On his second voyage across the Atlantic, Christopher Columbus sighted Jamaica on May 3, 1494, and claimed it for the Spanish crown, naming it Santiago. The island, then home to the Taino people, would become a Spanish colony and later a brutal center of the transatlantic slave trade and sugar production under English rule. Columbus himself would return in 1503, shipwrecked, and spend a miserable year stranded there.
Columbus's second voyage was a very different affair from his first. Instead of three small ships and a crew desperate simply to survive, he commanded a fleet of seventeen vessels carrying over a thousand men intent on colonization. Sailing along the southern coast of Cuba, he spotted the mountainous silhouette of another island on May 3, 1494, and named it Santiago after Spain's patron saint, though the indigenous Taino name, Xaymaca, meaning 'land of wood and water,' eventually won out in altered form as Jamaica.
Columbus did not linger long on this visit, continuing his exploration of the Caribbean, but the island's fate was already sealed. Spanish settlement soon followed, decimating the Taino population through disease and forced labor within a generation. The island later passed to English control in 1655 and became one of the most profitable and merciless sugar colonies in the world, built on the labor of enslaved Africans transported across the Atlantic.
Columbus's own relationship with the island grew more personal nine years later, when a shipwreck stranded him and his crew on Jamaica's coast for nearly a year, forcing him to survive on the goodwill—and eventually the exhausted patience—of the very Taino people his voyages had begun to destroy.
Key people: Christopher Columbus