Seventeen ships and twelve hundred men turn a voyage into a colony

Columbus crossed the Atlantic a second time with seventeen ships and about twelve hundred men, and founded the settlement of Isabella on the north coast of Hispaniola. The numbers carry the meaning. Three small vessels and ninety men had been an expedition. A fleet this size brought craftsmen, soldiers, priests, livestock, seed and tools, which is what a state sends when it means to stay. Dubois treats the second voyage as the hinge between reconnaissance and occupation. From this point Spain was administering territory, assigning labour and extracting gold, and the Taino had become a workforce inside somebody else's plan. Isabella itself failed within a few years, defeated by fever and a bad site, and the capital moved to Santo Domingo. The model it established did not fail. Every European colony that followed in the Caribbean copied the arrangement: a fortified town on the coast, a hinterland worked under compulsion, and metal or sugar going out on the returning ships.

Returning to the northern coast of Haiti on 28 November 1493, Columbus found La Navidad wrecked and the men he had left there dead. Guacanagari, the cacique of Marien who had helped build the fort, told him Caonabo had done it. Caonabo ruled Maguana, a chiefdom in the interior, and the explanation offered was that his people had been abused by the Spaniards and that he had struck back on their account. Rouse reports the accusation as Guacanagari's, which is the correct way to handle it. The one man with a motive to steer Spanish anger elsewhere was the ally on whose territory the fort had stood. Columbus took the story. The Spanish later seized Caonabo by a trick and put him on a ship for Spain, and he died at sea. Guacanagari kept his alliance and lost his chiefdom anyway. Both routes arrived at the same place inside twenty years.

The reconquest of the Iberian peninsula was completed in January 1492. The Spanish crown held a papal mandate to overcome unbelievers wherever it met them, and Pope Alexander VI tied that mandate directly to the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Muslims who had accepted baptism in Spain were called Moriscos. A number of them returned to Islam once they were across the ocean and set about preaching it among the indigenous people they found, with enough success to bring a series of anti Muslim decrees from King Ferdinand. Those decrees still reserved that Moors were not to be taken as slaves. Later the French applied the same religious reasoning to enslaving Muslims of the Barbary coast, and then Muslims of any origin at all. Toleration in Iberia had covered only those willing to convert, and only until about 1500. Suppression of Islam in the Americas continued into the last decades of the twentieth century.

The crew pulled timber, nails and fittings out of the grounded Santa Maria near what is now Cap-Haitien and built a small fortified post on shore. They called it La Navidad for the day. Roughly thirty nine men stayed in it when Columbus sailed for Spain, provisioned with what the ship had carried and told to look for gold and to keep on good terms with the local cacique, Guacanagari, whose people had come out in canoes to help salvage the wreck. Girard treats this as the first European settlement of the Americas, and it stood on Haitian ground. It did not last a year. When Columbus returned in November 1493 the fort had been burned and every man in it was dead, killed by islanders who had endured their demands for gold and for women. The first European colony in the New World was destroyed by the people it was planted among, eleven months after it went up.