The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [15]
The Tainos of Hispañola were from a group known as Arawaks who came from South America but spread northward into the Greater Antilles. Two of their best-known inventions were hammocks, which they called hamacas, and a musical instrument known as maracas. Two things that they had in common with the current inhabitants: they ate the root of the cassava plant, known today in Spanish by the word yuca, said to be of Taino origin, and they played a ball game for which they constructed fields throughout their communities. The Taino word for both their ball game and their ballpark is the Dominican word for a cane-worker village, a batey. While Tainos are clearly the reason that today’s Dominicans eat so much yucca, the fact that the current residents are also a ballpark-building people is a coincidence, an accident of history, like the fact that the Tainos, too, had extreme reverence for their mothers.
The Tainos were a seafaring people, which is why these South Americans spread so far north in the Caribbean. Another reason is that they were driven there by a more aggressive South American group, the Caribs, who were also expanding into the Caribbean. When Columbus came to the Caribbean, he sailed into an ongoing war between the Tainos and the Caribs. When he first encountered the Caribs, on Guadeloupe, he claimed that they were breeding Tainos for food and that their body parts were hung to cure like sides of beef. He said he was so revolted by this that he attacked and killed every Carib he could find, but since that was what he generally did, it has to be wondered if this was a fabricated excuse. However, the Caribs and the Tainos were clearly at war, and the Tainos seemed to be losing. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, an early Spanish historian of Santo Domingo, wrote that the cacique Cayacoa was one of the more ferocious resisters of the encroaching Caribs.
The Tainos built excellent dugout canoes, and in fact invented the word canoe, or canoa. They caught fish in nets, with hook and line, with spears or with traps, which are the same techniques used in San Pedro today.
In Taino Higüey, a people settled at the mouth of the Higuamo, where the river is wide and brackish and full of fish. No doubt drawn there by the fishing, this people called themselves Macorixes. Not only did the Macorixes have abundant river fish to net, oysters to pluck from the mangrove roots of the brackish water, and crabs to chase out of the holes they dug in the earth of the marshlands, but they could go to sea and try to land giant fish such as marlin, which were sometimes longer than the Macorix canoes. In short, it was a good spot for fishing and, set as it was a little upriver from the sea, was safe from all but the most furious of storms, known in Taino as a huracán.
Soon after the Spanish arrived, they began the conquest of Higüey and, when the Tainos resisted, unleashed a war of extermination. By 1504, with the territory more firmly under control, Juan Ponce de León was appointed governor of Higüey.
At the mouth of the Higuamo, people continued to fish, primarily from the eastern bank; but as time went on, a village also grew on the western bank. The area went by various names. The original settlement was and is still called Punta de Pescadores, Fishermen’s Point. But just as pragmatic and illustrative was another name, Mosquito