Alice’s razor-thin blond hair is what people in Santo Domingo call bueno, but I don’t understand how that kind of hair can be good. It doesn’t move at all, or ripple like the water in Boca Chica when I throw shells at it.

On November 27, 1493, when Columbus returned to Navidad, he found that the 39 crew members that he had left behind had been murdered, and instead of finding a peaceful settlement, he found their corpses bleaching on the beach. The local Taíno Indians had killed them all; because of the ignorant and cruel treatment they had received from the Spaniards. Little wonder that, from that time on, Columbus had problems with the Taínos. Columbus wisely decided to abandon Navidad and established La Isabela as the first capital of Hispaniola. La Isabela’s location was across a sand bar on a shallow river along the coast of what is now the Dominican Republic.