Istwa Nou

New England ships were working the waters around Hispaniola long before any government in North America had a position on the place. In 1686 William Phips, a shipwright from the Maine frontier who later governed the Massachusetts colony, recovered a sunken hoard off the island's coast and carried the proceeds home. The voyage made him rich and it made his name. It is a fair marker of what the island already meant to English colonists: a source of sudden money and a crossroads of Atlantic traffic. Rayford Logan uses the episode to fix a point about sequence. The commercial relationship between the ports of New England and the French colony was built by merchants and captains across the whole eighteenth century, decades before there was a United States to conduct diplomacy. When Washington's government later had to decide how to handle a slave colony in revolt, it was deciding about a trading partner its own merchants knew intimately. The trade came first and the diplomacy caught up with it.