Brett McDavid, age 15, of Beaumont, Tex., for his question:
WHO FIRST LIVED ON JAMAICA?
Jamaica is an island nation in the West Indies that lies about 480 miles south of Florida and is slightly smaller in size than the state of Connecticut. When Christopher Columbus landed in Jamaica in 1494, he found Arawak Indians living there.
Historians tell us that the Arawak Indians had been living there for many hundreds of years. They had named the island Xaymaca, which means "island of springs."
The Spanish explorers claimed the island for Spain and promptly enslaved all of the Arawak Indians. Later, Africans were brought to the island to help increase the slave population.
Disease and over work killed almost all of the Arawak during the period when the Spanish used Jamaica as a supply base and made no attempt to settle or develop the island.
The British invaded Jamaica in 1655 and they controlled most of the island by 1660. But they continued to fight African and Indian slaves, called Maroons, who had escaped into the hills when the British arrived. The British and the Maroons finally signed a peace treaty in 1738.
During the 1670s, British pirates in the Caribbean used Jamaica as a base to attack Spanish ports and ships.
During the 1700s, sugar became the major crop. Jamaica prospered and the island ranked as the most important slave market in the Western Hemisphere. Then, in 1838, the British Parliament freed the slaves.
The end of slavery hurt the Jamaican sugar industry because the plantation owners lost thousands of laborers. Most of the freed slaves left the plantations and became independent farmers.
Jamaica was a British colony for about 300 years. In 1944, Britain gave Jamaica a new constitution that provided for some self government.
In 1962, Jamaica became fully independent and a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.
Jamaica joined the United Nations in 1962 and became a member of the Organization of American States in 1969.
More than 90 percent of the people of Jamaica today have African or mixed African and European ancestry. More than half of the people live in rural areas, but many have moved to the cities since the early 1960s.
Jamaica's fine climate and beautiful beaches and mountains attract more than half a million tourists each year. But tourism isn't Jamaica's chief industry. The island is among the world's leading producers of bauxite, the ore from which aluminum is made. Also, the island produces bananas, sugar and various manufactured goods.
Although Jamaica's official language is English, most of the people speak a dialect of English that differs from the English spoken in America and England.