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Hispaniola (Spanish: La Española; Haitian Creole: Ispayola; Taíno: Ayiti) is a major Caribbean island comprising the sovereign nations of the Dominican Republic to the east (approximately 64% of the island's area) and Haiti to the west (approximately 36% of the island's area). The island is located between Cuba to the west and Puerto Rico to the east.

Hispaniola is the site of the first European colonies founded by Christopher Columbus on his voyages in 1492 and 1493. It is the tenth-most-populous island in the world, and the most populous in the Americas. It is the second largest island in the Caribbean, with Cuba being nearly 44% larger by area, while having more than twice (237%) Cuba's population density (with roughly 19.1 vs 11.2 million people, respectively). Hispaniola is the 22nd-largest island in the world.


Etymology

The island bears various names originated by its native people, the Taíno Amerindians. When Columbus took possession of the island in 1492 he named it Hispana in Latin and La Isla Española, meaning "The Spanish Island", in Spanish. Bartolomé de las Casas shortened the name to "Española", and when Pietro Martyr d‘Anghiera detailed his account of the island in Latin, he translated the name as Hispaniola. Because Anghiera's literary work was translated into English and French in a short period of time, the name "Hispaniola" became the most frequently used term in English-speaking countries for the island in scientific and cartographic works.

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and de las Casas documented that the island was called Haití ("Mountainous Land") by the Taíno. D'Anghiera added another name, Quizqueia (supposedly "Mother of all Lands"), but later research shows that the word does not seem to derive from the original Arawak Taíno language. Although the Taínos use of Haití is verified and the name was used by all three historians, evidence suggests that it probably was not the Taíno name of the whole island. Haití was the Taíno name of a region (now known as Los Haitises) in the northeastern section of the present-day Dominican Republic. In the oldest documented map of the island, created by Andrés de Morales, that region is named Montes de Haití ("Haiti Mountains"). Las Casas apparently named the whole island Haití on the basis of that particular region; d'Anghiera said that the name of one part was given to the whole island.

The colonial terms Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo are sometimes still applied to the whole island, although these names refer, respectively, to the colonies that became Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

The name Haïti was adopted by Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines as the official name of independent Saint-Domingue, as a tribute to the Amerindian predecessors. Quisqueya (from Quizqueia) is used to refer to the Dominican Republic.


Post-Columbian

Christopher Columbus arrived at the island during his first voyage to the Americas in 1492, where his flagship, the Santa Maria, sank after running aground on Christmas Day. During his arrival, he founded the settlement of La Navidad on the north coast of present-day Haiti. On his return the subsequent year, following the disbandment of La Navidad, Columbus quickly founded a second settlement farther east in present-day Dominican Republic, La Isabela.

The island was inhabited by the Taíno, one of the indigenous Arawak peoples. The Taino were at first tolerant of Columbus and his crew, and helped him to construct La Navidad on what is now Môle Saint-Nicolas, Haiti, in December 1492. European colonization of the island began in earnest the following year, when 1,300 men arrived from Spain under the watch of Bartolomeo Columbus. In 1496 the town of Nueva Isabela was founded. After being destroyed by a hurricane, it was rebuilt on the opposite side of the Ozama River and called Santo Domingo. It is the oldest permanent European settlement in the Americas.

The Taíno population of the island was rapidly decimated, owing to a combination of new infectious diseases, to which they had no immunity, and harsh treatment by Spanish overlords. In 1501, the colony began to import African slaves, believing them more capable of performing physical labor. The natives had no immunity to European diseases, including smallpox, and entire tribes were destroyed. From an estimated initial population of 250,000 in 1492, 14,000 Arawaks were left by 1517.

In 1574, a census taken of the Greater Antilles reported 1,000 Spaniards and 12,000 African slaves on Hispaniola.

As Spain conquered new regions on the mainland of the Americas, its interest in Hispaniola waned, and the colony’s population grew slowly. By the early 17th century, the island and its smaller neighbors (notably Tortuga) became regular stopping points for Caribbean pirates. In 1606, the government of Philip III ordered all inhabitants of Hispaniola to move close to Santo Domingo, to avoid interaction with pirates. Rather than secure the island, his action meant that French, English and Dutch pirates established their own bases on the abandoned north and west coasts of the island.

In 1665, French colonization of the island was officially recognized by King Louis XIV. The French colony was given the name Saint-Domingue. In the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, Spain formally ceded the western third of the island to France. Saint-Domingue quickly came to overshadow the east in both wealth and population. Nicknamed the "Pearl of the Antilles," it became the richest and most prosperous colony in the West Indies, with a slave society based on sugar cane production when demand for sugar was high in Europe. It was an important port in the Americas for goods and products flowing to and from France and Europe.

With the treaty of Peace of Basel, revolutionary France emerged as a major European power. In the second 1795 Treaty of Basel (July 22), Spain ceded the eastern two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola, later to become the Dominican Republic. French settlers had begun to colonize some areas in the Spanish side of the territory.

European colonists often died young due to tropical fevers, as well as racial conflicts in the late eighteenth century. When the French Revolution abolished slavery in the colonies on February 4, 1794, it was a European first, and when Napoleon reimposed slavery in 1802 it led to a major upheaval by the emancipated black slaves.

Thousands succumbed to a yellow fever during the summer months and more than half of the French army died because of disease. After the French removed the surviving 7,000 troops in late 1803, the leaders of the revolution declared the new nation of independent Haiti in early 1804.

Fearing the influence of the slave revolution, the United States and European powers refused to recognize Haiti, the second republic in the western hemisphere. In addition, the US maintained an arms and goods embargo against the country during the years of its own conflict with Great Britain. France demanded a high payment for compensation to slaveholders who lost their property, and Haiti was saddled with unmanageable debt for decades. It became one of the poorest countries in the Americas, while the Dominican Republic, whose independence was won via a very different route gradually has developed into the largest economy of Central America and the Caribbean.