Santo Domingo becomes the first lasting European city in the Americas

Spanish settlers founded Santo Domingo on the southern side of Hispaniola in 1496, and it became the first European city in the Americas to last. It held the high court, the cathedral and the treasury, and for most of the sixteenth century every Spanish expedition into the Caribbean, Mexico and the northern coast of South America was fitted out or licensed there. The men who went on to take Cuba and Puerto Rico sailed from its harbour. The city stands on ground that had been Taino country four years earlier, and it could be built and provisioned because that population was already collapsing under the gold tribute and the labour drafts. Spain's imperial capital in the New World was raised on the fastest demographic catastrophe in the record. The same island later carried the richest colony in the world and then the first Black republic, which puts Hispaniola at the centre of the Atlantic story three separate times.

An emperor of the Askia dynasty, remembered as Askia the Great, made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1495 with an escort of 500 horsemen and 100 foot soldiers and three hundred thousand gold pieces. He was out of his states for nearly two years. He gave away a hundred thousand pieces in Medina and Mecca, spent as much again on the upkeep of himself and his large suite, and put the rest into purchases that he carried home to Gao, his capital, in 1497. He governed for thirty six years and kept peace across territory as large as half of Europe. He built a standing professional army, divided the empire into viceroyalties under men of his own family or household, set up a system of weights and measures to hold traders to honest dealing, and used the waters of the Niger in a canal system that carried cultivation to the edge of the desert. Letters and science were taught at the mosque of Sankore in Timbuktu.

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 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.