Istwa Nou

Christopher Columbus reached the western end of the island on 6 December 1492 and gave the whole landmass the name Hispaniola. Rayford Logan opens his study of Haitian relations with the United States at that point, and he argues that the terrain and the position of this western third settled much of what came afterward for Saint-Domingue and for Haiti. Only Cuba lies closer to the United States. The long northwestern peninsula, with Mole Saint-Nicolas at its tip, reaches out into the Windward Passage, the channel carrying traffic between the Atlantic and the Caribbean and the route a fleet takes to reach the Gulf. A harbour on that passage is worth having whether the ships are merchantmen or warships, which is why Mole Saint-Nicolas turns up again and again in nineteenth century American proposals. Logan treats climate and location as first causes. The island did not choose its place in the sea lanes, and neither did the people who ended up defending it.

Columbus came back to Hispaniola on his second voyage and found that the Spaniards he had left on the north coast had vanished, with nobody left alive to explain it. What followed was a policy. Short of food, short of gold and short of hands, the Spanish drove the indigenous population into the mines and the fields under compulsion, and within roughly fifty years of the first landing there was almost nobody left to drive. Logan cites estimates putting the island's population as high as a million people before the Europeans came. Whatever the true figure, the direction is not in dispute. He opens his diplomatic history of Haiti with this episode, and the choice is deliberate. Logan published in 1941, when the United States had recently ended a nineteen year occupation of the country, and he wanted his readers to grasp that the violence they were reading about in the twentieth century had a starting date in the fifteenth.

On 18 August 1517 the Spanish government licensed the import of enslaved Africans into Hispaniola in large numbers. Bartolome de las Casas had pressed for it. He had spent years fighting the encomienda system and the destruction of the Taino, and what he put to the court was a substitution: bring labour from Africa and the surviving indigenous people would be left alone. He came to regret it and wrote so, once he understood that he had helped fasten one people into slavery while trying to release another. Rayford Logan, writing in 1941, treats the licence as the point at which the history of this island parted from every other European holding in the region. The traffic it opened ran three hundred years and carried hundreds of thousands of people into the western third of Hispaniola, under conditions at sea that killed a large share of them. Men and women who rose in 1791 had made that crossing and remembered it.