Christmas on Haitian Soil

The island of high mountains

On December 6, 1492, Columbus's two remaining ships came to anchor at a harbor on the northwestern tip of a large, mountainous island. Today that spot is called Môle Saint-Nicolas, in Haiti. Columbus named the island La Isla Española, "the Spanish island." [1]

The people who lived there already had a name for it. The Taíno called the whole island Haiti, a word usually translated as "land of high mountains." [2] In Haitian Creole today, it is spelled Ayiti.

Columbus was still searching for gold, and for the rich cities of Asia he believed were close. He sailed east along the island's northern coast.

Christmas Eve, 1492

On the night of December 24, the Santa María was sailing slowly along the coast. After celebrating Christmas Eve, most of the crew went to bed. [4]

The man responsible for steering handed the tiller to a ship's boy and went to sleep himself. [3] In the early hours of Christmas morning, the current carried the ship onto a sandbank off the coast of what is now northern Haiti. [3][4] The ship rolled onto its side and its planks split open. The flagship of the expedition was lost. [6]

Columbus now had a single small ship, the Niña. The Pinta, under Martín Alonso Pinzón, had separated from the fleet off Cuba a month earlier and had not been seen since. [7]

The rescue

The wreck lay near the town of a cacique, or chief, named Guacanagarí. Columbus had been on his way to visit him.

When Guacanagarí learned of the wreck, he ordered his people out in their canoes, and soon the water around the wreck was crowded with them. They unloaded the ship and carried everything that could be moved to the shore, where it was stored and placed under guard. [5]

Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella that not the smallest trifle had been lost, and that Guacanagarí had armed men guard the goods through the night. [3]

Stop and consider this moment. A stranger's ship had broken apart on the reef. Everything it carried lay on the beach. The Taíno could have taken all of it. Instead, by the stranger's own account, they protected it.

A fort built from a ship

Columbus could not take everyone home on the Niña. So he decided to leave men behind. Around December 26, they began building a fort out of the Santa María's own timbers and nails. Columbus named it La Navidad, "the Nativity," after the night of the wreck. [6]

It was the first Spanish settlement in the Americas, and it stood on Haitian soil.

Columbus left 39 men at La Navidad. [6] On January 4, 1493, he sailed away in the Niña. Two days later, he finally sighted the Pinta, and the two ships headed home to Spain together. [7] He took with him gold and samples of the island's birds and plants. He also took Taíno captives: as many as 25 people were carried to Spain, and only eight survived. [11]

Return to ashes

Columbus came back on his second voyage. On November 27, 1493, his fleet reached La Navidad. [7]

The fort had been destroyed. The bodies of eleven of his men were found near the beach, and none of the 39 survived. [6][7] Guacanagarí told the Spaniards the attack had been led by another cacique, Caonabo. [8]

What happened at La Navidad during those eleven months? No Spanish survivor lived to tell it.

We do know what came next. In March 1495, Guacanagarí marched alongside Columbus's soldiers, horses and attack dogs against other caciques of the island. [9] The chief who had rescued the Spaniards' cargo now fought beside them, against other Taíno leaders.

Digging for the truth

For almost five hundred years, no one knew where La Navidad had stood.

In 1977, an American missionary doctor named William Hodges was working in northern Haiti. His patients showed him finely made Taíno pottery, and that led him to a place called En Bas Saline, near the coast. [6]

En Bas Saline turned out to be the site of a very large Taíno town, lived in for roughly three centuries before Columbus arrived. It lies about 12 kilometers east of the city of Cap-Haïtien, close to where the Santa María went down. Archaeologists believe it was Guacanagarí's principal town. [10]

The Florida Museum of Natural History, working with Haiti's national ethnology bureau, excavated there from 1983 to 1988 and again in 2003. [6] People from the Haitian village of En Bas Saline, which still farms the land, served as the project's main archaeological technicians. [12]

At the center of the site, on a mound, they found the remains of a large building that had burned. Radiocarbon dates showed the structure existed in 1492. Almost all of the European objects at the site came from this one spot: Spanish pottery, a lead musket ball, and the bones of pigs and rats, animals that came from Europe. [10] Among those bones was the earliest trace of the Old World black rat on the island. [6]

Is this La Navidad? The archaeologists call it the most likely candidate, but the fort's location has never been proven. [6][10] And the Santa María itself has never been found. A 2014 claim to have located the wreck was disputed by Haitian officials. One historian suggests that river sediment has pushed the coastline outward, so the wreck may now lie under about six meters of earth, on dry land. [6]

The name comes home

Three hundred and eleven years after the wreck, on January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of the former French colony of Saint-Domingue. He gave the new nation the island's old Taíno name, Haiti, as a tribute to its first people. [2]

The story of Columbus in the Americas is usually told as a story of discovery. This chapter's version begins somewhere else: on a reef off the coast of Haiti, on Christmas morning, with a Taíno chief deciding to help strangers in trouble.