Spanish Jamaica

Santiago, known today as Spanish Jamaica, was Spain's colony on the island the Taíno called Xaymaca, land of springs. Christopher Columbus landed there on 5 May 1494 during his second voyage, named the island Santiago, and used it as a mini-state for his family; after his ships were wrecked in St Ann's Bay in 1503 he and his men were stranded on Jamaica for a year before help came from Hispaniola. Permanent colonization began in 1509 under Juan de Esquivel, who founded the first capital, Sevilla la Nueva, on the island's north coast — the first European settlement on Jamaica. Sevilla la Nueva was abandoned within a generation, after earthquakes and hurricanes damaged it, and the seat of government moved to Villa de la Vega, later called Spanish Town, on the safer southern plain. For the rest of the Spanish period the colony stayed a poor outpost of the Spanish West Indies within the Viceroyalty of New Spain: the Taíno population collapsed, Spanish settlement remained thin, and the island never developed the plantation riches of its neighbours. That weakness invited attack, and in 1655 an English expedition under William Penn and Robert Venables captured the island, ending Spanish Jamaica; Spain ceded it formally in 1670.