I returned from visiting the Dominican Republic last week, completing my research for the next sequel. It will retell the years 1498 to 1502, depicting Anacaona’s then successful struggle to maintain rule of her and her brother’s chiefdom despite “Española’s” conquest elsewhere, Queen Isabella’s failed effort to curtail her conquerors’ enslavement of “Indians,” and Columbus’s demise.
The previous post showed portraits and statues of Isabella that I found in Spain last month, and this includes photos of modern statues and an illustration of Anacaona found in the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, I didn’t visit Haiti this trip, where more can be found.
The first statue is a bust of Chief Anacaona displayed in the Fortaleza San Luís’s Cultural Museum in Santiago de Los Caballeros. The second is the statue in the Plaza Anacaona in San Juan de la Maguana, showing a more youthful Anacaona (as depicted in Encounters Unforeseen: 1492 Retold). The third is the Taíno woman—said to be Anacaona—on the pedestal of the Columbus statue in the Parque Colón at the center of Santo Domingo’s colonial zone.
The illustration is of a book cover I found in the collection of the Museum of the Dominican Man’s library in Santo Domingo.
I also include the well-known depiction of Anacaona attributed to Washington Irving and Boris De Los Santos’s sketch of Anacaona drawn for Columbus and Caonabó: 1493–1498 Retold. Boris has drawn illustrations of Taínos for the Regional Museum of Archaeology at Altos de Chavon (near La Romana), which I visited. The last photo is of a Taíno necklace in the exhibits of that museum, perhaps one of Boris’s inspirations for the necklace he drew on Anacaona.
