- Named for: Sunday, the day Columbus sailed by.
- Long/Lat: 15.2 N/61.2 W, 4000 miles or 8 hours east of Castro Valley
- Population: 72,000, 1.1 CVs
- Size: 290 sq mi, 10 CVs (less dense)
- Avg temp in April: 87 F/23 C phew!
- Median household income: ~$4,000
- Ethnicity: 85% Afro-Dominican, 4% Kalinago/Caribe, <1% European
- Main industries: Small agriculture, growing financial services (offshore banking/tax havens)
Dominica, fortunately, stopped practicing cannibalism. If they ever did, which is doubtful. Even so, historians as late as the 1960s were still tossing off lines like, “By the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the Caribs had almost ceased eating Christian Europeans, for on one occasion all who had dined on a Spanish friar had fallen deathly ill or died.”
Dominica is the fourth small country in my A-Z series, another island and definitely not the last. It was named by Columbus on his second journey to the New World, the first island he sailed by on Sunday, November 3, 1493. Not a very enterprising name, since Dominica means Sunday. The naming conventions here seem particularly uninspired. Columbus also named islands Ferdinanda, Isabela, Juana (their daughter), and San Salvador (Holy Savior). I suppose we should be lucky he didn’t just number them, or Jamaica would be Dieciocho.
The trail of islands from Cuba curving down to Venezuela are called the Antilles, whose name is both mysterious and stupid. The mystery is that “somehow” Europeans knew of a group of islands, far to the west of Portugal, on their charts even though no one had (technically) discovered them. A very detailed map of the Mediterranean by Albino de Canepa, 15th century but predating Columbus, shows an island called Antillia somewhere in the Atlantic. I bet good odds that someone else less showy than Columbus found the Caribbean islands and maybe even the Americas. There were a dozen “legends,” also known as history not written by monks, describing all sorts of land west of Europe. Named by the Portuguese, Antilles means ante+illes or “before other islands.” Brilliant.
Columbus didn’t “discover” Dominica and didn’t land there at first. It’s a small island, with few natural beaches, with rising elevation (4700 ft) mid-island. Dominica has nine active volcanoes, as well as a year-round sperm whale community. The island history is one of people settling, then being pushed out by others. The two first settling groups were the Arawaks, who came up from lands across northern South America, and the Caribes, from the Orinoco basin.
The Arawaks were the name that tribe called itself, as interpreted by Columbus, and his explorers found them “peaceful” i.e., cooperative. The Caribes, on the other hand, were known as the warlike aggressors. Their reputation was for seafaring and raiding, in contrast to the gathering, farming Arawaks. Think of the Caribes as the Vikings of the Antilles. The Caribe’ name for themselves is closer to Karina or Kalinago. Some linguists explain that Columbus called them caniba, and that when the word cannibal was created, he meant those seafaring, Viking, scary raider guys. Who allegedly ate a priest.
If we can just get past the confusion over the names, I could explain how the Caribe pushed the few Spanish settlers out. Anthropologists still argue that they didn’t practice cannibalism on any significant basis; those were mainly scary rumors spread by the Arawakans. Eventually, the Caribe tribes were overrun by the British, who brought thousands of African slaves, who eventually pushed out the British. Ergo, the population today is primarily a mix of African/Caribbean, and Kalinago, with almost no European involved. But the British have come back and set up tax havens and offshore banking, so there’s that.
