Small shell masks turn up on islands hundreds of kilometres apart

Across the Greater Antilles and the northern Lesser Antilles, excavation keeps producing small masks cut from shell or stone, carved with stylised human or spirit faces and made to be carried. They were ritual objects, held or worn in ceremonies that bound people to one another and to the powers they recognised. The distribution is what matters. Islands separated by long stretches of open water hold the same object made in the same idiom, which means the canoes carried more than food, pots and stone. They carried the images a person needs in order to worship. Ideas moved on those routes as reliably as cargo did. The Classic Taino religious system is usually described as belonging to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, with the smaller islands treated as its outer edge. These masks were in circulation well beyond that heartland. Whatever the political map looked like, the spiritual one covered a great deal more water.

At the feast of Mary in August 1449 the Emperor Zara Ya'iqob gathered the leaders of the Ethiopian church at the monastery of Dabra Mitmaq in Shoa. Two Egyptian metropolitans came, along with the abbots of Dabra Hayk, Dabra Libanos, Dabra Bizan, Dabra Damo and many other houses. The question was the Sabbath. One monastic party, the House of Ewostatewos, kept the Jewish Saturday and had been refusing ordination from the metropolitan for decades; the rest of the kingdom ignored it. The emperor, who had spent twenty years shut up in the mountain prison at Amba-Gishan before taking the throne in 1434, had thought the matter through and written books about it. The council agreed that both days would be kept and that the Ewostathians would accept ordination again. Ethiopians have observed two Sabbaths ever since. The province that mattered politically lay in the north, near the Red Sea coast the emperor was determined to control.

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.

Returning to the northern coast of Haiti on 28 November 1493, Columbus found La Navidad wrecked and the men he had left there dead. Guacanagari, the cacique of Marien who had helped build the fort, told him Caonabo had done it. Caonabo ruled Maguana, a chiefdom in the interior, and the explanation offered was that his people had been abused by the Spaniards and that he had struck back on their account. Rouse reports the accusation as Guacanagari's, which is the correct way to handle it. The one man with a motive to steer Spanish anger elsewhere was the ally on whose territory the fort had stood. Columbus took the story. The Spanish later seized Caonabo by a trick and put him on a ship for Spain, and he died at sea. Guacanagari kept his alliance and lost his chiefdom anyway. Both routes arrived at the same place inside twenty years.