A rock off Haiti's southwest coast becomes American property

Navassa is a bare limestone island of about five square kilometres lying between Haiti's southwestern peninsula and Jamaica. Men sailing under Columbus reached it in 1504, found no fresh water, and moved on. It stayed empty until guano became valuable. In 1856 the United States Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which allowed any American citizen to take possession of an unoccupied island holding seabird droppings and hold it for the nation. A Baltimore ship captain named Peter Duncan invoked that law in 1857 and claimed Navassa. Labourers brought from Maryland dug the deposits until the workings closed in 1898, and Washington kept the island anyway. Haiti has claimed Navassa since independence in 1804 and the United States has never acknowledged the claim. In 1999 the American government declared the island a National Wildlife Refuge, which turned an unresolved question of sovereignty into a matter of bird protection. The dispute did not end. It was reclassified.

Nzinga Nkuvu died in 1506. He was said to have named Afonso as his heir, but the great chiefs at Mbanza Kongo picked another son who had not converted. Afonso marched on the capital with the Portuguese who had been with him in Nsundi, defeated and killed his brother, and took the throne. His supporters claimed a vision of St James had helped, in the Iberian manner. He ruled until 1543. He fought few wars and expanded no borders, spending his reign instead on schools, churches, craftsmen and medicine, and Lisbon treated him as an independent Christian king to be trained in the habits proper to one, including living in a house with two storeys. From the moment he won that fight the Kongo monarchy never publicly renounced Christianity again for more than three hundred years. Afonso had made a new kind of legitimacy, and it became part of what the kingdom understood itself to be.

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.

By the 1780s the French colony of Saint-Domingue, occupying the western third of Hispaniola, shipped out more sugar than any other territory in the world, along with most of Europe's coffee and a great deal of its indigo. Bordeaux and Nantes were built on that traffic. All of it descends from a decision taken in 1505, when Spanish settlers first planted cane on the island. Sugar cannot be produced at scale without a large disciplined workforce held in place for years, and the Taino who had farmed this land were being destroyed by European disease and Spanish labour drafts. Over the following three centuries more than half a million Africans were carried across the Atlantic to the western third of this island alone. Working lives on the estates were short enough that the population had to be replaced by fresh arrivals rather than sustained by births. The rising of 1791 grew directly out of that arrangement.