Columbus had left Cádiz on September 25, 1493, at the head of a far larger expedition than his first, meant to settle and hold the lands he had claimed for Castile. His course took him farther south than before, into the chain of islands now called the Lesser Antilles. On Sunday, November 3, the fleet raised a rugged, forested island he named Dominica. The same day he reached a flatter island nearby and named it Santa María la Galante, after his flagship, the Marigalante.
The Kalinago people who lived on Dominica called it Wai'tu kubuli, usually translated as "tall is her body", a fair description of an island whose volcanic peaks rise steeply from the sea. Columbus did not stay. From Marie-Galante he sailed past a cluster of islets he called Todos los Santos and reached Guadeloupe, which his men explored from November 4 to 10.
The voyage then turned northwest along the arc of islands, past Puerto Rico, toward Hispaniola, where Columbus had left 39 men at the fort of La Navidad the previous winter. On the night of November 27 the fleet fired cannon and flares to signal the fort and got no reply. The next day the Spaniards found it burnt and its garrison dead.
Dominica's name, fixed on a Sunday in 1493, outlasted every later claim to the island. Spain made no lasting settlement there; the island later became a French and then a British colony before gaining independence as a republic in 1978.
Key people: Christopher Columbus