Flight into the mountains, and the mutilations meant to stop it

People began running from the work gangs and plantations of Hispaniola as early as the sixteenth century, and as imports of captives rose the number of runaways rose with them. Many made for the Bahoruco mountains in the southwest of the island, in what is now the Dominican Republic, where they joined others and built communities that were economic, political and cultural units in their own right. They generally arrived with farming tools and sometimes with a horse or mule from the estate. Survival was hard, since mountain plots did not feed everyone, so the camps raided the settlements below. Anyone caught was punished in ways designed to be seen: ears cut off, the pillory, burning. It did not stop the person from trying again and it did not stop anyone else from going. Before a newcomer was accepted into a camp he swore, in front of a leader who was often a priest as well, never to betray his companions.

Work on Sao Jorge da Mina began on 20 January 1482 on the Gold Coast of what is now Ghana, and the castle was finished the following year. Europeans had traded along this shore from ships and temporary posts. A square stone fort with steep stairways and deep dungeons said something else: the Portuguese intended to hold ground in Africa permanently. The building outlasted them. It passed to the Dutch and then to the British, and for more than three hundred years a large cistern under its base supplied fresh water to vessels loading for the Middle Passage. Water is what a slave ship runs out of first, and a captain who could fill his casks at Elmina could carry more people and sail further. Thousands of captives were driven through the opening in its wall that later generations named the door of no return, some bound for the Americas and others for ports elsewhere on the African coast. Elmina is the oldest European building still standing south of the Sahara.

Columbus was born in Genoa in late October 1451, and he spent years selling a bad calculation to anyone who would listen. His estimate of the earth's circumference was wrong and the Portuguese court knew it was wrong, which is why they turned him down. Spain funded him anyway because the upside on a shortcut to Asia was worth the risk on the math. He never reached Asia and he never accepted that he had not. I keep him on this timeline as a person rather than as an event because the personhood is the point. This was not an inevitable force of history. It was a specific man with a specific error and a specific set of investors, and the four hundred years that followed on this island were the compound interest on that transaction.

Daut retells the killing of the Xaraguan queen as nineteenth-century Haitian writers told it, which is the point of her whole method. Anacaona, whose name joined the Ayitian words for flower and for gold, accepted an invitation from the new Spanish governor Nicolas de Ovando along with three hundred of her people, was accused of treason once inside, and was hanged. Half a year of near indiscriminate slaughter of the Xaraguans followed, leaving orphans including her daughter Higuemota. Her husband Caonabo had already been seized in 1496 and, in the Haitian accounts, died aboard the ship deporting him to Spain. Daut stresses how Vastey drew the parallel that mattered to him, comparing Caonabo's end to Toussaint Louverture's death in a French prison. For these writers the island's Indigenous dead were not a separate prehistory but the first chapter of the same continuing crime.