Hispaniola fills up inland and the bones in the middens change

Late in the pre-Columbian sequence, settlement on Hispaniola moved away from the shore and into the interior. The animal bone in the rubbish of those inland sites reflects the shift. Land animals and fish taken from rivers and lakes appear in place of the reef species that fill coastal middens. The diet was reorganised rather than replaced, and the farming that supported it was intensified, which is what a growing population requires. With that comes a settlement pattern of large sites, built mounds and laid out ritual ground, the arrangement archaeologists describe as a galactic polity, in which lesser communities orbit a dominant centre. Control over land, water and labour had passed to chiefs who held the position by inheritance. The island was filling up, and the arrangements people made in order to eat were turning into arrangements about who gives the orders. None of it needed an arrival from outside to set it going.

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.

Columbus sailed from Cuba on 5 December 1492 convinced that Cuba was part of a mainland. The next day he brought his ships into a harbour at the northwestern tip of the island now called Haiti, the place later known as Nicolas mole and then Mole Saint-Nicolas. Its entrance lies between two capes about three quarters of a mile apart. Inside, the water narrows, bends to the northeast, and ends in a basin cut off from the open sea by a low neck of land half a mile across. It is deep throughout, sheltered from every wind, and holds an anchor well. Columbus recorded how safe the place was and also how dry and poor the country around it looked. Both judgements held. For the next four centuries the harbour was the best on that coast and the land behind it stayed thin, and in the eighteen eighties foreign governments opened negotiations to acquire the port.

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.