From The Root:
1492 – Dec. 5, Columbus lands on a large island he names Isla Española (Spanish Island), later changed to Hispaniola. It is inhabited by Taino and Arawak Indians.
1503 – First Africans brought to Hispaniola for labor after pleas from a Spanish priest who wants to save the Indians from extinction.
1592 – Spanish governor executes Queen Anacaona, the last Taino chief.
1659 – First official settlement on Tortuga (off the coast of Haiti) by French buccaneers who hunt wild cattle and by pirates who attack ships sailing from South America to Europe.
1664 – French West India Company takes control of Western third of the island and names it Saint-Domingue.
1670 – First French settlement on the main island, named Cap Francois, later Cap-Français and now Cap-Haitien, the second largest city in Haiti. Settlers grow cacao, coffee, tobacco and indigo and begin importing slaves as labor.
1685 – Louis XIV enacts the Code Noir, which regulates the treatment of slaves and sets obligations for owners. Corporal punishment is allowed, sanctioning brutal treatment.
1697 – Spain formally cedes the Western third of the island to France via the Treaty of Ryswick.
1749 – Port-au-Prince is founded.
More here.
I'm sad to report that the situation in Haiti is acute and worsening-people are beginning to get even more desperate and frustrated. The leadership of the Government of the U.S. and its partner nations are “forming up” great things that will take shape in a week or so down the road, but they really need to quickly work through the current paralyzing logistical challenges with harder work and innovative and dramatic re-thinking of the fundamentally flawed, incomplete and inadequate “fly mostly into one airport, then organize and deliver a huge majority of critical aid into one central point and fan out from there” train wreck of a strategy that is not reaching the majority of Haitians in time to avoid major conseuences and an unacceptable level of after-event mortality and morbidity. The collective official response should have been completely on-track by today. As usual, many big shots are failing to think selflessly and share their financial, operational resources with smaller but super-effective agencies- acting like they are the only game in town and the smaller agencies are merely a nuisance underfoot that should just be ignored. This attitude is is not helping anyone. Quite frankly, I would have thought some of them would have learned an important lesson from other disasters where some of the same mistakes were made.
Here's the bottom line: If things don't start improving very rapidly, then life and limb-threatening infections and deadly dehydration and unnecessary conflict will likely emerge within the affected population on a scale that has the potential of becoming rampant and widespread, resulting in more death and injury that could still be avoided, though time is fast running out. The current path to giving Haiti the relief it desperately needs is simply taking way too long in developing in order to be a reasonable and defensible short term emergency strategy. Each country should, by now, be realizing that it is very much the correct option would be to stage multiple and overwhelmingly robust and well managed multi-national supply lines and helicopter sorties using locations and bases other than Port Au Prince Airport, particularly from the Dominican Republic through the border near Jumani, D.R. It's 7-10 hours by road (depending on the kind of vehicle and size of the load), but it's a darn good road compared to the roads in the Pakistan earthquake affected areas that I've been traveling on for the past four years. Distributing aid from several points over a more widespread area can reach far more people far more quickly.