At 5 a.m. on November 3, 1493, 528 years ago today, a lookout on Columbus’s flagship, the María Galante, sighted a volcano topping the sea mist in the moonlight. By dawn, islands of the archipelago now known as the Lesser Antilles came into view, and Columbus directed the fleet to the largest then off the bow, which he named Dominica, as it was Sunday (Domingo in Spanish). The ocean crossing from the Canary Islands had taken three weeks, almost two weeks shorter than the first voyage.
Dominica retains the name today—as the independent Commonwealth of Dominica. In 1493, it was called Ouitoucoubouli (meaning “tall is her body”) by its indigenous inhabitants, the Kalinago or Caribe peoples, who continue to live there now. The first two photos are of the island’s rugged east coast and the cultural village in the Kalinago Territory situated on that coast. I visited the village in 2019, and the third photo is of Faustulus Frederick, who served a term as chief of the territory and authored In Our Carib Indian Village (1971, with Elizabeth Shepherd), and Samanta Francis, my guide.
Columbus didn’t find appropriate anchorage to disembark on Dominica’s east coast, and the fleet sailed north to harbor for the night at the next large island, which he named after the flagship—also still so named today (Marie-Galante in French). The last photo looks north from Dominica to Marie-Galante, barely discernible on the horizon.
