The northern Lesser Antilles stop being villages and become lookouts

Late in the pre-Columbian period the small islands of the northern Lesser Antilles changed function. Large permanent villages were given up, and in their place came smaller stations set at intervals along the sailing routes, used for trade and as points from which to watch the water. A settlement pattern like that answers to somebody else's traffic. The powerful polities of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico were pushing their influence eastward in these centuries, and the islands in the path of that expansion were reorganised to service it. Communities that had run their own affairs from their own villages became nodes in a system whose centre was somewhere else. The archaeology records no conquest. It records people abandoning an arrangement that had held for generations and taking up one that makes sense only in relation to a larger power. That is a loss of independence, and it was under way before any European sail appeared.

Alvise da Cadamosto, a Venetian working for the Portuguese, sailed to Senegambia in 1455 and opened his first negotiation with Budomel, a Jalof lord who promised captives in exchange for horses. To show good faith Budomel handed over a girl of about twelve. Cadamosto wrote that she was given for the service of his chamber, that he accepted her, and that he sent her to the ship. He recorded no objection to any part of the transaction and said nothing further about her. What she understood of it, and what the women and girls left behind under Budomel understood, went unwritten, though the terms would have been plain enough to all of them. Cadamosto came back to the Gambia river in 1456. His narrative was printed in Italian in 1507 and translated into Latin, German and French within eight years, which made it one of the first accounts through which European readers learned that people on that coast could be bought.

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.

Anacaona was born in 1464 at Yaguana, the place we now call Léogâne. Her name in Taíno means Golden Flower. She was a cacique, meaning a head of state, and she was also a composer of areítos, the sung poems that carried Taíno history. She ruled Xaragua, negotiated with the Spanish, hosted them, and was hanged by Governor Nicolás de Ovando in 1504 after a massacre of her nobles at a banquet. Now follow the chain, because this is where the timeline stops being a list and starts being an argument. With Taíno labor destroyed and Taíno leadership executed, the colonial administration needed a replacement workforce. The importation of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola accelerates directly out of that gap. Anacaona's death is not only the end of one story. It is the procurement decision that begins another.