Introduction

Research into Jamaica’s archaeology and history naturally divides into three primary categories: the Aboriginal, Spanish, and English periods.

In Egypt, the advanced level of civilization has allowed researchers to uncover detailed information about life in the Nile valley thousands of years before the common era. In contrast, we still know very little about the indigenous people who lived in Jamaica just over 400 years ago. No one knows exactly how long they had been on the island by the time Columbus arrived, although the size and depth of their ancient trash heaps—about thirty of which have been excavated over time—provide valuable clues.

Just like in Hispaniola, the native people of Jamaica were led by chiefs called caciques. Historians disagree significantly on how many people lived in the West Indian islands. Las Casas claimed the islands were as crowded with people as an anthill is with ants, estimating the population at 6,000,000. However, Peter Martyr estimated only 1,200,000 for Hispaniola. Using that as a guide, Jamaica likely had around 600,000 people—which is roughly three-quarters of its population today. Very few of them remained by the time the English captured the island in 1655.

By English standards, the native Indians were short. Today, the Arawaks of Guiana are described as having reddish-cinnamon skin. Their hair is thick, long, very straight, and deep black. Their facial features are very similar to those of people of Chinese or Mongolian descent, and they have a noticeably gentle expression. They are physically frail, and few live past the age of fifty. As evidenced by a few skulls discovered over time, the natives of Jamaica—along with other West Indian tribes—had a unique custom of tying boards to their children’s foreheads. This caused the skulls to become and permanently stay extremely flat.

Peter Martyr, who heard the language spoken, described the speech of the Greater Antilles as “soft and just as fluid as Latin,” and “full of vowels and pleasant to listen to.” Many words of West Indian origin are still commonly used in English, including avocado (from aguacate), barbecue, buccaneer, canoe, Carib (and the related word cannibal), guava, hammock, hurricane, iguana, maize, manatee, pirogue, potato, and tobacco.

Columbus mentioned a chief in Cuba who believed that a person’s actions in this life determined their fate in the next. However, Sir Everard im Thurn found no such belief among the Indians of Guiana. It is likely that Columbus’s guide from Guanahani (Watling Island) only partially understood the chief, or that Columbus misunderstood his guide. Their homes were primitive in both design and build. In Jamaica, these houses were likely circular, featuring walls made of woven branches plastered with mud and steep roofs made of palm leaves; they probably didn’t have windows. The Indians slept in hammocks. The Arawaks of Jamaica and other large islands used darts and war clubs as weapons. They seemingly did not have bows and arrows, which were the preferred weapons of the Caribs; this gave the Caribs a major advantage over their more peaceful enemies.

Men wore more jewelry and decorations than women did. The simplest form of decoration was body paint, using blue, black, red, white, and yellow colors made from plants and minerals. They wore necklaces made of pig teeth and stone beads, feather crowns on their heads, aprons made of woven cotton or palm leaves, and bands around their arms and legs. Their primary ways of surviving were hunting, fishing, farming, and occasionally trading. Because they only needed canoes for travel, basic houses, household baskets, hammocks for sleeping, simple hunting tools, items like chisels and axes, clay pots, and a few pieces of clothing and jewelry, these things—along with some basic rock carvings—made up the entirety of their art and industry.

Like other indigenous people of the West Indies, the natives of New Zealand, and all the nomadic tribes of the Americas from Patagonia to the Arctic Circle, the Arawaks of Jamaica had no knowledge of metalworking when they were first encountered. Based on the remains found in their ancient trash heaps, we know they ate a great deal of fish.

Before 1895, very few artifacts had been found to prove that a tribe once lived in Jamaica, surviving by gathering food from the land and the sea. During and after that time, several collections of Indigenous remains were discovered. These finds are spread across most of the island, though strangely enough, none were found at the eastern end; they are most concentrated in St. Andrew and Vere, in St. Ann, and in the western part of Westmoreland. These items are all similar in style and suggest a society that had not reached a high level of artistic or cultural development, falling well below the civilizations of Mexico and Peru. Most of the objects include petal-shaped or almond-shaped polished stone axes made from metamorphic or volcanic rock, which are found in large numbers throughout the island; shallow, unglazed pottery bowls that are circular or oval with simple decorations, used for cooking or as burial jars for the heads of chiefs—found occasionally in caves and at old home sites; chalcedony beads, which have strangely only been found in Vere; stone and wooden statues, as well as rock carvings and paintings; and a few rare shell and flint tools and grinding stones.

It is unfortunate that many of the items displayed at an 1895 exhibition of native remains at the Institute of Jamaica—which took place after the Halberstadt cave was discovered—as well as other later finds, were allowed to be taken off the island. Once such treasures are lost, they are rarely recovered.

Some early Spanish historians often used the letter X instead of J and wrote the island’s name as Xaymaca. However, the name appears in its current form as early as 1511 in Peter Martyr’s “Decades,” where he called it Jamaica and Jamica. On Juan de la Cosa’s map from 1500, the island is not named.

The island first appeared on a map created by Bartolommeo Colombo, Christopher Columbus’s younger brother, to document the admiral’s fourth voyage, where it was spelled Jamaicha. In Cantino’s map from 1502–04, it is written as Jamaiqua; in Caneiro’s, it is Jamaiqua; and in Waldseemüller’s 1507 map, it is Jamaiana. In the so-called Admiral’s map of 1507, it is listed as Jamaqua. The name is missing from Ruysch’s 1508 map, but it appears as Jamaiqua in the 1513 Strasburg edition of Ptolemaeus and again as Jamaiqua in Waldseemüller’s 1516 map.

The 1519 Maggiolo map calls it Jamaica, but the 1527 Maggiolo map spells it Jamaicha. In Ribero’s 1529 “Antilles” and Mercator’s 1541 map, it is Jamaica again. However, Herrera’s 1601 map returns to the older form Xamaica, and as late as 1734, it appears as Xamayca in Charlevoix’s “L’isle Espagnole.” English writers who visited the island shortly after the British took over also used different spellings: Commissioner Butler (1655) wrote Gemecoe and Gemegoe, Daniell (1655) called it Jamico, Gwakin (1657) wrote Jammaca, and General Fleetwood (1658) wrote Jamecah.

When Columbus was returning from his first voyage, natives near Tortuga told him that if he sailed in a specific direction for two days, he would reach Babeque, a place where gold could be found. Columbus mentions Babeque frequently in his journals, but he never actually found it—at least not by that name. The 1571 “Historie” claims it was Hispaniola, though this is questioned. Las Casas believed it might have been Jamaica.

Like most native names in the West Indies, the name Jamaica reached us through Spanish records; the original native pronunciation was likely something like Hâmîca. There are several theories about what the word means. The most unusual attempt links the name to James II. Moll’s map of the island, published in the early 1700s, claims that Columbus first called the island St. Jago, but that the name was later changed to Jamaica in honor of James, Duke of York. In this regard, it is a bit sad that none of the larger Antilles kept the names Columbus gave them. Española, Santiago, and Juana returned to their native names of Hayti, Jamaica, and Cuba, while St. Juan Bautista became Porto Rico. However, Hispaniola has survived to some extent and remains the most practical name for the island shared by two republics. Among the smaller islands, names like Trinidad, Antigua, Dominica, Montserrat, and Guadeloupe still remind us of the great explorer.

In a rough draft of his history of Jamaica (1742) held at the British Museum, James Knight suggests this origin for the word Jamaica: “Originally it was Jamajaco. In the native language, Jamo means country, and Jaco means water.”

In his 1737 book, “Voyage to the Guinea, Brazil, and the West Indies,” John Atkins claims that King James renamed Jamaica, combining his own name with “ca,” meaning island. He might have been close regarding the word for “island.” The West Indian word for an island, cai (or the Biscayan word cay), is thought to be part of Lucayos (the Bahamas), meaning “Men of the Island,” as well as the Caicos islands and various cays or keys throughout the West Indies; however, modern linguistics suggests that cay or key actually comes from the Welsh word cae.

Writing in 1774, Long suggested it was possible that Jamaica is a name of Indigenous origin, perhaps coming from Jamacaru, the Brazilian word for the prickly pear. This plant grows widely along the coast of the south side, where the original Indigenous explorers may have first landed. However, later authors have not supported this theory.

Bryan Edwards wrote in 1793 that early Spanish historians spelled the word as Xaymaca. He noted that in the native language, this was said to mean “a land full of springs.”

Bridges, who generally has a more active imagination than Long but is far less reliable as a historian, wrote in 1828: “In the Florida dialect, Chaübaan meant water and makia meant wood. Combining these sounds would create Chab-makia, which the Spanish would hear as Chamakia, or a similar blend of these two terms, meaning a forested land with shaded streams—or simply, a fertile land.” Later writers have generally accepted this theory. Bridges never explained why he looked to Florida to find the meaning of a Jamaican word. The only two languages Columbus likely heard in the Greater Antilles were Carib and Arawâk. In Arawâk, the word for wood is ada, forests are konoko, and water is winiab or comiaboo. In Carib, forests are eotch and water is tona.

Bryan Edwards notes that in Fernando Columbus’s “Historie,” the indigenous name for Antigua was given as Jamaica. He adds: “It is a strange coincidence that a word meaning a land full of springs in the language of the larger islands would be used by the Caribs for an island that doesn’t have a single spring or stream of fresh water.” Until more research proves otherwise, Jamaica must be recognized as what it actually is: the land of woods and streams.

Besides the name of the island itself, very few original indigenous names remain. These will be mentioned throughout the book as they come up.

It is difficult to tell whether West Indian place names come from native Indian or Spanish origins, and relying too heavily on the rules of linguistics can be misleading. Often, place names change over time based on how people pronounce them.

Regarding this topic, Long wrote: “Because the language of these islanders resembles Spanish in some ways, I suspect that many of their words were changed by the way the Spanish pronounced them. The explorers likely struggled to say and accent these words without mixing in their own native sounds. In some cases, this is very obvious, such as when the letter ‘b’ is used interchangeably with ‘v,’ following Spanish habits. This distortion could easily lead us to believe that the names of places—like rivers, mountains, and capes—come from Spanish or Moorish origins, when they are actually derived from Indian languages. For example, the term ‘gua,’ which is common in both these islands and on the South American continent, was often added to the beginning or end of Indian names for places, things, and even local chiefs. Examples of chiefs include Gua-rionexius, Gua-canarillus, and Gua-naboa. There are many place names as well, such as Gua-nama, Xa-gua, Gua-há-gua, Camayá-gua, Aicayazá-gua, Má-gua, Nicará-gua, Verá-gua, Xará-guo, Gua-ríco, and Ni-gua (Chigger). These might be mistaken for derivatives of the Spanish or Moorish word ‘agua,’ meaning water. Similarly, endings like ‘ao,’ ‘ana,’ ‘coa,’ and ‘boa’ or ‘voa’ appear in names like Manabax-ao, Cib-ao, Gu-ana, Magu-ana, Yagu-ana, Ligu-ana, Zav-ana (Savannah), Furac-ana (Hurricane), Caym-ana, Guaiac-ana (Guiacum), Haba-coa, and Cuana-boa. Therefore, names found on our island—such as Liguana, Cagua, Tilboa, Guanaboa, and Guadibocoa—and others with similar endings are more accurately traced back to Indian dialects than to Spanish.”