From colonization to today.
Spanish exploration of the Honduran coast began in 1502, during Christopher Columbus’s fourth voyage, and colonization followed two decades later when Hernán Cortés dispatched an expedition under Cristóbal de Olid. By 1539, the territory had been absorbed into the Spanish Empire as part of the Captaincy General of Guatemala. Gold deposits initially drew Spanish settlers […]
Spain claimed the island of Hispaniola following Columbus’s arrival in 1492, but by the seventeenth century French buccaneers and settlers had established a foothold on its western third. Spain formally ceded this territory to France under the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, creating the colony that became known as Saint-Domingue. Under French administration, Saint-Domingue grew […]
The Dutch were the first Europeans to establish a lasting presence in what is now Guyana, founding the trading post of Fort Kyk-over-Al on the Essequibo River in 1616. The Dutch West India Company went on to found the separate colonies of Berbice in 1627 and Demerara in 1741, each governed independently and centered on […]
Spanish forces led by Pedro de Alvarado conquered the Maya kingdoms of highland Guatemala beginning in 1524, extending Spanish control southward from the recently subdued Aztec Empire. In 1527 the Crown established the Captaincy General of Guatemala, an administrative division of the Viceroyalty of New Spain that eventually encompassed the territory of present-day Guatemala, El […]
France established the first permanent European settlement on Grenada in 1649, when an expedition from Martinique under Jacques Dyel du Parquet purchased land from the island’s Kalinago inhabitants and founded a colony near what is now St. George’s. Conflict with the Kalinago followed, and by the mid-1650s the French had gained full control of the […]
