I was watching a show the other day about travelling to Jamaica. Most of the people the traveller encountered were blacks (for lack of better term) with African heritage. The others were white “colonists.”
The program said Columbus “found” Jamaica on his second voyage across the Atlantac (1494?). During the slave trade tons of slaves were brought over from Africa to work on sugar plantations. Some slaves escaped up to the mountains to smoke ganja and worship Haile Selassi I of Ethiopia and created their own Rastafarian religion.
Ok so that’s the general gist of it (sure I got stuff wrong). Everyone on the island seems to speak of their African and slave heritage, so it seems everyone there is either a decendant of a slave or a decendant of a white master.
But who did Columbus find in Jamaica when he first got there? Certainlly there must have been some natives. Searching for “Jamaican Natives” on Google only brings up pages about people who live in Jamaica now.
Were the people lighter skinned like natives from Central and South America (Incans, Mayans, Etc)? Did they perhaps come to discover the island from another place like South America, or even after years of living somewhere else in the Caribbean? Or was the place just completely uninhabited when Columbus showed up? You’d think he’d need to see some native in action reaping the land before telling all the Europeans “Yes this is a good place to have slaves.”
Well, there were two major tribes of natives living in the Caribbean when the first Europeans arrived, the Carib and the Arawak, IIRC. If you google those names, you should get tons of info.
The natives Columbus encountered were called the Taino, and were nearly wiped out by the colonists. Some survive today in the mountains with the Maroon population, descended from escaped slaves.
All the islands in the Caribbean were inhabited by native americans, one tribe of which was called the Carib tribe, giving the region its name. The Spanish forced the indians into slavery. Waves of Old World epidemics washed through the islands. Since the indians had never been exposed to them the epidemics caused greater than 90% mortality. The indian social structure was destroyed, and people who might have survived with palliative care died because the people who might have cared for them were also sick, dying, enslaved, or hiding in the hills. The surviving indians were either worked to death, hunted for sport, or assimilated into the Spanish population as concubines. Very soon the native population was simply extinct. Since there were no more indian slaves to work the plantations, African slaves were imported. Africans had already been exposed to Old World diseases, and were as resistant as Europeans. Although the mortality rate for African slaves was very high, enough survived to make slave plantations economically profitable.
Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico were inhabitted by Taino indians. Although by the time Columbus arrived there were some reported settlements of Caribe indians as well.
To clarify a little more, the Taino are (were) a subgroup of the Arawak linguistic group. Caribs, who at the time of Columbus were mostly found in the Lesser Antilles within the region, belong to the Carib linguistic group (along with some mainly South American tribes).
The answer to your actual question has been answered in detail already, so I won’t go into that. What I will address, however, is this pretty flawed interpretation of Jamaican society.
Many/most individual Jamaicans can easily trace their roots to slaves, to indigenous populations of the Americas, to British, to Scottish, and other ethnic groups. Jamaican heritage is usually discussed in terms of and, not or.
Out of Many, One. It’s Jamaica’s motto and it’s very accurate.
As a point of etymylogical trivia, the caribs may or may not have practiced ritual eating of their dead, though whether they did or didn’t Spanish chroniclers accused them of it in several accounts. In some Spanish dialects the name appeared as “caniba”, hence the word “cannibal”.
