Hispaniola's Century of Misery

One highly respected interpretation of the social history of Hispaniola aptly refers to the period of the seventeenth century in the island as El Siglo de la Miseria ¹ (The Century of Misery). Throughout the society during that period there was a pervading atmosphere of spiritual despair on practically every level of daily existence. Most disappointingly, for example, cacao never quite reached the point of being the significant export crop it had been expected to become. The severity of the era’s unfavorable climatic changes, among other factors, accounted for this failure. Moreover, the period was witness to perhaps one of the worst epidemics of illness and disease in the island’s history, nearly completely destroying the bulk of the labor force in the colony. Africans were by far the majority population that fell victim to the smallpox epidemic: no dejaron manos que cultivasen la tierra ² (not leaving any hands to work the land). In a letter written at that time to a friend back in Spain, one settler described the local conditions: las arboledas de cacao, que de quince a diez años a esta parte se sembraron, están perdidas por no haber esclavos que lo beneficien ³ (the cacao groves, which were seeded ten or fifteen years ago in this part, are lost as a result of there not being slaves to work them).