Istwa Nou

In the middle of the seventeenth century England set out to break Spanish control of the Caribbean by force, and Hispaniola was the target. The expedition of 1655 failed to take the island. It belonged to a wider policy of acquiring a Caribbean foothold by conquest, and the fleet went on to seize Jamaica, which England kept. Logan treats the failed attempt as the start of something that lasted. For the next century and a half British diplomacy and British war planning returned again and again to the value of the island, and particularly to its western harbours, the deep water that would later serve Saint-Domingue. That interest was acted on in 1793, when a British army landed in the middle of the Haitian Revolution and spent five years and tens of thousands of lives failing to hold the colony. The ambition declared in 1655 was still being pursued when Toussaint Louverture negotiated the British off the island in 1798.