Cuba Insul/ Hispaniola

Title

Cuba Insul/ Hispaniola

Description

Map shows Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica,St. Ioannes and Margareta

ca. 1620

Artist

Bertius (1565-1629)

Petrus Bertius (1565 -1629) was a Flemish theologian, historian, geographer and cartographer, He grew up in Beveren (Flanders). In 1593 he was appointed mathematics professor and librarian of the University of Leyden. His main cartographic work includes a miniature world atlas of 1600, a pocket atlas of the German Empire of 1616 with 26 engraved maps and 101 city views, a version of the Geographia of Ptolemy with 28 maps by Mercator and 14 maps from the Parergon of Ortelius of 1618, but he is known today as a cartographer with his edition of the Geographia of Ptolemy (based on Mercator's edition of 1578) and for his atlas.

Historical Description

The name "Cuba" probably comes from the language of the Caribbean or Taíno. The words coa (= place) and bana (= big) mean something like "big place". Columbus wrote that he had landed in a place that the indigenous people called Cubao, Cuban or Cibao. These designations obviously referred to a mountain region near the place of landing in the east of Cuba. When it was first discovered, Columbus named the island Juana after Prince Don Juan. In 1515, his father Fernando II, King of Spain, ordered the name to be changed to Fernandina, because so far only one island in the Bahamas (today: Long Island) was named after him. Cuba and the Arawak people living there came under Spanish control in the first half of the 16th century. Within a few decades, the indigenous peoples were practically wiped out by violence and disease. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Spanish planters used tens of thousands of slaves to carry out the very labor-intensive cultivation of sugar cane, which were mainly imported from West Africa.