On December 5, 1492, Christopher Columbus's expedition sighted the island later called Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), during his first voyage across the Atlantic. His ships had already explored Cuba, and this new landfall would become the site of the first permanent European settlement in the Americas, La Isabela, founded the following year.
Columbus recorded in his ship's log that the island's mountains and lush greenery reminded him of Castile, prompting the name La Isla Española, later anglicized to Hispaniola. He believed, as he did with much of the Caribbean, that he had reached the outer islands of Asia.
Within weeks his flagship, the Santa María, ran aground off Hispaniola's northern coast, forcing Columbus to leave dozens of men behind at a hastily built fort called La Navidad while he returned to Spain to report his findings. Every man left there was dead by the time a return expedition arrived less than a year later, killed in conflict with the Taíno after abuses by the settlers.
Hispaniola became the launching point for Spain's colonization of the Americas, and within a generation the island's indigenous Taíno population, once numbering in the hundreds of thousands, had been decimated by disease, forced labor, and violence. The island's fate foreshadowed the demographic catastrophe that would unfold across the hemisphere in the centuries following Columbus's landfall.