Tainos and Caribs were the inhabitants of the Caribbean when Columbus reached the Americas, both human groups became extinct soon after contact, decimated by the Spaniards and the diseases they brought.
When Spaniards landed on the coast of Jamaica in early May 1494, perhaps 50,000- 60,000 Tainos lived there (Sherlock and Bennett, 1998:48). By 1655, when the British invaded Spanish Jamaica, the Tainos were nearly extinct, and the few survivors lived in the vastness of the Blue Mountains. Jamaica was settled by the Spanish in 1509, and “under Spanish rule, Africans were brought to Jamaica from 1517 onwards as laborers to take the place of the native population, the Tainos/Arawaks, who became extinct as a result of diseases, and horrific abuses by the Spaniards” (Dalby, 1971, p.31).
Few and, for the most part, evil are the records of Spanish colonization in Jamaica. The sites of the early settlements are hard to trace, and the history of the 150 years, during which the Spaniards bore rule in the island, is little more than a blank. The Indians (Tainos), said to have been at first kindly treated, were afterwards exterminated, and the colony, which began with brightness and prosperity, gradually passed into obscurity and decay (Lucas 96). Jamaica had been at first intended as a place of supply for Spanish ships and expeditions, and its main trade is said to have consisted in providing fresh provisions for the homeward bound merchant ships. The island, being a half-open land, given up in great measure to forest and to pasture, it is not surprising that the colonists were few or that the Spaniards found Jamaica less attractive than the larger islands and the vast continent teeming with gold and silver (Lucas 97).
Terracotta figurines and Spanish coins found in association confirm that Taino inhabited parts of Jamaica when the British took over the island in 1655, indicating that some indigenous people, thought by some to have long since been exterminated, survived into the seventeenth century. Those finds challenge the myth that all the Amerindians in Jamaica had been exterminated before the arrival of the British (Hauser 148).
Under British government Jamaica became the headquarters of the British buccaneers. Their marauding exploits were permitted if not encouraged, by the British authorities in the island, and they regularly brought their booty to be sold in Jamaica, generally spending the proceeds in drink and rioting.
In Jamaica, the indigenous population is still being referred to as the Arawaks despite the adoption of the term Tainos, to distinguish the native population of the Greater Antilles from the Arawaks of South America. Irving Rouse defines the Tainos as “the ethnic group that inhabited the Bahamiam archipelago, most of the Greater Antilles and the northern part of the Lesser Antilles prior to and during the time of Columbus (1992, 185.) According to Rouse, in Columbus’s time, the Tainos lacked an overall name. The people referred to themselves by the names of the localities in which they lived- for example the Puerto Ricans called themselves Borinquem, their name for the island. Traditionally Jamaicans have been taught that Xaymaca was the Taino name given to the island, meaning “land abounding with springs” from which Jamaica- land of wood and water- was derived.
Citations"
Historical Linguistics 1997, pg. 323
Lectures on British Colonization and Empire: First Series (1660-1783) pg. 50
Lucas, Sir Charles Prestwood. The West Indies. pg. 96-98.
Atkinson, Lesley Gail. The earliest Inhabitants: the Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino.
Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica. pg. 29
Chang, Mildred M. The Jamaican Accompong Maroons: Continuities and Transformations. pg. 28
Hauser, Mark W. Out of Many, One People: The Historical Archaeology of Colonial Jamaica. Pg 148.
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