Key to the Indies: Port Towns in the Spanish Caribbean: 1493–1550

Abstract

Seaborne commerce, communication, and transportation to a great extent defined and enabled the Spanish enterprise in the Caribbean from the time Europeans first arrived in the islands. With the exception of a minority of towns such as Concepción de la Vega in Española that were established in the interiors of the islands to provide access to gold mines and the indigenous labor to exploit them, the majority of new towns and cities were located on the coasts. Although Santo Domingo, San Juan, and eventually Havana emerged as the principal ports and administrative capitals of the large islands of the northern Caribbean in the first half of the sixteenth century, many secondary and small port towns played essential roles in the rapid development of systems of local and regional exchange, indigenous slave raiding, and transatlantic commerce that linked the islands to Seville, the Canaries and other islands of the Atlantic and the southern Caribbean. Allowing island residents to take advantage of waterborne transportation often via indigenous-built canoes, linking the islands to one another and the circum-Caribbean mainland, and serving as staging grounds for slave-raiding and other expeditions that radiated out from the islands, these towns helped to forge a diverse and dynamic region that was closely tied both to Spain and later to the developing societies of Spanish America.

Indigenous Routes and Resource Materialities in the Early Spanish Colonial World: Comparative Archaeological Approaches

“…Recent surveys have proven that preconquest Indigenous settlement was substantial across many parts of the island, emerging as a function of local resources and political networks. By contrast, the majority of early Spanish settlements were established in those specific coastal areas that mapped onto the ship-based transportation regime underpinning much of the growing colonial network in the Caribbean (Altman 2017). Although the regime of mineral extraction established in the earliest years of the colony and reliant on a declining labor force would continue into the middle of the sixteenth century, it quickly became articulated with a new mobility regime based on increasingly formalized roads and animal transportation that centered on the island's new Atlantic and Caribbean ports.…”