History of Puerto Rico

The island of Puerto Rico was discovered on November 19, 1493 by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage of exploration.  Some historians are of the opinion that Puerto Rico was discovered by Martin Alonso Pinzon in 1492 while he was separated from Columbus.  The Taino, the native inhabitants of the island, called it “Boriquen” or “Borinquen”, a term that bears some resemblance to the acoustic of its current name, and provided the still existing “Puerto Rican.”

By all accounts, the Taino were peaceful, with a hospitable culture. They gave the Spaniards gifts of gold; the metal was simply of decorative value to the Taino, like a necklace of snails, while for the inhabitants of Europe, Asia and Africa gold was and remains highly valued.

There is a theory that this behavior was due to the belief that the Spaniards were gods because of the color of their skin, but modern thinking has discarded this as myth.  In fact what emerges from the writings of the colonists is the reference that they were treated like gods by the Taino, which is the colonizer’s own approach.

It is not an objective indicator, however, of what the Taino really thought about them.  Remember, that at the time there were no good Spanish translators able to deepen a conversation with the Taino and so the colonizers were left to form their own impressions.

Another incident that is worth examining is the death of Diego Salcedo, a settler who had enslaved a group of Taino.  They rebelled against him for his cruelties and drowned him in a river.  Many people believe that the act was carried out to verify his status as a god, but the scholars differ.

One fact used to rebut this presumption is that in 1492 Fort Christmas was built, in what is today the Dominican Republic, with the remains of the ship Santa Maria.  When the Spaniards returned in 1493 they found that the fort had been destroyed by fire and that the Taino had killed all the settlers living there.  Experts in the field are of the opinion that the death of Salcedo was a premeditated act by Cacique Agueybana, which represented the beginning of the Taino revolt against the colonizers.

In 1508 Juan Ponce de Leon colonized the island and founded the town of Caparra.  Ponce de Leon was greeted by the Cacique Agueybana and quickly took control of the island.  This is in contrast to the failure of Vicente Yanez Pinzon, who was Captain-General and Magistrate and was limited to the land and animals in the west of the island.

After the death of Christopher Columbus, who had been declared “Governor of the Indies,” the title was denied his son, Diego Columbus.  The Spanish Crown named Juan Ponce de Leon as the first official governor of the island.

Under his commission, the Spaniards forced the Taino to abandon their many villages to live and work on farms in exchange for a Christian education.  Many Tainos died because they lacked immunity to diseases brought by Europeans, such as measles, smallpox, and possibly syphilis.

However, a number of Indians also died in the many battles against the Spaniards.  The Tainos who survived were released when Fray Bartolome de las Casas convinced the Catholic monarchs to eliminate the practice. To fill the void left by the freed Taino slaves, the Spaniards began to bring black African slaves to Puerto Rico. Since then most Africans have established themselves in the east of the island, in towns such as Vieques, Ponce and Loiza.  This mix of ethnicities had lead to modern Puerto Ricans, and Puerto Rico as a country, to be described as tricolor.