before returning to Isabela in September 1494 In his absence, the colonists under Diego Columbus had enraged the island’s Taíno inhabitants by their violent efforts to secure their women and labor Meanwhile Columbus had settled on the idea of enslaving the Indians, who would pan for gold and other precious metals in the islands and be sold as chattel in European markets In February 1495, he approved the first shipment of some 500 Taíno to Spain to be sold as slaves A month later, in the interior of Hispaniola, there occurred the first large-scale pitched battle between Spanish and Taíno forces The Battle of Vega Real of March 1495 resulted in the Taínos’ total defeat, their slings and arrows proving no match for the Spaniards’ swords and armor One of the defeated caciques, Caonabo, was put in chains and sent to Spain He died en route and was buried at sea A statue in his honor can be found in present-day Santo Domingo, where many remember him as the Americas’ first indigenous martyr against the European invasion In the next few years, as news of Columbus’s discovery spread and as the Crown determined to subjugate the Indies, ships and men poured into the Caribbean In 1495–96, the island of Hispaniola was completely subdued and its surviving inhabitants enslaved The Crown soon replaced outright enslavement with the institution of encomienda, in which the Crown granted groups of Indians to individual encomenderos, who were said to hold them in encomienda, or “in trust.” The explorations continued through the late 1490s and into the 1500s In 1508, the Crown’s attention shifted from Hispaniola to Cuba, where a major expedition of conquest was launched in 1511 under the leadership of Crown-designate Diego Velázquez The invading Spaniards slaughtered thousands of native Arawak (or Sub-Taíno), Ciboney, and Mayarí By 1515, the conquest of Cuba was complete The conquest of the Caribbean thus took place in piecemeal fashion, with the Spanish “hopping” from one island to the next in their seaward march toward the west By 1515, the native population of Hispaniola, Cuba, and other Caribbean islands had declined precipitously In addition to warfare, violence, and forced labor, the principal cause of Indian deaths was their lack of biological immunity to European diseases, especially smallpox, as well as measles, bubonic plague, typhus, and cholera By the 1550s, the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean had all but disappeared, only a few thousand surviving; by 1600, virtually all had died The Caribbean islands, in turn, were used as launching-off points for further conquests in the Americas, beginning with the conquest of Mexico under Hernán Cortés in 1519–21 Central America, conquest of 67 See also Ferdinand V and Isabella I of Spain; voyages of discovery Further reading: Boorstin, Daniel J The Discoverers New York: Penguin Books, 1983; Denevan, William E., ed The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992; Dor-Ner, Zvi Columbus and the Age of Discovery New York: William Morrow & Company, 1991; Fuson, Robert H., trans The Log of Christopher Columbus Camden, ME: International Marine Publishing Co., 1987; Stannard, David E American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 Michael J Schroeder Central America, conquest of The Spanish conquest of Central America ranks among the most violently destructive processes in world history The combination of prolonged warfare, forced labor, enslavement, and disease decimated the indigenous population, which nonetheless survived and endured both the conquest and 300 years of colonial rule The conquest profoundly affected every aspect of life across the isthmus After consolidating their conquest of Hispaniola and establishing garrisons along the coast of Cuba in the 1490s, Spanish explorers began probing the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula and the Caribbean coasts of Central and South America In 1509, the Spanish Crown granted two concessions for colonization of these unexplored lands One was christened Nueva Andalusia, covering the territory east of the Gulf of Darién (at the junction of present-day Colombia and Panama) The second, Castilla de Oro, extended from the Gulf of Darién north to Cabo Gracias a Dios (at the modern Nicaragua-Honduras border) Initial forays along these coastal regions met with stiff native resistance, disease, hardship, and failure These early Spanish encounters with the Caribbean littorals of Central and South America implanted virulent European diseases among the native inhabitants that quickly spread north, south, and west Within a decade, smallpox and other pathogens were decimating the population of both the Andes and the Central American isthmus, years before Spaniards actually set foot in these areas Weakening indigenous polities by causing precipitous demographic declines and generating profound cultural and political crises, the rapid spread of these highly contagious pathogens helped to make subsequent conquests possible