The Eastern Stars Read Online Free Page B

the island Española to leave no doubt about ownership, and established the first European colony in the Americas. It became a base for the Spanish conquest of America, and most of the butchers who conquered for Spain—including Cortés, Pizarro, Ponce de León, and Balboa—passed through there.
    Gold was the Spanish obsession of the time, and when they found some they enslaved the locals to mine it. Only twenty-five years later, most of the gold and most of the locals were gone. The Spanish had worked to death or infected with fatal diseases all but 11,000 of the estimated population of 400,000, earning Santo Domingo an important place in the history of genocide.
    Understandably, Dominicans do not feel comfortable with their founding history. There is no Columbus Day holiday in the Dominican Republic, because they knew him too well. Yet there is a certain pride, especially in the capital city, in the firstness that Columbus gave them—that Santo Domingo is the oldest European city in the Americas and its university the oldest in the Americas.
    But with both the gold and the population gone, Santo Domingo became a backwater, never again to play a major role on the world stage. Sugar, which for a thousand years had been a Mediterranean product, could be produced more cheaply in the Caribbean tropics. The Dominicans were one of the first sugar producers in the Americas. The original colonists tried it, harvesting the first Dominican sugar crop in 1506. But despite high sugar prices in Europe, Dominicans failed to become major sugar producers. Sugar requires a great deal of labor, and the Spanish, having killed most of the locals, were left with an underpopulated island. Like other islands, they began importing African slaves, but starting in 1522 the slaves began rebelling. Soon there were more runaway slaves than Spaniards in the colony.
    Away from the capital, in the far western regions of the second-largest Caribbean island, local sugar was being sold illegally to enemies of Spain, such as France and Holland. The Spanish solution was to burn and destroy all the coastal agriculture on the western side of the island, where the smuggling had taken place, and forcibly vacate the area. As a result, it was taken over by the French, who turned it into the most profitable colony in the world, while the eastern Spanish half remained impoverished and neglected.
    In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—when the French side exploded in what would be the Americas’ first successful African slave rebellion and in what became the world’s first postcolonial black nation—the Santo Domingo side continued to drift.
    In 1795, during the Haitian revolution, the French took the Spanish side away from Spain. The Dominicans rebelled and threw the French and the Haitians out but, instead of declaring independence, asked the Spanish back. From 1809 to 1821 the Spanish ruled again, but they ruled harshly and were indifferent to developing the colony. Tired of Spanish rule, the Dominicans rebelled again—as did most of the Spanish colonies at the time—and in a rare moment of triumph the Dominicans drove the Spanish out and declared their independence. This should have been the moment of national glory, the founding moment in the nation. But immediately a sense of panic seemed to grip Dominicans about being alone in the world. They entered into negotiations with Simón Bolívar, the great South American liberator from Venezuela who dreamed of one large independent Latin American nation called Gran Colombia.
    Instead the Haitian army invaded in 1822 and, with little resistance, took over and immediately abolished slavery. The Dominicans never even had their own abolitionist movement. Haitian rule was not only antislavery, it was antiwhite—even antimulatto—and the Haitians, wishing to make the eastern side of the island blacker, encouraged black immigration from the United States and got five thousand blacks, mostly from New