Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, is the oldest continuously inhabited, European established settlement in the Americas. Incredible maps in the Library of Congress help us to understand the vast history of the “First City of America.”
Christopher Columbus led a Spanish fleet on a landmark voyage through the Caribbean in 1492, encountering native populations and establishing knowledge of the Americas to Europeans broadly for the first time. After constructing the short-lived fort of La Navidad and then the small settlement of La Isabela, both on the northern coast of Hispaniola, a new site on the island’s southern coast was established in 1496 to be Spain’s colonial capital in the “New World.” During this period and in the years to follow, Spanish forces fought and violently oppressed the indigenous Taíno people, who had lived throughout the West Indies for thousands of years.
Santo Domingo would serve as a critical Spanish stronghold and a launching point for the colonization of the Americas and the extraction of gold, silver, and other resources from the continent. This hub would be subjected to a long history of contestation by rival powers, beginning with the 1586 Battle of Santo Domingo. Under the command of Francis Drake, an English fleet captured Santo Domingo, swamping the surprised Spanish forces, plundering valuables and occupying the city for a month. This was part of a series of English raids in the West Indies aimed at weakening Spanish footholds in the New World.
The successful raids were memorialized in a set of map engravings by London-based Italian artist Baptista Boazio, drawing from first-hand accounts of the attacks. Prominently featured in the map is the sense of an overwhelming English fleet of ships and marching troops. Boazio’s map, a richly illustrated pictorial view featuring the fortressed urban center, rolling hills on the horizon, and an array of animals on land and sea, is the first published map view of Santo Domingo.
While the focus of Spain’s New World colonization would largely shift to the mainland, the city of Santo Domingo remained under Spanish control through the 17th and much of the 18th centuries, even facing another attack by an English fleet in 1655, but this time, repelling it. Dominion over the rest of the island, however, was a different story. The Spanish crown implemented misguided plans for the depopulation, followed by repopulation, of large swaths of the island outside of the capital region to combat smuggling operations and stop French settlements on the island’s west coast from expanding eastward. The 1697 Treaty of Ryswick formally recognized the island as partly Spanish and French possessions, but an official border between the two colonies would not be established until 1777.
The Geography and Map Division holds numerous maps of Santo Domingo from this period by Spanish, French, and German cartographers, reflecting a continued European interest in the city. Maps by George-Louis Le Rouge and Nicolas Jacques Bellin provide general urban layouts, while C.F. Fritzsch’s Stadt St. Domingo offers a panoramic view illustrating life in the city. Of these 18th century maps, Lopez de Vargas Machuca’s map may be the most detailed, with labeling for bulwarks, churches, hospitals, and other important landmarks across the city.
The turn of 19th century began a period of dramatic change for Hispaniola. In the 1795 Treaty of Basel, the result of a Franco-Spanish conflict in Europe, Spain ceded its portion of the island to France, interrupting centuries of continuous Spanish rule on the island. In the west, the Haitian Revolution, in which enslaved people of African ancestry successfully fought for liberation against French colonial rule, was waged from 1791 to 1804, resulting in the abolition of slavery and the establishment of Haiti as an independent nation. In 1805, Haitian Revolution leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines launched an invasion of Santo Domingo, primarily aimed at ending French rule on the island and uniting it under his rule. The siege of Santo Domingo, which the French repelled over several months of fighting, is documented in this incredible French military map of the city, featuring detailed listings of major landmarks, troop locations and fortifications, colorful illustrations of natural landscapes, and an inset map of Camp Galard, Dessalines’s headquarters north of the city.
Violent conquests and reconquests would define much of the 19th and 20th centuries for Santo Domingo. The city would experience periods of Spanish reconquest, occupation by Haiti, independence, recolonization by Spain, independence again, U.S. occupation, and independence once again. This expansive history, covered here in a highly abridged form, leads into the present-day, which finds Santo Domingo as the largest metropolitan area in the Caribbean, and the Dominican Republic as one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America. Along this timeline, colonial contestation for the “First City of America” can be explored through centuries of cartography.
