Two villages on a dry limestone plateau in the last decades before 1492

Morne Cybele and Morne Souffleur stand on the high plateau of La Desirade, a small island in the Guadeloupe group with thin soil, broken limestone and very little fresh water. Both were occupied around the middle of the fifteenth century, within a few decades of the first European crossing. Living up there meant solving the water problem and hauling everything over rough ground, work the fertile coastal country of the larger islands does not demand. People took it on anyway. That is the interesting part. In the last stretch of the pre-Columbian period, communities in the eastern Caribbean were still moving into new places, including places with no obvious advantage, which is the behaviour of a population under pressure or a population still growing. Either way the Lesser Antilles were not in decline when Europe arrived. These islands were being settled right up to the moment the record changed hands.

Antam Goncalves sailed to western Africa in 1441 and opened his expedition by seizing a single man and a single woman. A companion told him that by carrying off those two captives he would allow Prince Henry to learn something about these people. The chronicle of the voyage was written by Gomes Eannes de Zurara, who returned again and again to the pleasure the prince took in each arrival of captives and to the hope of taking more. The pair matter because of what they were for. A man and a woman together do not make a sample. They make a demonstration that the coast could supply people who would go on producing more people, and that an owner's holdings could grow through the reproduction of the people he owned. The Portuguese traffic in African captives that opens here reached the Caribbean within a lifetime and eventually delivered most of the ancestors of Haiti.

Christopher Columbus was born at Genoa in the last days of October 1451. He spent years persuading the Spanish crown to pay for a westward crossing to India and got his answer in 1492, sailing from Spain on 3 August and raising the northern coast of Hispaniola on 5 December. On Christmas Eve the Santa Maria went aground. Thirty nine men stayed behind in a stockade called La Navidad, near where Cap-Haitien stands now, and he was back in Europe by March 1493. He returned that November to a burned fort and dead men, killed by the Taino whose welcome had been answered with violence. He crossed three more times and died at Valladolid on 20 May 1506. Haiti observes 5 December as Discovery Day, which is a curious thing for a country to keep. Several hundred thousand Taino were living on this island when he arrived, and within decades forced labour, disease and killing had finished them as a people.

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.