Instead, plantations were established to supply food for the Spanish ships that sailed between Europe and the Americas. Jamaica was, however, never heavily populated by the Spanish, for they found no gold on the island. In 1538 the Spanish moved the capital of Jamaica to Spanish Town. Jamaica’s first town was built by the Spanish in Saint Ann’s Bay and was called Sevilla Nueva. In the early years of the 16th century the practice of importing slaves from West Africa to work in Jamaica began. Jamaica was settled by the Spanish in 1510 and the indigenous Taino people were forced into slavery and eventually exterminated. The word Jamaica actually derives from the Arawak word Xaymaca, meaning “Land of wood and water”.Ĭhristopher Columbus was the first European to set foot on the island when he claimed it for Spain on May 3rd, 1494, during his second voyage to the New World. The Arawak language spoken by the Tainos survives in many words such as ‘hammock’, ‘hurricane’, ‘tobacco’, ‘barbeque’ and ‘canoe’. Many Tainos fiercely resisted the Spanish occupation of their land and some even committed suicide rather than serve as slaves. After living continuously in Jamaica for almost 900 years, the Tainos were wiped out within 50 years of the Spanish conquest in 1494, due to exploitation by the Spanish settlers, starvation and a lack of resistance to European diseases. They were stone–age peoples who had migrated to Jamaica from the northern coast of South America. The first Jamaicans were the Taino Indians who settled in Jamaica around 600 AD. Modern Jamaica is built on a historical legacy of genocide perpetrated against the island’s indigenous peoples, on the experience of over three hundred years of slavery and oppression suffered by the Jamaicans of African origin and on the interplay between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East in the building of a proud, free and progressive nation in the heart of the Caribbean. The history of Jamaica over the past 500 years has been marked by the courage of the Jamaican people in their triumphant struggle for freedom and justice and by their unrelenting resistance and determination in the face of adversity and discrimination.
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