Hispaniola’s indigenous population collapsed from hundreds of thousands to near zero within decades

Evidence

Under the encomienda system, settlers were granted the right to the labor of indigenous people in order to mine for precious metals. It was not technically slavery—workers were not owned by the settlers—but in practice it was little different. Overworked, attacked by diseases against which they had no immunity, executed as punishment for revolt, and often committing suicide to escape their brutal conditions, the indigenous population declined precipitously within the first few decades of Spanish colonization. By 1514, of a population estimated to have been between 500,000 and 750,000 in 1492, only 29,000 were left. By the mid-sixteenth century the indigenous population of the island had all but vanished. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 59

The results are to be seen in the best estimates that have been prepared of the trend of population in Hispaniola. These place the population in 1492 at between 200,000 and 300,000. By 1508 the number was reduced to 60,000; in 1510 Oviedo doubted whether five hundred Indians of pure stock remained. In 1570 only two villages survived of those about whom Columbus had assured his sovereigns, less than eighty years before, that “there is no better nor gentler people in the world.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 624

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s article on trees as infrastructure and to broader colonial demography narratives; also foreshadows the contrast with the enslaved African population that follows in Saint-Domingue.
• CANDY: The grim irony of Columbus praising ‘no better nor gentler people’ while they were systemically destroyed is a striking, tweetable historical fact.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone interested in pre-Columbian demographic collapse or colonial atrocity statistics.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 59; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 624