Columbus reaches Cuba and sends envoys to find China

The fleet reached Cuba on 28 October 1492 and anchored at Bariay, near the modern town of Gibara on the northeast coast. Columbus took the long green shoreline for the mainland of Asia, a peninsula of China or the island of Japan, and he acted on that reading. Hearing reports of an inland cacique who held gold, he sent two men into the interior with a letter of introduction from Ferdinand and Isabella addressed to the Great Khan, accompanied by an interpreter who spoke Arabic and Hebrew and was expected to manage the negotiations. They walked into a Taino village, were received hospitably, and came back with tobacco. The mistake ran for years. Columbus later required his crews to swear under oath that Cuba was a continent, and he died still holding the position. Rouse uses the episode to show how completely the Caribbean was read through expectations formed before anyone left Spain.

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.

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.