Chicoid designs reach Cuba one way and the Lesser Antilles the other

Boca Chica pottery and the Chicoid designs that go with it reach well beyond Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, appearing in the Lesser Antilles to the east and in Cuba to the west. Establishing the distribution is the easy part. The harder question is how a complicated set of images moved that far and what it meant to the people who took it up. A motif does not travel by itself. Somebody carried a pot, or learned a technique from a potter on another island, or wanted an object that marked them as connected to a place with standing. Whether the communities adopting these designs understood them as their makers did is beyond recovery, and it is worth admitting as much. What the spread does establish is heavy traffic between islands and a shared regional prestige in which certain material traditions were worth acquiring. Indigenous boundaries in the Caribbean were fluid, and objects crossed them faster than anything else.

Gomes Eannes de Azurara wrote a chronicle of the Portuguese voyages down the West African coast. In it he reports that in 1441 sailors, one of them probably Antam Goncalves, carried the first Africans and a quantity of gold dust back to Portugal. Getting there had meant working past Cape Bojador, whose reefs and shoals had turned earlier ships back. Tiffany Lethabo King uses that date to slow down a habit of scholarship. Studies of colonialism reach almost automatically for 1492 and the Caribbean as the moment conquest begins. Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers both put the beginning earlier and elsewhere, on the shore of Guinea, where the category of Blackness was being made before there was an American colony to apply it in. Haiti sits at the far end of a line that starts on a stretch of Senegalese coast fifty years before Columbus sailed.

The crew pulled timber, nails and fittings out of the grounded Santa Maria near what is now Cap-Haitien and built a small fortified post on shore. They called it La Navidad for the day. Roughly thirty nine men stayed in it when Columbus sailed for Spain, provisioned with what the ship had carried and told to look for gold and to keep on good terms with the local cacique, Guacanagari, whose people had come out in canoes to help salvage the wreck. Girard treats this as the first European settlement of the Americas, and it stood on Haitian ground. It did not last a year. When Columbus returned in November 1493 the fort had been burned and every man in it was dead, killed by islanders who had endured their demands for gold and for women. The first European colony in the New World was destroyed by the people it was planted among, eleven months after it went up.

Italian and Iberian merchants carried sugarcane out to the Atlantic islands during the fifteenth century, planting it on Madeira and in the Canaries. Sugar was not a new business for them. They had been growing and refining it around the Mediterranean for generations, using bound labour on estates in places like Cyprus and Sicily. What the islands changed was the setting. Here was land nobody in Europe held a prior claim on, a climate that suited the cane, and a workforce that could be shipped in from elsewhere. That is the plantation as it would later stand in the Caribbean, complete except for scale. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of how often Saint-Domingue gets described as something new, an invention of the eighteenth century and a French one. It was a model that had been running for three hundred years by then. What the French did was move it west and make it enormous.