Not the least of Columbus' humiliations, as we were reminded in a talk yesterday, is that his New World was named after a later and lesser Italian voyager, Amerigo Vespucci. It was Vespucci who dropped anchor in Bonaire in 1499, inaugurating a varied history of European colonization for this little island (current population 13,400) that, 500 years later,find itself part of the Netherlands Antilles.
We visited the site of Indian drawings, surviving evidence of a vanished indigenous culture that quickly succumbed to European disease and exploitation. The first colonizers of the island were the Spanish. After a century, it was seized by the Dutch who, in turn, lost it to the British before regaining control in 1816. Today the Dutch influence shows strongly in the architecture (see the photo), whereas the local patois draws on the vocabulary of some half a dozen European languages, a fascinating living source of colonial history. The present population looks to the future by trying to forge a distinctive contemporary Caribbean identity from these diverse roots.
