These Truths: A History of the United States

In October 1492, Christopher Columbus supposedly wrote in his diary that he and his crew had seen naked people on the island they called Haiti—“land of mountains.” Columbus called the island Hispaniola—“the little Spanish island”—because he believed that the island on which he had landed had no name. Columbus noticed that the people who lived there had no weapons and no tools. He figured they also lacked a faith and exercised no guile. He wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, telling them that he would take six of them back to Spain so that they could learn to speak, for neither he nor his crew understood a word that they spoke.

Two months after his journey to Haiti, Columbus intended to go back to Spain, but his three-masted ship sank. His crew “salvaged the timbers to build a fort” (4). The sunken ship has never been found. Columbus thought about the people he had met, whom he called “Indians” because he believed he had sailed to the East Indies.

When Columbus arrived in Barcelona, he hired Ramón Pané, a priest and scholar, to accompany him on his next voyage. He figured that Pané could come to understand the indigenous people in Haiti and how they worshipped.