Spain, in its exploration and exploitation of the New World, finds an outlet for the crusading energies that the war against the Muslims had stimulated.

Portuguese mariners are opening a route around Africa to the East in the fifteenth century.

At the same time as the Castilians, they have planted colonies in the Azores and in the Canary Islands (also Canaries; Spanish, Canarias), the latter of which have been assigned to Spain by papal decree.

The conquest of Granada allows the Catholic Kings to divert their attention to exploration, although Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492 is financed by foreign bankers.

In 1493 Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, a Catalan) formally approves the division of the unexplored world between Spain and Portugal.

The Treaty of Tordesillas, which Spain and Portugal sign one year later, moves the line of division westward and allows Portugal to claim Brazil.

New discoveries and conquests come in quick succession.

Vasco Núñez de Balboa reaches the Pacific in 1513, and the survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition complete the circumnavigation of the globe in 1522.

In 1519 the conquistador Hernán Cortes subdues the Aztecs in Mexico with a handful of followers, and between 1531 and 1533 Francisco Pizarro overthrows the empire of the Incas and establishes Spanish dominion over Peru.

In 1493, when Columbus brought fifteen hundred colonists with him on his second voyage, a royal administrator had already been appointed for the Indies.

The Council of the Indies (Consejo de Indias), established in 1524, acts as an advisory board to the crown on colonial affairs, and the House of Trade (Casa de Contratacion) regulates trade with the colonies.

The newly established colonies are not Spanish but Castilian.

They are administered as appendages of Castile, and the Aragonese are prohibited from trading or settling there.

…Little River in St. James Parish are among the earliest known sites of this Ostionoid people, who livde near the coast and extensively hunted turtles and fish.

Around 950, the people of the Meillacan culture settled on both the coast and the interior of Jamaica, either absorbing the Ostionoid people or co-inhabiting the island with them.

The Taíno culture, which had begun to developed on Jamaica around 1200, had brought from South America a system of raising yuca known as "conuco."

To add nutrients to the soil, the Taíno burn local bushes and trees and heap the ash into large mounds, into which they then plant yuca cuttings.

Most Taíno live in large circular buildings (bohios), constructed with wooden poles, woven straw, and palm leaves.

The Taino speak an Arawakan language and do not have writing.

Some of the words used by them, such as barbacoa ("barbecue"), hamaca ("hammock"), kanoa ("canoe"), tabaco ("tobacco"), yuca, batata ("sweet potato"), and juracán ("hurricane"), will be incorporated into Spanish and English.

The Taíno are historically enemies of the neighboring Carib tribes, another group with origins in South America, who lived principally in the Lesser Antilles but had also colonized Jamaica.

For much of the fifteenth century, the Taíno tribe was being driven to the northeast in the Caribbean (out of what is now South America) because of raids by the Carib.

The Spanish Empire begins its official governance of Jamaica in 1509, with formal occupation of the island by conquistador Juan de Esquivel and his men.

Esquivel had accompanied Columbus in his second trip to the Americas in 1493 and participated in the invasion of Hispaniola.

A decade later, Friar Bartolomé de las Casas wrote Spanish authorities about Esquivel's conduct during the Higüey massacre of 1503.

The first Spanish settlement is founded in 1509 near St Ann's Bay and named Seville.

The Spanish settlers of Jamaica had moved in 1534 from Seville to a new, healthier site, which they named Villa de la Vega, which the English will rename Spanish Town when they conquer the island in 1655.

This settlement serves as the capital of both Spanish and English Jamaica from its foundation in 1534 until 1872, after which the capital will be moved to Kingston.

The Spaniards have enslaved many of the native people, overworking and harming them to the point that many have perished within fifty years of European arrival.

Subsequently, the lack of indigenous opportunity for labor is mended with the arrival of African slaves.

Disappointed in the lack of gold on the isle, the Spanish mainly use Jamaica as a military base to supply colonizing efforts in the mainland Americas.

The Spanish colonists had not broiught women in the first expeditions and had taken Taíno women for their common-law wives, resulting in mestizo children.

Sexual violence with the Taíno women by the Spanish was also common.

Ferdinand and Isabella are the last of the Trastamaras, and a native dynasty will never again rule Spain.

When their sole male heir, John, who was to have inherited all his parents' crowns, died in 1497, the succession to the throne had passed to Juana, John's sister, but Juana had become the wife of Philip the Handsome, heir through his father, Emperor Maximilian I, to the Habsburg patrimony.

On Ferdinand's death in 1516, Charles of Ghent, the son of Juana and Philip, inherits Spain (which he rules as Charles I, r. 1516-56), its colonies, and Naples. (Juana, called Juana la Loca or Joanna the Mad, will live until 1555 but is judged incompetent to rule.)

When Maximilian I dies in 1519, Charles also inherits the Habsburg domains in Germany.

Shortly afterward he is selected Holy Roman emperor, a title that he holds as Charles V (r. 1519-56), to succeed his grandfather.

Charles, in only a few years, is able to bring together the world's most diverse empire since Rome.

Charles's closest attachment is to his birthplace, Flanders; he surrounds himself with Flemish advisers who are not appreciated in Spain.

His duties as both Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain, moreover, never allow him to tarry in one place.

As the years of his long reign pass, however, Charles moves closer to Spain and calls upon its manpower and colonial wealth to maintain the Habsburg empire.

Europeans begin the enslavement of continental natives.

Sugar mills have been constructed in Cuba and …

…Jamaica by the 1520s.

Francisco de Garay was born in the Garay tower in Sopuerta, in the county of Encartaciones located in the province of Biscay.

A companion to Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World, he had arrived in Hispaniola in 1493, attracting attention when he encountered a large gold nugget worth four thousand pesos.

From 1514 Garay has served as Royal Governor of Santiago (Governor of Jamaica).

As a Governor of Santiago he stands accused of committing genocide of the Island's indigenous population.

Bartolomé de Las Casas, writing in 1516, holds him responsible for the great decline of the Indian population, whom he has enslaved and sent to work in the goldmines of Cuba.

By 1519 the original population of Jamaica has almost been eradicated.

He also raises pigs during his governorship, at one point employing five thousand Indians to herd his swine.

Ponce de León had previously mapped parts of Florida, which he believed to be an island.

Alonso Alvarez de Pineda had led several expeditions in 1517 to map the western coastlines of the Gulf of Mexico, from the Yucatán Peninsula to the Pánuco River, just north of Veracruz.

Subsequent expeditions piloted by Antón de Alaminos had eliminated the western areas as being the site of the passage, leaving the land between the Pánuco River and Florida to be mapped.

Alaminos had persuaded the governor of Jamaica, Francisco de Garay, to finance an expedition to search the remainder of the Gulf.

Garay outfits three ships with two hundred and seventy soldiers, and places them under the command of Alvarez de Pineda, who leaves Jamaica in early 1519 and sails west to follow the northern coastline of the Gulf.

Alonso Álvarez de Pineda attempts to sail east at the western tip of Southern Florida, but the winds are uncooperative.

Instead, Alvarez de Pineda sail west from the Florida Keys to hug the Gulf Coast.

On June 2, 1519, Alvarez de Pineda enters a large bay with a sizable Native American settlement on one shore.

He sails upriver for eighteen miles and observes as many as forty villages on the banks of the large, deep river he names "Espíritu Santo".

Long assumed to have been the first European report of the mouth of the Mississippi River, the description of the land and its settlement has led many historians to believe he was describing Mobile Bay and the Alabama River.