TOPOGRAPHY OF SAN DOMINGO. 



419 



garrison was maintained in the capital. Then came the English, and after them 

 the Spaniards, followed in 1821 by the revolt against the mother-country under 

 the Colombian flag. But Bolivar was too far off and too hard pressed by the 

 Spaniards to come to the aid of the insurgents, and the new republic had to 

 unite with Haiti in a single state. In 1844 it regained a precarious auto- 

 nomy, more than once threatened, first by France, then by S^iain and the United 

 States. 



On the south coast the chief place west of the capital is Azim [Azua de Com- 

 postela), which occupies a healthy site on a terrace some six miles north of Ocoa 

 Bay. The town had already been founded farther south by Diego Colon in 1504 ; 



Fig. 201.— AzTjA AXD Ocoa Bay, 

 Scale 1 : 1,000,000. 



18 Miles. 



but after its destruction by an earthquake it was rebuilt on its present site on 

 the Rio Via. The district abounds in salt, bitumen, and mineral wateTs, while 

 vast grazing- ground 8 occupy the uj)per Neyba and Artibonite valleys, especially 

 about the towns of Bmtica and San Juan dc Magiiana. It «as at San Juan that 

 Schomburgk discovered the most remarkable objects of pre-Columbian culture, 

 including a circle of granite blocks supposed to rejDresent the serpent biting its 

 tail, symbol of eternity. 



Santo Domingo, the capital, which has given its name to the republic and to 

 the whole island, is one of the oldest European settlements in the New World. 

 In 1096 it succeeded to the station of Natividad which Columbus had founded on 

 Caracol Bay in the north-west part of Espanola. Built at first by Bartholomew 



