1441 to 1758 · Africanspan

Three centuries of Atlantic slaving happen without crossing to America

From 1441 the traffic ran north to Iberia and out to the islands, and it never stopped.

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1441 · Africanyear only

A Portuguese chronicle dates the first captives carried north to 1441

Conquest starts on the African shore in this account, half a century before Columbus.

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1441 · Africanyear only

A Portuguese captain takes one man and one woman for a prince

Antam Goncalves began with a pair, so that Prince Henry could learn what the coast held.

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1447 · Africanyear only

A letter to Genoa turns African numbers into a reason to buy

Antoine Malfonte wrote that captives were cheap because the land held too many people.

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August 1449 · Africanmonth known

An Ethiopian emperor ends a church schism over which day is holy

Hundreds of abbots agreed at Dabra Mitmaq that Saturday and Sunday would both be kept.

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the fifteenth century · African

Abravanel writes about Africans in both directions at once

The curse of Ham as a Jewish invention turns out to be a twentieth century invention.

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October 1451 · Caribbeanmonth known

Christopher Columbus is born in Genoa

A discoverer in one hemisphere. The opening of a catastrophe in the other.

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October 1451 · Caribbeanmonth known

A Genoese navigator is born and a hemisphere gets a new calendar

Haiti marks 5 December, the day his ships raised the northern coast, as Discovery Day.

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1453 · Africanyear only

Constantinople falls and Europe's slave supply turns African

Ottoman control of the Black Sea routes sent captives to Islamic buyers and left European sugar short of hands.

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1455 · Africanyear only

A Venetian trader accepts a twelve year old girl as a gift

Budomel sealed a bargain of horses for captives, and Cadamosto sent the girl to his ship.

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1460s · Africandecade

Sugar for export starts moving west across the Atlantic islands

The plantation complex began its journey toward the Caribbean on islands off Africa and Iberia.

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1464 · Indigenousyear only

Anacaona is born at Yaguana, which is now Léogâne

Golden Flower. Cacique of Xaragua. Poet. Hanged in 1504.

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1480 · Africanyear only

A chapel to Santiago rises at the port where the ships loaded

Africans met the mounted warrior saint at Elmina before any of them saw the Caribbean.

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23 April 1482 · African

Portuguese ships land at Mpinda and meet the kingdom of Kongo

Diogo Cao went looking for a sea road to India and found a state of six provinces.

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20 January 1482 to 1483 · Africanspan

The Portuguese build a stone fortress on the Gold Coast

Elmina announced that Europeans meant to stay, and its cistern watered slave ships for three centuries.

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1482 · Africanyear only

A chief asks the Portuguese to go elsewhere and they ask him to be baptised

Elmina became Portugal's first tropical possession and both requests were refused.

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1483 · Africanyear only

An empty island becomes the base of Portugal's West African slave trade

Sao Tome took convicts from Lisbon first and then captives from the mainland.

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1483 · Africanyear only

A Portuguese captain reaches the Congo and takes hostages home

Three more voyages followed and each convinced Lisbon there was a real kingdom here.

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1487 · Caribbeanyear only

Witch hunting manuals teach that the Devil hands out poison recipes

Poison became a woman's crime in European thought and stayed one after the trials stopped.

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1490s · Africandecade

Black slaves outnumber white slaves in Sicily

Notaries on the island start writing sclavi negri into the majority of contracts before Columbus sails.

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1490s · Africandecade

Portuguese sugar takes root on Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea

An uninhabited equatorial island became the rehearsal for every plantation colony in the Americas.

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1491 · Africanyear only

The wives of the Kongo court work on their husbands to stop the king converting

Christianity would leave the king one wife, and the rest understood what that meant.

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1491 · Africanyear only

A flag of Saint James is handed to the king of Kongo

Portuguese missionaries gave Nzinga Nkuvu an embroidered cross, and three centuries of Kongo history followed.

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3 May 1491 · African

A Kongo king is baptised and Christianity becomes Kongolese identity

Nzinga a Nkuwu became João I, and three centuries later his church shaped Haitian rebel rhetoric.

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4 June 1491 · African

A provincial governor is baptised Afonso and keeps the faith when his father drops it

Twelve years in Nsundi kept a religion alive that the capital had already abandoned.

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1491 · Africanyear only

A Kongo king takes baptism and a Portuguese name in his own capital

Priests, stonemasons, carpenters and horses came ashore, and the ritual objects burned.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

The forest that was here in 1492

Six thousand plant species and full canopy. Today under two percent forest cover.

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1492 to about 1542 · Indigenousspan

Fifty years of Spanish rule end the Taino as a people

Mocombe puts the pre-contact population at three to four million and calls the outcome genocide.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

Columbus ships five hundred captive islanders to Spain

The first Atlantic cargo of people went east, and disease then emptied the islands he had claimed.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

The islanders tell Columbus they are the good people

Taino means noble in their own language, and it marked them off from the raiders to the south.

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1492 to 1550 · Indigenousspan

Nine in ten islanders are dead within sixty years

Massacre, epidemic and forced labour emptied the West Indies and created the demand African ships answered.

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c. 1492 · Indigenousapproximate

A mound near Limonade is probably Guacanagari's town

Kathleen Deagan's excavation found Spanish clothing tips and foreign animal bone in a Taino village.

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c. 1492 to 1600 · Indigenousspan

Taino networks keep running for a century after Columbus

Hofman and her colleagues track indigenous people still moving goods and themselves under Spanish rule.

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1492 to 2005 · Haitianspan

The mountains kept the countryside out of reach of every ruler

Rugged terrain sheltered maroons and peasants alike, and defeated every road system laid across it.

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1492 to 1994 · Haitianspan

Haiti's own records burned, so its history sits in foreign files

The National Palace explosion of 1869 and a century of pilferage moved the archive abroad.

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1492 to 1788 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan

Three quarters of the world's sugar came off this one colony

Enslaved labour on the western third of Hispaniola paid for chateaux in France and exhausted the land.

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1492 to 1788 · Haitianspan

One island grows two societies that do not recognise each other

The Spanish east stayed Iberian and Catholic while the French west turned Jacobin and Vodou.

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1492 to 1995 · Haitianspan

Morne la Selle stands at 8,793 feet and rules the map

Height and distance, more than any government, decided who in Haiti could reach whom.

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1492 to 1994 · Haitianspan

Vodou and Kreyol are the country's real institutions

The state was run in French by a small elite while the population kept another language and another faith.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

Five chiefdoms govern Hispaniola and succession runs through sisters

Jaragua and Marien covered what is now Haiti, under a matrilineal rule the Spanish moved fast to break.

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1492 to the present · Haitianspan

Haiti loses its forest and then loses the soil under it

From full cover in 1492 to under two percent today, driven by charcoal and the absence of any other fuel.

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1492 · Caribbeanyear only

One island, two countries, and a name that erased a third

Columbus called it the Spanish island, and the words the Taino used for their own country did not last.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

Jaragua's capital became Leogane and then an earthquake epicentre

The southwestern Taino chiefdom, ruled last by Anacaona, sat where the 2010 quake began.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

Half a million Taino lived on Hispaniola before Columbus

Five chiefdoms, a manioc economy, and a collapse fast enough to create the demand for African labour.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

The most famous poet in Hayti was a woman who governed

Anacaona composed areytos, ruled Xaragua alone, and was hanged at a military review.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

Columbus renames Ayiti and the killing begins

The island called Ayiti was baptised Hispaniola, and its population did not survive the century.

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January 1492 · Africanmonth known

The reconquest ends and its mandate crosses the ocean

Moriscos who returned to Islam in the Americas set about converting the people they found there.

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1492 to 1507 · Indigenousspan

Hispaniola falls from over a million people to sixty thousand

Spanish settlers then enslave Lucayans and Caribs before turning exclusively to Africa.

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1492 · Indigenousyear only

Fouchard calls the arrival of Columbus an authorised genocide

A million people on one island, destroyed quickly by mine labour, torture and slave export.

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1492 · Caribbeanyear only

Spain expels Moors and Jews and puts the difference in the blood

The same year opened the Atlantic and fixed a doctrine of descent that later moved to skin.

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3 August 1492 · Caribbean

Three ships leave Palos and steer for open ocean

Columbus stopped in the Canaries for stores, then turned west into water no European chart covered.

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12 October 1492 · Indigenous

Columbus lands at Guanahani and renames it San Salvador

The first island he touched already had a name and a population that came down to the beach to look.

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28 October 1492 · Caribbean

Columbus reaches Cuba and sends envoys to find China

Landing near Gibara, he heard of a chief holding gold and dispatched men inland to the Great Khan.

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5 December 1492 · Caribbean

Columbus reaches the north coast and calls the island Spanish

Girard opens his history of Haiti here, with a crowded, farmed island about to be emptied.

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5 December 1492 · Caribbean

One landing produces two countries on a single island

Dubois dates the permanent European presence on Hispaniola to this arrival on the northern shore.

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5 to 6 December 1492 · Indigenousspan

Columbus writes new names over Quisqueya, Bohio and Babeque

On the feast of Saint Nicholas he named a harbour for the saint, and the older names went out of use.

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5 December 1492 · Caribbean

A flag planted on a beach converts an island into property

Columbus performed a ceremony of possession in front of people who already owned the place.

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5 December 1492 · Caribbean

The first Spanish garrison on Hispaniola lasted eleven months

A grounded flagship, a fort built from its timbers, thirty nine men, and a burned ruin on the return.

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6 December 1492 · Caribbean

Geography puts Haiti in the path of every Atlantic power

Logan begins his diplomatic history with the Windward Passage and the peninsula that reaches into it.

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6 December 1492 · Caribbean

Columbus anchors at the Mole and notes the barren ground

He had left Cuba the day before, still certain that Cuba was a continent.

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December 1492 · Indigenousmonth known

Guacanagaric gave Columbus the ground for his first fort

The chiefdom of Marien supplied land and hands for La Navidad, near what is now Cap-Haitien.

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15 December 1492 · Caribbean

France's hold on Haiti begins on a small turtle shaped island

Columbus named Tortuga in 1492; French buccaneers took it in 1625 and worked their way to the mainland.

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24 December 1492 · Indigenous

Columbus wrecks his flagship and leaves the first settlement behind

The Santa Maria struck a reef on Christmas Eve, and the men left ashore were killed after he sailed.

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24 December 1492 · Caribbean

The Santa Maria runs onto a reef on Christmas Eve

Losing the flagship off the northern coast forced Columbus home in one caravel with men left behind.

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25 December 1492 · Caribbean

A fort called Christmas rises from the wreck of a ship

Salvaged timber became La Navidad, the first Spanish garrison in the Americas, on the future Haitian coast.

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25 December 1492 · Caribbean

Columbus leaves men behind and sails home to report

A garrison on the northern coast held the Spanish claim while the admiral crossed back for money.

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1493 · Indigenousyear only

The first European settlement in the Americas lasted under a year

Geggus reads the burning of La Navidad as an answer to how the garrison behaved.

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1493 · Caribbeanyear only

Seventeen ships and twelve hundred men turn a voyage into a colony

Dubois marks the second crossing as the point where Spain stopped exploring and started settling.

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2 January 1493 · Caribbean

Thirty nine men are left to hold a fort on Taino land

Columbus sailed for Spain and the first European garrison in the Americas stayed at La Navidad.

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16 January 1493 · Indigenous

At Samana Bay the Ciguayo meet the Spanish with bows

Rouse marks the first people in the Americas to face the newcomers under arms.

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15 March 1493 · Indigenous

Six Taino are baptised at court with the king as godfather

Both surviving ships made Palos on the same day, and the captives went on display in Spain.

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25 September 1493 · Caribbean

The second fleet leaves Cadiz with orders to mine, settle and convert

Seventeen ships and roughly fifteen hundred men carried a written programme for the island.

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3 November 1493 · Indigenous

At Guadeloupe the Spanish find what they take for Carib ritual

The fleet raised Dominica and turned northwest along the island arc toward Hispaniola.

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3 November 1493 · Caribbean

One landfall fixes the sailing route between Europe and the Antilles

Columbus arrived off Dominica having found the winds that carried ships west for four centuries.

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22 November 1493 · Indigenous

Within fifty years of contact the island's people were gone

Logan puts the population before Columbus as high as a million and the collapse at half a century.

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28 November 1493 · Indigenous

Guacanagaric blames Caonabo for the killing at La Navidad

Columbus found the fort in ruins and accepted his ally's account of who had done it.

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28 November 1493 · Indigenous

The Taino answer for eleven months of a garrison's conduct

Columbus came back to a burned fort and thirty nine dead men, and called the killing savagery.

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8 December 1493 · Caribbean

La Isabella replaces the burned fort with a Spanish town

Columbus moved his settlement east and built the base from which the island was taken apart.

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1494 · Caribbeanyear only

A pope draws a line down the Atlantic

Tordesillas settled Spain and Portugal's claims; Saragossa did the same for the East in 1529.

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7 June 1494 · Caribbean

Two kingdoms divide the world along a line drawn in the Atlantic

The Treaty of Tordesillas partitioned every non Christian country between Spain and Portugal.

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1495 to 1497 · Africanspan

Askia the Great goes to Mecca with three hundred thousand gold pieces

Two years away from an empire he had already fitted with canals, a standing army and legal weights.

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1496 · Caribbeanyear only

Santo Domingo becomes the first lasting European city in the Americas

Founded on the southern coast in 1496, it ran Spain's Caribbean empire for most of a century.

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1496 · Indigenousyear only

Anacaona stages the reception that later gets her kingdom killed

The queen of Xaragua ran the ceremonies herself while her brother sat back and watched.

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1498 to 1525 · Africanspan

The first Africans in the Americas came by way of Europe

Eltis and Richardson date a possible arrival to 1498 and direct shipping from Africa to about 1525.

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