A flag planted on a beach converts an island into property

On 5 December 1492 Columbus came ashore on the island the Spanish would name Hispaniola and declared it the property of the Spanish crown. The act consisted of words spoken in a language nobody present understood, a banner, and a notarial record carried back to Europe. Several hundred thousand Taino were living on the island that afternoon. Nothing in the ceremony required their agreement, their presence, or any knowledge on their part that it had happened. The legal fiction outlived the man who performed it. Spain, and France after it, went on treating the western Atlantic as vacant ground that Europeans could assign to one another by treaty, and every later argument about who owned Saint-Domingue traced back to a document written on that premise. The people already there entered European law as an obstacle to be cleared. Haiti spent the next three hundred and twelve years arguing with a claim made in a single afternoon.

The fourth Portuguese expedition to the Kongo landed in 1491 carrying priests, stonemasons, carpenters, horses, a few women, cloth and tools. The Mani Soyo, who governed the coastal province, was baptised at once together with his son while the implements of the old religion were piled up and burned. Two months later the party reached the capital, Mbanza Kongo, in the interior. The king, Nzinga Nkuvu, welcomed them and accepted baptism under the name Joao I, in honour of the reigning king of Portugal. Christianity in the Kongo, and in central Africa, starts here. The two societies were less foreign to each other than later accounts suggest. In both, disaster was explained by spiritual causes, sacred objects held real power, and religion belonged to the king, so that conversion was a decision taken at the top and then arranged between two crowns. Ordinary people in Iberia were as surrounded by saints and relics as villagers on the Zaire were by their own protectors.

Christopher Columbus opened the Atlantic trade in human beings by shipping about five hundred indigenous people from the Caribbean to Spain for sale. He was not improvising. Italian merchants and bankers in the Atlantic ports had been financing sugar estates and dealing in enslaved labour for generations, and the men who backed his voyages knew what a new island with a workable climate was for. What followed was the collapse of the people already living there. Smallpox, influenza and other diseases reached populations with no prior exposure and no immunity, and epidemics of that kind kill adults as readily as children, so households lost the people who planted and fished. Spanish violence and the wrecking of local food systems finished what the pathogens started. Millions of Caribbean islanders died within a few decades. The labour supply the Spanish had counted on disappeared, and the shortage they made themselves is why ships began sailing to Africa for replacements.

Hispaniola was forested when Columbus arrived and held more than six thousand plant species. Less than two percent of Haiti carries forest today. The decline is documented and its mechanism is dull. Around sixty percent of the country was still wooded in 1920. The population grew through the twentieth century, no electricity or gas supply was built for ordinary households, and people cooked with charcoal, which is made by cutting trees. Cover fell below twenty five percent by 1980 and has kept falling. Each stage feeds the next. Bare slopes lose soil, thin soil grows less food, poorer families burn more charcoal. Rain that intact forest would have absorbed now runs off in mudslides that kill people in their houses. USAID has planted more than sixty million trees in Haiti since 1990 and most of them have been cut for fuel, because nobody supplied the cooking energy the trees were being burned to provide. Planting without fuel is a way of looking busy.