Diccionario Geográfico, EstadÃstico, Histórico de la Isla de Cuba
, tomo 2 (Madrid: Imprenta del Establecimiento de Mellado, 1863), 496â512.
24
See José Barreiro, “Indians in Cuba,”
Cultural Survival Quarterly
13, no. 3
(1989): 56â60; and M. F. Pospisil, “Physical Anthropological Research on Indian Remnants in Eastern Cuba,”
Current Anthropology
12, no. 2 (April 1971): 229.
25
William E. Johns, “Dynamics of Boundary Currents and Marginal Seas: Windward Passage Experiment,” Physical Oceanography: Annual Reports: FY06, Office of Naval Research; William E. Johns et al., “On the Atlantic Inflow to the Caribbean Sea,”
Deep Sea Research
1, no. 49 (2002): 211â43; and J. L. Sar-miento et al., “High-latitude Controls of Thermocline Nutrients and Low Latitude Biological Productivity,”
Nature
42, no. 7 (Jan. 2004): 56â60.
28
Philip L. Richardson and Roger Goldsmith, “The Columbus Landfall: Voyage Track Corrected for Winds and Currents,”
Oceanus
30 (1987): 3â10.
30
On this boom-and-bust cycle in Cuba and Spain's other colonies, see Laird W. Bergad,
The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12â14, as well as Louis A. Pérez Jr.,
Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 27â31.
31
Pérez,
Cuba: Between Reform
, 38; Elliott,
Empires of the Atlantic World
, 224; Haring,
The Spanish Empire in America
, 223.
32
Pérez,
Cuba: Between Reform
, 38, and Elliott,
Empires of the Atlantic World
, 105.
33
Pérez,
Cuba: Between Reform
, 38â39; Elliott,
Empires of the Atlantic World
, 105â106.
35
Pérez,
Cuba: Between Reform
, 36â38; Guerra Valiente,
Las Huellas del Génesis
, 12â13.
36
Guerra Valiente,
Las Huellas del Génesis
, 127â29; Pérez,
Cuba: Between Reform
, 38â40.
37
Guerra Valiente,
Las Huellas del Génesis
, 127â29; Pérez,
Cuba: Between Reform
, 40â41, 46â7.
39
Elliott,
Empires of the Atlantic World
, 25; Haring,
The Spanish Empire in America
, 29.
40
Pérez,
Cuba: Between Reform
, 51â56.
41
Regino E. Boti,
Guantánamo: Breves apuntes acerca de los origenes y fundacÃon de esta ciudad
(Guantánamo: Imprenta de el Resumen, 1912). Guerra Valiente,
Las Huellas del Génesis
, 18, represents a vast improvement.
42
Guerra Valiente,
Las Huellas del Génesis
, 12. On the nettlesome problem of contraband in Spanish colonies, see G. Earl Sanders, “Counter-Contraband in Spanish America: Handicaps of the Governors in the Indies,”
The Americas
34, no. 1 (July 1977): 59â80; George H. Nelson, “Contraband Trade Under the Asiento,
1730â1739,”
American Historical Review
51, no. 1 (Oct. 1945): 55â67; Alfonso W. Qiroz, “Implicit Costs of Empire: Bureaucratic Corruption in Nineteenth-Century Cuba,”
Journal of Latin American Studies
35, no. 3 (Aug. 2003): 473â511, esp. 476â79; and Virginia Lee Brown, “Contraband Trade: A Factor in the Decline of Spain's American Empire,”
Hispanic American Historical Review
8, no. 2 (May 1928): 178â89, esp. 182â83.
43
Guerra Valiente,
Las Huellas del Génesis
, 12.
44
For British troop levels, see Vernon to Newcastle, September 2, 1741, in
Original Papers, Relating to the Expedition to the Island of Cuba
(London: M. Cooper, 1744), Houghton Library, Harvard University, 91.