The founding ceremony may have happened a week earlier, or differently

Girard narrates the gathering at Bois Caiman with all its detail, the storm on the horizon, Boukman the Jamaican born priest, Jeannot, Biassou and Jean-Francois, the mambo Cecile Fatiman cutting the throat of a black pig, the participants drinking the blood and keeping hairs for charms, and the declaration that the god of war wanted them to rise. Then he withdraws most of it. The vivid particulars were added in the nineteenth century by the Frenchman Antoine Dalmas, who wanted the rebels to look like savages in a satanic cult, and no French witness could have attended a meeting called to plan their deaths. Slave gatherings occurred and the revolt followed, and that is all that is known, with genuine uncertainty as to whether the meeting fell on 21 August or the previous Sunday, the fourteenth. He predicts the scene will open histories two centuries from now anyway. Where this account departs from the standard one: Girard treats the canonical Bois Caiman scene as largely a nineteenth century French invention and leaves even its date open.

In 1791 free people of colour in Saint-Domingue armed enslaved men to strengthen their hand against the white colonists who refused them equal rights. The armed men were known as the Swiss, a name borrowed from the mercenary guards of the French king. Once the free coloured leaders obtained the concessions they wanted, the soldiers who had fought for them became an embarrassment. Two hundred and seventeen of them were put aboard ship late that year and carried to the Mosquito Coast of Central America. They were held below deck in irons, and the crews tried to sell them on arrival. Officials at Belize and in Jamaica, worried about what such men might say to the enslaved people around them, refused to let them land. The ships turned back to Saint-Domingue, where the men appear to have been killed without trial. Political exile, sale and massacre ran together in a single voyage, eleven years before the same combination returned on a much larger scale.

Writing to the naval minister on 25 March 1795, the French representative Etienne Laveaux gave figures that explain why emancipation was not optional. Of 10,288 soldiers sent to Saint-Domingue only 990 remained, and of 952 officers only 262. Yellow fever and malaria, not battle, did most of this. Girard notes a French officer's earlier estimate that four white men had to be sent for one to be alive four years later. Former slaves, numbering more than half a million in Saint-Domingue at the start of the revolution and far more resistant to tropical fevers, became the replacement. Regulations required black civilians to keep working on estates even after abolition, so joining the army was a way out of field labour, and the constitution of 1795 reserved the vote to soldiers and the wealthy. By 1796 a third of the officers and seven eighths of the soldiers in Guadeloupe were black.

Audubon was born on 26 April 1785 at Les Cayes, the illegitimate son of a French sugar planter and a French servant woman. He was taken to France as a child as the colony destabilized and later sent to the United States to avoid Napoleon's conscription. He became the defining ornithological artist in American history, and almost nobody who owns a print knows the man was born in Haiti. I keep him here for one reason. The diaspora is usually narrated as something that starts in 1915, or 1957, or 1991, and it starts before the country does. Saint-Domingue exported people to Louisiana, to Cuba, to Philadelphia, to Charleston and to France for decades before independence, and the cultural residue of that scattering is sitting in American museums under captions that mention no island at all.