Columbus reaches the north coast and calls the island Spanish

On 5 December 1492 Columbus brought his ships to the north coast of the island and named it La Isla Espanola, the Spanish island. Philippe Girard begins his history of Haiti at this point. What the Spanish found was a worked landscape. The island supported a large population living in villages under chiefs, growing cassava, sweet potato and maize in raised mounds, fishing the reefs, playing a ball game on prepared courts, and moving between islands in large canoes. Within fifty years almost all of it was gone. The naming is the part to notice. On the first day of contact the island acquired a Spanish identity in Spanish records, and the words its inhabitants used for it went into the archive as curiosities. Everything the Spanish did afterward followed from the assumption buried in that name. The country that eventually threw them and their French successors out chose to call itself Ayiti, a word taken from the people who were there first.

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.