The Captaincy General of Santo Domingo was a Spanish colony in the Caribbean which existed from 1493 to 1795, with Santo Domingo serving as its capital. In 1492, the Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus arrived on the island of Hispaniola during his first voyage to the Americas, finding that the island was divided into five chiefdoms. In 1493, Columbus came back to the island on his second voyage, and he founded the first Spanish settlement of Isabella. In 1496, his brother Bartholomew Columbus established the city of Santo Domingo on the southern coast, and it became the new capital. 400,000 Tainos on the island were enslaved in the gold mines; this number decreased to 60,000 in 1508 and to a few dozen by 1535. In 1510, the first sizable shipment of African slaves, 250 people, arrived in Hispaniola from Spain, and sugarcane was introduced to the island from the Canary Islands. The first sugar mill in the New World was established in 1516, and the sugar mill owners formed a new colonial elite; the enslaved population came to number between 20,000 and 30,000 in the mid-sixteenth century.
In 1512, King Ferdinand II of Aragon established a Real Audiencia for the new colony. In 1522, enslaved Wolof Muslims led a slave uprising in Santo Domingo, and, by the 1530s, several Maroon bands operated in rural areas, preventing safe travel for the Spaniards outside of the rural areas. In 1586, the English privateer Francis Drake captured Santo Domingo and held it for ransom, signalling the decline of Spanish dominion over Hispaniola, and French buccaneers took over the west coast in 1625, preceding French settlers; however, a 1655 English expedition to Santo Domingo on the orders of Oliver Cromwell was defeated. In the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick, Spain ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France, establishing the later divisions between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. On 22 July 1795, Spain ceded Santo Domingo to the French Republic in return for France giving up its occupied territories on the southern side of the Pyrenees. In 1809, Spain reconquered the Dominican Republic during the Peninsular War, but Spain was unable to properly or directly govern the colony, and, on 1 December 1821, the country declared independence as Spanish Haiti.
