Love My Caribbean

About 500 years ago, an Italian sea captain supported by Spanish royal house went seeking for new lands to capture, if not to capture, at least to claim. He found a immense amount of unforeseen real estate, as history has so often told, and it was he who named this island St.Martin. Whether Christopher Columbus set ashore here, anchored here of merely voyaged past, he literally put this thirty-seven square miles of mountain top on the map.
Sint Maarten (Dutch spelling) or Saint Martin (French, Spanish, Italian, English spelling) was named for St.Martin of Tours on whose feast day, November 11, 1493, Columbus first saw these white sand beaches.
The island name, incidentally, is in general pronounce the English manner, just St. Martin. St. Martin of Tours, for those who may be interested, lived from 330 to 397, was a bishop, a missionary and father of monasticism in Gaul. he was among the most revered saints of Western Europe, one of the 1st persons not a martyr to be publicly sacred as a saint.

When Columbus navigated these seas, St.Martin was populated, if inhabited at all, by Arawak or Carib Indians.
The Arawaks were subjugated by the unpeaceful Carib Indians from South America a short time before the arrival of the Spanish who came after in Columbus' wake. The English work cannibal, we not in passing, is derived from an Arawak word which referred to the Caribs.
The Arawaks were a relatively cultured people who introduced agriculture, fashioned pottery and whose social organization was headed by hereditary chieftans who gained their power from personal deities called zemis.
The Caribs, on the contrary, focused on warfare. They killed and ate the Arawak men, then married the Arawak women. How the Arawak women felt about that is not recorded, but it is exciting to note that the surviving language was Arawak.