Barbados is thought to have been originally inhabited by Arawak Indians. By the time Europeans explored the island, however, it was uninhabited.

Portuguese explorer Pedro a Campos stopped on Barbados in 1536 en route to Brazil. Though he had no interest in settling the island, it's thought that he introduced pigs to Barbados with the intention of using them as a food source on return voyages. It was Campos who named the island Los Barbados ('the bearded ones'), presumably after the island's fig trees, whose long, hanging aerial roots have a beard-like resemblance.

Captain John Powell landed on Barbados in 1625 and claimed the uninhabited island for England. Two years later, his brother Captain Henry Powell landed with a party of 80 settlers and 10 slaves. The group established the island's first European settlement, Jamestown, on the western coast at what is now Holetown. More settlers followed in their wake and by the end of 1628 the colony's population had grown to 2000.

Within a few years the colonists had cleared much of the native forest and planted tobacco and cotton. They replanted their fields with sugar in the 1640s. To meet the labor demands of the new crop, planters, who had previously relied upon indentured servants, began to import large numbers of African slaves. Their estates, the first large sugar plantations in the Caribbean, proved immensely profitable, and by the mid-17th century the planters and merchants were thriving.