Columbus anchors at the Mole and notes the barren ground

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.

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.

The island its inhabitants called Ayiti was baptised Hispaniola by Columbus in 1492. What followed there was genocide, and it belongs to the same sixteenth century transformation that connected European ventures across the Atlantic, carried enslaved Africans into the Americas and dismantled Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac. Out of that came a structure for controlling authority, economy, subjectivity and the norms of gender and sexual relations, driven by the Atlantic Europeans of the Iberian peninsula, Holland, France and England, in their quarrels with each other as much as in their exploitation of labour and their seizure of land. Africans and the peoples of the Americas took no part in setting the rules. The name Ayiti was recovered in 1804 by people who had been brought to the island in chains three centuries after its first inhabitants were destroyed, and who chose the word the destroyed had used.

Columbus reached Hispaniola on 5 December 1492 and claimed it for Spain. On Christmas Eve the Santa Maria, his flagship, went aground in shallow water near what is now Cap-Haitien and could not be got off. He had it broken up and raised a fort from the timber. When he sailed for Spain on 2 January 1493 he left thirty nine men in it, the first Europeans holding ground on the island. He came back on 28 November 1493 and found the fort burned and all of them dead. The Taino who had helped build the place had destroyed it, and even Spanish accounts blamed the garrison's treatment of local women and its appetite for gold. Three hundred years of the island's history sit inside those eleven months. Europeans arrive and declare ownership. The people already there resist. The reply escalates until the original population is gone and Africans are brought in to replace them.