Columbus, Silver, and Failure

The first European town in the New World was established by Christopher Columbus after his second voyage across the Atlantic, in 1494. Fifteen hundred souls traveled with him and settled on the north shore of the island of Hispaniola at a town--complete with plaza, royal compound (for Columbus, of course) and stone structures. One of their primary goals was to find and test the potential for precious metals--gold and silver--in the New World. But the colony failed, faced with hurricanes, crop failures, and previous residents who didn't take kindly to the intruders.

Evidence for the metallurgical testing completed by Columbus and his men was found at La Isabela; but detailed scientific analysis of the remainder of a metal processing feature tells a very different tale, that of desperation and failure.

• Christopher Columbus' Failed Outpost: The First European Colony in the New World
• La Isabela (Dominican Republic), details on the site itself
• Christopher Columbus, a biography from Melissa Snell, Medieval and Renaissance History
• La Isabela, from the Florida Museum of Natural History

By the way, the very first non-Native American settlement that we know of in the Americas is, of course, the failed Scandinavian colony of L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, settled by the Norse almost exactly 500 years earlier, in 998 AD.