The island was very prosperous by the time of the Napoleonic wars (1792–1814), exporting sugar and coffee but after the wars sugar prices dropped, and the slave trade was abolished in 1807. Settlers, using slave labour, developed sugar, cocoa, indigo and later coffee estates. Nonetheless, the battles of the Maroons to retain their freedom succeeded when, in 1740, the British authorities recognised their rights to freedom and ownership of property. The company used Jamaica as its chief market, and the island became a centre of slave trading in the West Indies. Two years later the Royal Africa Company, a slave-trading enterprise, was formed. In 1670 Spain formally ceded the island to Britain. Between 16 pirates used Jamaica as a place of resort. These people came to be known as Maroons (from the Spanish cimarron, meaning ‘wild’, a word applied to escaped slaves). In 1645 the British captured Jamaica from the Spaniards, whose former slaves refused to surrender, took to the mountains and repelled all attempts to subjugate them. There were no Arawaks left on the island by 1665, but there were enslaved Africans replacing them. The Spanish arrival was a disaster to the indigenous peoples, great numbers of whom were sent to Spain as slaves, others used as slaves on site, and many killed by the invaders, despite the efforts of Spanish Christian missionaries to prevent these outrages. Lacking gold, Jamaica was used mainly as a staging post in the scramble for the wealth of the Americas. However, the name was never adopted and it kept its Arawak name Xaymaca, of which ‘Jamaica’ is a corruption. He named the island Santiago (Saint-James). Little is known about the island’s early history, except that there are many traces of Arawak habitation, and that Arawaks, agriculturists who made good-quality textiles and pottery, were living there when Christopher Columbus landed on, on his second American voyage of exploration. Capital and largest city (2011 est.): Kingston, 571,000.Prime Minister: Portia Simpson-Miller (2012).Constitutional parliamentary democracy.The island is made up of coastal lowlands, a limestone plateau, and the Blue Mountains, a group of volcanic hills, in the east. Jamaica is an island in the West Indies, 90 mi (145 km) south of Cuba and 100 mi (161 km) west of Haiti.