Ciguayo

The Ciguayo were a non-Taíno people of north-eastern Hispaniola, holding the Samaná Peninsula and the northern mountains called Ciguay. They seem heirs of an older pre-ceramic, pottery-less hunter-gatherer people pushed into this corner by the expanding farming Taíno; Ciguayo itself was a Taíno exonym meaning roughly people of the wild mountain land.

Spanish observers found them taller than the Taíno, their bodies painted black and hair dressed with feathers, and feared them as archers with larger bows and poisoned arrows. Their tongue struck Ramón Pané and Las Casas as wholly unlike the island's common speech, and it was moribund in the sixteenth century, surviving only around Samaná; a single word, tuob for gold, was recorded.

Their last chief, Mayobanex, sheltered the fugitive Taíno cacique Guarionex, but Spanish campaigns overran the country and both men were seized, Guarionex being shipped in chains to Spain in 1502.