PART THIRD THE REPUBLICS OF THE CARIBBEAN SEA THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC THE REPUBLIC OF HAITI THE REPUBLIC OF CUBA 5 DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. HISTORICAL NOTES. Peculiar interest attaches to the Dominican Republic for the reason that the territory upon which it stands was the first upon which Christian civilization was established this side of the Atlantic. The island of Santo Domingo, called by Columbus, as if by way of distinction, La Isla Española, "The Spanish Island," discovered on December 6, 1492, thirty-nine days after Cuba and fifty-five after Guanahanee, or San Salvador, was from the beginning, and continued to be for a long time, the metropolis of the vast colonial empire founded by Spain in the New World, a noble and magnificent capital, which resisted for not less than four centuries the inevitable destruction to which all things human are doomed. In addition to the fact that this island was, as might be said, historically, as well as legally, the foundation upon which that ponderous empire was built, there is another fact which attracts to it most intensely the attention of the student and arouses his sympathies. The history of Santo Domingo will bring him face to face with interesting problems of the philosophy of history, causing him to meditate with more than usual reverence over the ways of Providence, should he endeavor to inquire, in the proper spirit, into the trials and calamities to which the Dominican people have been so long subjected. During the whole of the sixteenth century and for a considerable part of the seventeenth Spain retained without opposition the undivided control of the island; but in 1630 French adventurers and pirates, afterwards called "buccaneers," who escaped the persecution of the Spanish fleet commanded by Don FEDERICO ALVAREZ DE TOLEDO, which in those days policed with marked success the waters of the Caribbean Sea, took refuge in the island of Tortuga, where they settled, and from where not long afterwards they sent expeditions, more or less predatory, and more or less irresistible under the circumstances of the times and localities, against the neighboring coast of Santo Domingo. This Tortuga settlement, and the other settlements, most of them very small, which were established on the above-mentioned coast, became the nucleus of a French colony, which grew little by little in 7 |