Cuban bones record hunger, illness and hard labour

E. Vento Canosa and D. Gonzalez examined indigenous skeletons recovered from sites across Cuba and published what the bones say about ordinary life before 1492. The remains carry chronic conditions, shortfalls in nutrition, and injuries of the kind that come from repeated specialised work: hauling, paddling, grinding, diving. Infectious disease left its marks as well. Set beside the early Spanish chronicles, which tend to describe island people living in easy abundance under a generous sky, the skeletal record reads as a correction written in bone. People here worked hard, went short in bad seasons, and got hurt doing the jobs their communities needed done. I keep this on the list because both pictures get used politically. The paradise version turns the conquest into a fall from innocence and its victims into scenery. The bones make them workers with occupational injuries, which is a harder thing to sentimentalise and a more useful thing to know.

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.

Laurent Dubois opens his history of the Haitian Revolution with the arrival of Columbus on the northern shore of the island on 5 December 1492 and with the name he gave it, La Isla Espanola. Europeans had touched other islands in the preceding weeks and sailed on. This time they stayed, and no year since has passed without a European or a European derived state claiming authority over some part of this ground. The island now carries two countries with different languages, different histories and a shared border running some three hundred and eighty kilometres. Haiti holds the western third and speaks Kreyol and French. The Dominican Republic holds the east and speaks Spanish. Both date from what happened after this landing, and the line between them was drawn later by European powers dividing the island between Spain and France. One afternoon on a beach in December is the common ancestor of two national histories that spend much of their time insisting they are unrelated.

Less than twelve months separate the founding of La Navidad from its destruction. Columbus left the garrison on the north coast of Hispaniola in January 1493, and the Taino of the surrounding country burned the place before the year was out. Geggus is direct about the cause. The Spaniards left there preyed on the people around them, and the people around them answered. That reading matters because of what the standard chronology usually does with the episode, which is to file it under indigenous treachery and move on. The men in the fort had no supply line, no authority over anyone and no restraint. They took food, they took women, and they went looking for gold in country whose owners had agreed to none of it. The response was local, organised and effective. The first act of armed resistance to European settlement anywhere in the Americas happened here, and it worked.