1492-00-00: (Taíno, the Indigenous People of Ayiti at the Time of Columbus’s Arrival, Numbering Roughly 500,000, Organized Into Five Chiefdoms, Rapidly Decim…

1492-00-00: (Taíno, the Indigenous People of Ayiti at the Time of Columbus’s Arrival, Numbering Roughly 500,000, Organized Into Five Chiefdoms, Rapidly Decimated by Spanish Disease and Violence, Their Destruction Creating the Labor Vacuum That Launched the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Island): The Taíno were the people living on Ayiti when Columbus arrived in 1492. They numbered roughly 500,000, organized into five chiefdoms each led by a cacique, and their primary food staple was manioc. They were the historical enemies of the Carib people who inhabited many of the Lesser Antilles. Within decades of European contact, the Taíno population was annihilated by a combination of disease, forced labor, and outright violence. Their destruction was so rapid and so complete that the Spanish colonizers faced a labor crisis of their own making: there were no longer enough indigenous people to work the mines and fields. The solution was to deport enslaved Africans to the island, which means the genocide of the Taíno is directly and causally linked to the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade to the island. One catastrophe produced the next. Earlier scholarship mistakenly referred to the Taíno as Arawak, a related but distinct group who lived in Trinidad and Guyana.