Lucayan People - The Spanish-Lucayan Encounter

The Spanish-Lucayan Encounter

In 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain with three ships, seeking a direct route to Asia. On October 12, 1492 Columbus reached an island in the Bahamas, an event long regarded as the 'discovery' of America. This first island to be visited by Columbus was called Guanahani by the Lucayans, and San Salvador by the Spanish. The identity of the first American landfall by Columbus remains controversial, but many authors accept Samuel E. Morison's identification of what was later called Watling (or Watling's) Island as Columbus' San Salvador. The former Watling Island was officially renamed San Salvador in 1925. Luis Marden's identification of Samana Key as Guanahani is the strongest contender with the former Watling Island theory. Columbus visited several other islands in the Bahamas hunting for gold before sailing on to Cuba.

Columbus spent a few days visiting other islands in the vicinity: Santa María de la Concepción, Fernandina, and Saomete. Lucayans on San Salvador had told Columbus that he could find a "king" who had a lot of gold at the village of Samaot (also spelled Samoet, Saomete or Saometo). (Taino chiefs and villages often shared a name. Keegan suggests that the confusion of spellings was due to grammatically differing forms of the name for the chief and for the village or island, or was simply due to Columbus's difficulty with the Lucayan language.) Columbus spent three days sailing back and forth along the shore of an island seeking Samaot. At one point he sought to reach Samaot by sailing eastward, but the water was too shallow, and he felt that sailing around the island was "a very long way". Keegan interprets this description to fit the Acklins/Crooked Islands group, with a ship in the west side being able to see the western shore of Acklins Island across the very shallow waters of the Bight of Acklins, where there was a village that stretched about six km along the shore.

Amerigo Vespucci spent almost four months in the Bahamas in 1499–1500. His log of that time is vague, perhaps because he was trespassing on Columbus's discoveries (which at the time remained under Columbus's monopoly). There may have been other unrecorded Spanish incursions into the Bahamas, shipwrecks and slaving expeditions. Maps published between 1500 and 1508 appear to show details of the Bahamas, Cuba and the North American mainland that were not officially reported until later. European artifacts of the period have been found on San Salvador, the Caicos Islands, Long Island, Little Exuma, Acklins Island, Conception Island and Samana Cay. Such finds, however, do not prove that Spaniards visited those islands, as trade among Lucayans could have distributed the artifacts.