Monarchies in the Americas The royalists went to the polls divided, with the press indicating there were actually two princes aspiring to the Brazilian throne (Dom Luiz de Orleans e Bragança and Dom João Henrique); this created some confusion among the voters. The entire island of Hispaniola was first claimed on 5 December 1492, by Christopher Columbus, for Queen Isabella, and the first Viceroy of the Americas was established along with a number of colonies throughout the Island. With the later discovery of Mexico and Peru many of the early settlers left for the main land, but some twelve cities and a hundred thousand
Indigenous peoples of the Americas were created by gods or animals, some migrated from a specified compass point, and others came from "across the ocean". The European colonization of the Americas fundamentally changed the lives and cultures of the native peoples of the continents. Although the exact pre-colonization population-count of the Americas is unknown, scholars estimate that Native American populations diminished by between 80% and 90% within the first centuries of contact with Europeans. The majority of these losses are attributed to the introduction of Afro-Eurasian diseases into the Americas. Epidemics ravaged the Americas with diseases such as smallpox, measles, and cholera, which the early