The first inhabitants of the ABC islands were the Caiquitíos Indians, an Arawak-speaking tribe from South America who established themselves on all three of the islands centuries before the arrival of the Spanish in 1499. In the years that followed, more Spaniards settled here in search of precious metals and drinking water. Not finding any gold or silver, they quickly dubbed the ABCs "las islas inutiles" or the "useless islands". (In fact, they should have looked harder on Aruba where over three million pounds of gold were discovered in the nineteenth century.)
Disappointed by the lack of natural resources, the Spanish enslaved many of the Amerindians and shipped them to Hispaniola to labour in the mines and plantations there. Returning in the mid-1520s to colonize the ABCs, the Spaniards introduced cattle and other livestock, and brought back many of the original slaves to work in agriculture.
During the early 1630s the Dutch , on a quest for a suitable Caribbean base from which to launch attacks against the Spanish, took control of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, and the next century saw a drastic increase in commerce on all three islands.
Prized for its naturally deep harbour, its strategic location and its saltpans (salt was an important commodity for preserving fish and meat shipped back to Europe), Curaçao quickly developed into an important Dutch naval base. Bonaire was also valued for its vast quantities of salt and tracts of agricultural land left behind by the Spaniards. The Dutch West India Company began exporting large amounts of salt, along with sorghum, maize, divi divi pods (used in the tanning process) and meat to Europe and to the rest of the world. They also imported livestock to Aruba for the sole purpose of feeding the many slaves and colonists living on Curaçao.
More slaves from Africa and the Caribbean were brought in to work the salt fields and the plantations . Curaçao, in fact, became the Caribbean's busiest slave depot during the seventeenth century when the Dutch West India Company shipped tens of thousands of slaves to Curaçao and Brazil where they were sold to plantation owners from across the Caribbean and the Americas. Slavery wouldn't be abolished in the ABCs until 1863, after which the Dutch West India Company closed many of the plantations.
Economic prospects were bleak until the discovery of rich oilfields off the coast of Venezuela at the beginning of the twentieth century, which proved to be a boon for all three of the islands. Aruba and Curaçao both built refineries, attracting workers from Bonaire and around the world. These refineries flourished until they were forced to close in the mid-1980s. While the oil and salt industries remain important today, it was the tourism initiatives of the 1990s that revived the islands' economies, providing jobs for a substantial number of their populations and increasing the ABC islands' profile as a holiday destination, particularly for Aruba and Bonaire, the more well-known of the islands.
