Ponce de Leon plants Spanish towns beside Puerto Rico's goldfields

The Mona Passage is the stretch of water between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, about a hundred kilometres wide and a day or two under sail. Juan Ponce de Leon crossed it on an earlier reconnaissance and came back reporting gold. In 1508 the Spanish crown gave him authority to occupy the island. He founded Caparra, on the northern coast near the site of modern San Juan, and San German in the southwest, both placed close to the streams where the metal was being panned. Those were the first lasting Spanish settlements on Puerto Rico. The pattern is the one already running on Hispaniola: locate a deposit, plant a town beside it, and put the local population to work through the encomienda, a grant assigning a named group of Taino to a named Spaniard. Puerto Rico's Taino population fell as fast as Hispaniola's had, and for the same reasons, which were overwork, hunger and imported disease.

Estimates of the population of Hispaniola in 1492 run from about one hundred thousand to eight million, and the spread does not much matter for what followed. By 1508 no more than sixty thousand Tainos remained. Forty years after that fewer than five hundred were left. Within a single generation the native population of the island had for practical purposes ceased to exist, killed by European diseases and by forced labour. The gold that had sealed their fate ran out quickly, and when word of the riches of Mexico and Peru reached the island the Spanish began to leave. Those who stayed concentrated on the eastern side around Santo Domingo, and the western third, the future Haiti, stood almost empty for close to a century. The Spanish also combed the neighbouring islands for replacement labour and emptied the Bahamas of people in the process. The first African slaves reached Hispaniola early in the sixteenth century.

Afonso I, king of Kongo, said that during a battle in 1506 he saw Saint James the Greater above the field, and that the saint assured him of a victory his numbers did not justify. He won. Saint James became the working patron of the kingdom, and many Kongolese came to treat him and Afonso as one figure, a royal ancestor carrying a sword. Catholic practice in Kongo was already old by then, and it kept the saint at the centre of royal display for two more centuries. In the last decades of the eighteenth century tens of thousands of Kongolese were sold into Saint-Domingue, most heavily onto the northern plain. They arrived knowing Saint James. West Africans working the same fields matched the armed saint to Ogou, the spirit of iron. The July pilgrimage that fills Plaine-du-Nord with drums and mud baths inherits both lines at once.

In 1510 a house was built on the bank of the Ozama river at Santo Domingo for Diego Colon, son of Christopher Columbus and governor of the Spanish Indies. It was an Italian Renaissance villa, and it is known as the Casa del Almirante, the admiral's house. Its three part symmetrical plan fixed the style and the proportions of smaller Spanish country houses across the island from the fifteen thirties onward. The first of those houses had open loggias without full galleries. Galleries began to be added around the end of the fifteen hundreds and grew steadily more popular through the following century. When French planters started building in the western part of the island a hundred and fifty years after that, they were working on ground where the Spanish pattern was long established. The plantation house of Saint-Domingue, one room deep with a broad gallery in front and small cabinet rooms behind, descends from a governor's villa on the Ozama.