Columbus lands at Guanahani and renames it San Salvador

After weeks out of the Canaries the ships made land on 12 October 1492 at an island in the Bahamian archipelago. The people living there called it Guanahani. Columbus went ashore with a notary and a royal standard, performed the ceremony of possession in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, and gave the island a new name, San Salvador. Nobody on the Taino side had any way of knowing what the ritual meant, and the document it produced was written in a language none of them read. Which island in the Bahamas this was remains argued over, since several candidates fit the sailing directions in the log. The naming matters more than the location. The first act of the encounter was the replacement of a local name with a Spanish one, backed by a legal formula devised in Europe to turn land already occupied by other people into crown property. That formula was applied to Hispaniola eight weeks later.

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.

In 1492 Christians completed the expulsion of Moors and Jews from the Iberian peninsula and forced conversion on those who stayed. The quarrel between the three religions of the book was old, but from that year it was reorganised around a new principle. Christian theology located the difference between Christian, Moor and Jew in the blood, which made descent rather than belief the test, and made conversion insufficient. In the same years the ranking of Spanish, Indian and African began to take shape in the Americas. By the eighteenth century blood as the marker of race had been transferred to skin, which is the form in which it reached the plantations of Saint-Domingue and the colour laws of the 1760s and 1770s. The doctrine that classified free people of colour by the number of their African ancestors was worked out first in Spain, against Jews and Muslims, before there was a Caribbean colony to apply it in.

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.