Christopher Columbus
Since the late 20th century, historians have criticized Columbus for initiating colonization and for abuse of natives. Among reasons for this criticism is the poor treatment of the native Taíno people of Hispaniola, whose population declined rapidly after contact with the Spanish. Columbus required the natives to pay tribute in gold and cotton. Modern estimates for the pre-Columbian population of Hispaniola are around 250,000–300,000. According to the historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, by 1548, 56 years after Columbus landed, and 42 years after he died, fewer than 500 Taíno were living on the island. The indigenous population declined rapidly, due primarily to the first pandemic of European endemic diseases, which struck Hispaniola after 1519. The natives had no acquired immunity to these new diseases and suffered high fatalities. There is also documentation that they were overworked.
Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean
A separate ethnic people that inhabited the Peninsula of Samaná and part of the northern coast toward the Nahua in what today is the Dominican Republic, and, by most contemporary accounts, differed in language and customs from the classical or high Taíno who lived on the eastern part of the island of Hispaniola then known. According to Eustaquio Fernandez de Navarrete, they were “warriors and spirited people,” (“gente animosa y guerrera”). The Cronista de Indias, Pedro Martir accused them of cannibalism: “when they descend from the mountains to wage war on their neighbors, they kill and eat some of them” (“trae[n] origen de los caníbales, pues cuando de las montañas bajan a lo llano para hacer guerra á sus vecinos, si matan á algunos se los comen”). Fray Ramón Pané, often dubbed as the first anthropologist of the Caribbean, distinguished the Cigüayos’ language from the rest of those spoken on Hispaniola. Bartolomé de las Casas, who studied them and was one of the few who read Ramón Pané’s original work in Spanish, provided most of the documentation about this group. Linguists Granberry and Gary Vescelius believe that the Cigüayos emigrated from Central America. Wilson (1990) states that circa 1500 this was the kingdom Cacicazgo of Cacique Guacangarí.