Okay.

And then try to directly answer your question.

She was born into the Caonabo family, the, the ruling family of one of the, the five large chiefdoms in Hispaniola at the time of conquest, fourteen ninety-two, when, when Columbus came by first.

And, you know, the primary sources don't record the ages of the Taino chieftains, but she was born in somewhere around fourteen sixty-eight, making her thirty years old at the beginning of the book.

And in her youth, and you can see this in all the primary sources, she was renowned as the island's most beautiful woman, and she then became renowned as the island's greatest poetess.

The Tainos recorded their history and their spiritual stories and so forth in song and dances that they called ariettos, and she was renowned for that.

When she was a young teenager, she was married to the chieftain i- in the, in the neighboring chieftain, Caonabo, and went to live with him in his chiefdom.

Mm-hmm.

But to go from that to, you know, a specific story about an individual, are-- do you-- is the shift really heavy to like, hey, if I want to know about Anacaona's life, I really have to, unfortunately, have to kind of parse through the Spanish sources just because it is about that individual? Or from some of the work you've seen on the archeological side and the anthropological side, we are able to pull out maybe a little bit more about Anacaona specifically as an individual.

The, it, it's more the anthropological side than the arthrop-- uh, than the archeological side.

The side where anthropologists have, have tried to understand their culture and thought patterns that are relying on interpretation.

There are archeological studies that help you determine where things happened, but it's really the anthropological studies that I find meaningful.

Now, y-you know, I said that European primary sources contain information about, uh, Anacaona and other Taino chieftains, and there's enough there to construct what happened in her life with, you know, I believe a fairly high degree of confidence.

Most of the information about her begins in 1495, which is when the conquest is going on.

But the Spanish chroniclers and reports also provide you some biographical information about, um, her prior to contact, prior to 1492.

Was there anything that surprised you when you were doing your research on this particular part of trying to understand what those cultural or, like, social norms were across this particular region?

In 1492, there were

five main chiefdoms of Taino Indians on the island of Española.

Zaragua was the most powerful chieftain, and it's located in the southwestern portion.

Basically, you could think of it as the southern half of what we now know as the country of Haiti, from a little bit above Port-au-Prince down through the rest of the country of Haiti.

Anna Connor was born in around 1468 or so.

There's no precise detail given in the chroniclers making her about 30 at the beginning of my book.

Isabella's just shy of 50.

So our two figures we focused on, Anacona and Columbus, how do you wrap their stories up in 1502? What happens to Columbus? What happens to Anacona? And then sort of, I guess, how's the stage set for how things move on beyond that?