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• 1 media/Thumb 145.png 2024-11-26T11:21:29-05:00 "History of Haiti: Preface" 12 A preface to a new history of Haiti by Louis Borno. Focuses on Christopher Columbus. plain 2024-11-28T22:43:16-05:00 Translation: We offer, as a primer for the readers of La Fraternité, the preface of an interesting work that our friend and collaborator Louis Borno will soon publish.
  
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  History of Haiti:

  Preface
  
  In 1492, a man, searching for a route, found a world.
  
  Christopher Columbus, heading to Asia by this "great road" called the Ocean, encountered land; he thought it was the extreme east of India, it was America.
  
  Facing so simple a fact, some said: "Chance." Others stopped, disconcerted, and, surprised by the singular mystery of certain details, began thinking and then said: "Providence."
  
  Chance or Providence, it is certain that Columbus had no doubt that he had just circled the globe, the facts show it clearly. The great Genoese, full of the fantastical ideas of Marco Polo, took Cuba for the States of the great Khan; the Cubans spoke to him of Cibao, he let himself believe that they meant Cipango, the marvellous island of gold that Marco Polo placed in front of the Asiatic continent. On his second voyage, believing he was in India, he had the audacious idea to return to Spain by carrying on ahead, through the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.
  
  It was not until his third voyage, six years later, that he realized his error and wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella that he "believed he had found lands until now unknown."
  
  Whatever it might be, whether it was an error, whether this discovery was the intelligent work of God or a simple accident of travel, the man through whom the world grew took up the attitude of the Genius, perceived in the extraordinary magnification of the legend. His name evokes a whole poignant history of pain. One thinks of the perpetual and humiliating court battle that this sublime and stubborn being must sustain, of the slanders that harmed his body, of the chains that bruised his limbs, of the ironically miserable death of this Viceroy of the Indies, of this Admiral of the Oceans, who gave Spain so many peoples and so much riches and, finally, of the unique crowning of all injustices, that another's name should be given to his work! One thinks of the despairing martyrdom so nobly endured by this great man, this great mind, this great heart, and we feel ourselves penetrated by a deep emotion, a pious tenderness.
  
  And that is why, at the beginning of this History of Haiti, we incline ourselves before the memory of Columbus.
  
  We will not tell his life story; although it is mixed up with the history of our island, we will not deal with it. For that matter, we will only cast a quick glance at that painful massacre called the History of the Caciques and whose vengeful stain still marks the face of Spain. The history of Hispaniola has nothing in common with the history of Haiti any more than the soft, the innocent, the poetic Indians of Quisqueya resembled the ferocious and ambitious revolutionaries of our day. The latter are successors, not descendants; there are two distinct histories, but both extremely sad! Ours, one could say, dates from the French Revolution. That of the Indians is the history of an immense murder, the touching elegy of a race that disappeared at the dawn of its discovery, and what a race! As we just said, simple, kind and good people, like children. Columbus wrote to the king and queen of Spain that: "they have the smile of tenderness on their lips." One of their kings cried in pain on seeing one of the Spanish ships sinking off shore; one of their queens, Anacaona, was a graceful and exquisite poetess, whose areítos echoed throughout the island.
  
  However tempting it would be to tell the story of these first inhabitants, we will not do it; we will not take it up until the time of the slave trade, when it will be a matter of pinpointing the causes and the circumstances that transformed the country and made it from an American land into and African land. These circumstances, the mind looks upon them with stupor, and the historian of Haiti must pin them down, not only to mark a natural point of departure, but also to fulfill his serious function as a justiciar, and to send a melancholy adieu to those sad predecessors who, in the words of Guilbaud,

  ...in passing, let out a feeble cry,
   And who will be submerged beneath the wave of forgetting.

  Once again, you will not find the biography of Christopher Columbus here. We will leave it to other to trace that life, so generous, so noble, so full of lessons of all sorts, were one can find a gripping combination of so many miseries and such great glory. The figure of the Revelator has tempted great minds: Humboldt, Rossi, Washington Irving, Lamartine, the moved biographer, the tender poet whose centenary is will soon be, as it will also soon the fourth centenary of America; there was also Roselly de Lorgues, whose pious admiration has put on the head of the great man the halo of a Saint, the aureole of the Apostle. We will carry on.
  
  Personally, we only wanted one thing: in memory of He who discovered Haiti, adorned on the threshold of this book, a simple and modest bust. To others be the glory of adorning the statue.
  
  Louis Borno