# Spanish Slave Raids on Barbados (c. 1515)

URL: https://allhistories.com/barbados/timeline/1515-spanish-slave-raids-on-barbados
Location: Barbados
Themes: battle

The Spanish colonies of the Greater Antilles needed workers for gold mining, ranching and the first sugar mills. As the Taíno died, Spanish 'armadas' sailed to the Bahamas, the Lesser Antilles and the coasts of South America to seize Indigenous people. Armed with licences against 'Caribs', raiders visited Barbados in the early decades of the sixteenth century. Historians such as Hilary Beckles describe frequent slave-raiding missions that captured inhabitants for labour in Hispaniola and elsewhere, while others fled to the mountainous, more defensible islands nearby. Details of individual raids on Barbados are poorly recorded, but by 1518 crown officials were acknowledging that people had been taken from Los Barbudos who were not Caribs and should not have been enslaved. Captives were usually shipped to Hispaniola or Puerto Rico and sold to mine owners and settlers. The raids, together with epidemic disease, ended more than a thousand years of Amerindian life on the island. When the English arrived in 1625 Barbados was uninhabited, a fact that shaped its entire colonial history. At this point in the timeline (c. 1512–1530), no state ruled Barbados: Spain claimed the Caribbean but never settled the island, which was largely uninhabited after the Spanish slave raids.

## Why it matters
The slave raids were the main reason Barbados was empty when the English arrived.

## Sources
- [Wikipedia — Slavery in colonial Spanish America](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_colonial_Spanish_America)
- [Wikipedia — History of Barbados](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Barbados)
- [Encyclopaedia Britannica — Barbados history](https://www.britannica.com/search?query=Barbados+history)