Captaincy General of Santo Domingo

The Captaincy General of Santo Domingo was the first Spanish captaincy in the New World, established on the island of Hispaniola in 1492 and governed from Santo Domingo, the oldest surviving European city in the Americas. It began as a military stronghold and a launching pad: Ponce de León sailed from its harbour for Puerto Rico, Diego Velázquez for Cuba, Hernán Cortés for Mexico and Vasco Núñez de Balboa towards the Pacific. A gold rush from 1500 to 1508 drew the crown's attention, and the conquistadors took some thirty thousand kilograms of gold from the island in two decades, more than all of Europe produced in those years. The Taíno population collapsed from roughly four hundred thousand to sixty thousand by 1508 and to a handful by 1535 through forced labour, hunger and disease. As the principal political entity of the early colonial Caribbean the captainty held jurisdiction over Spain's insular possessions and mainland coasts, and its Real Audiencia became the model later colonies copied. The devastations of Osorio in 1605 emptied the island's western third, which French settlers had already colonised; Spain ceded it at the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, planting the seeds of Haiti. The Treaty of Basel of 1795 handed Santo Domingo itself to France, until the Dominican general Juan Sánchez Ramírez reconquered it in 1809 and the colony declared independence in 1821.