January to 16 March 1908 · Haitianspan
A fake earthquake, a failed landing, and the poets shot at the cemetery
›Read the full entryClose
Pierre Nord Alexis was in his late eighties and wanted another term as president of Haiti. January 1908 opened with the arrest of Louis-Joseph Janvier, the country's leading constitutional scholar, who had announced a candidacy in Port-au-Prince and was dragged through the streets and jailed. On 15 January a cable reached the palace saying an earthquake had wrecked Gonaives. The telegram was a decoy. Jean-Jumeau had come in by sailboat from St Thomas and raised the flag of Antenor Firmin, holding Gonaives and Saint-Marc. Firmin's weapons never arrived, because American agents in New York had seized two thousand rifles, a hundred thousand cartridges and four hundred thousand dollars. Jean-Jumeau armed five hundred men with swords and machetes, lost, and was hacked to death when the firing squad failed to kill him. Merisier Jeannis was beheaded and his head shown on a pole in the Jacmel market. On the night of 14 March the president's police swept the capital, and the poet Massillon Coicou and his two brothers were shot at the cemetery beside graves already dug.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.