Haiti's own records burned, so its history sits in foreign files

The documentary record of Haiti has been destroyed over and over. Fire, explosion and theft account for most of the loss. The National Palace blew up in 1869 and took its papers with it. The 1804 Act of Independence passed into the hands of foreign collectors and was missing for the better part of two centuries. Colonial officials removed what they wanted when they left, and later occupiers did the same. Anyone writing the history of the country therefore works largely out of the diplomatic archives of Washington, London and Paris, because that is where continuous series of reports about Haiti actually survive. The Heinls call this a Thucydidean problem, since the events are known chiefly through the accounts of outsiders who were interested parties. Every quarrel about Haitian history runs into it. Claims that cannot be checked against a surviving document turn into myth, and myth about Haiti has never been scarce. Sovereignty includes control of the record of what you did.

On the night of 24 December 1492 the Santa Maria drifted onto a reef off the northern coast of Hispaniola, near what is now Cap-Haitien. A ship's boy had the helm. The hull opened and could not be saved. Columbus was left with one seaworthy vessel, since the Pinta had gone off on its own some weeks earlier, and the Nina was too small to carry every man back to Spain. He decided to build a fort out of the wreck and leave part of the crew in it. This accident produced the first European settlement in the Americas, and it produced it on the coast of what is now Haiti. Nothing about the site had been chosen. Rouse notes the practical consequence for the return voyage. Columbus sailed for Spain in January with a crew cut down to what one caravel could hold, and with a garrison behind him that he expected to find alive.

In the autumn of 1503 Ovando went into Xaragua, gathered the district chiefs into a single building on the pretext of a meeting, and had it set alight with eighty of them inside. Anacaona, who governed the province, was hanged in public. Rouse states the result plainly: this destroyed the last independent chiefdoms on Hispaniola and gave Spain complete control of the island. Eleven years had passed since the first European ship anchored off the coast. In that time a society of several hundred thousand people organised into five polities had been reduced to a labour supply with no leadership of its own, and the killing of a chief had become an administrative act performed by a governor holding instructions from Madrid. Everything that followed came out of a decision to leave nobody standing who could negotiate: the encomienda, the gold tribute, the collapse of the population, and the shipping in of Africans to replace it.

Governor Ovando sent Spain a report in 1503 warning that Africans escaping into the interior of Hispaniola had become a danger to the colony. Fick takes the document as a marker. Africans had been on the island perhaps three years, and already enough of them had gone into the mountains and stayed free there for the administration to treat it as a standing threat needing a policy. Marronage on this island is therefore as old as African slavery on it. No period of acceptance can be found before resistance begins. The same mountains sheltered maroon communities continuously for three centuries, through the Spanish period and the whole of French Saint-Domingue, and the leaders of the 1791 rising drew on a tradition of flight, concealment and armed refusal running back to the first decade of the sixteenth century. Fick built her history of the revolution on that continuity.