Half a million Taino lived on Hispaniola before Columbus

The island Europeans came to call Hispaniola was Taino country. Something like five hundred thousand people lived there in 1492, organised into five chiefdoms, each under a cacique, feeding themselves mainly on manioc. They had a long standing rivalry with the Carib peoples of the Lesser Antilles, and older scholarship confused them with the Arawak of Trinidad and Guyana, relatives who lived somewhere else entirely. Within a few decades of contact almost none of them were left. Disease did part of the work, forced labour in the mines did more, and Spanish violence finished it. The speed matters as much as the total. Spain destroyed its own workforce faster than it could use it, and the colonists then declared themselves short of hands. Africans were bought to fill the gap. So the first shipment of enslaved people to this island was a direct consequence of the killing that had gone before it. One catastrophe wrote the order for the next.

When Portuguese priests reached the Kongo court in 1491 and explained that the king would have to set aside all his wives but one, those wives grasped that they would lose their standing as wives of the king. They combined with the wives of his most trusted nobles and worked on their husbands to have the king advised against conversion. The lobbying failed and the court accepted Christianity. One of the women, Leonor, then asked to be baptised herself. The priests reported that she learned the doctrine quickly and answered their questions accurately, and that she supplied them with food and with money of the country, almost certainly nzimbu shells, out of income she controlled in her own right. She was the first cousin of her own husband, an early sign of how tightly the elite married inside itself. Her son Afonso later credited her with telling him how to enter the capital in order to defeat his half brother in the war of succession.

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.

En Bas Saline sits about a kilometre inland from Limonade Bord de Mer on the north coast of Haiti. Researchers including Kathleen Deagan have identified it as the village of the cacique Guacanagari and as the ground on which La Navidad stood. The case is circumstantial and rests on several strands at once. The site is unusually large and laid out in the pattern of a chief's town. It holds European objects, among them metal aglets, the small tips laced onto Spanish clothing, and bones of animals that were never native to the islands. Its distance from the shore matches contemporary descriptions of where the Santa Maria went aground. The mixture is what makes the place valuable. European material appears inside a Taino village that was still running as a Taino village, so the first weeks of contact can be read in the ground and not only in the admiral's journal. Keegan and Hofman call it a bridge between the pre-Columbian and colonial worlds.