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  • The Gate to Phaeton
  • Kathleen M. Balutansky (bio)

On sunny summer days, when I'm digging in my flower garden on a bluff overlooking Lake Champlain in Burlington, Vermont, I look across the lake to the Adirondack Mountains and my mind pictures the mountains I saw growing up on the northeastern coast of Haiti. I am, once again, a child scrambling down the bank to the shore in front of my parents' house to play in the volcanic rock and marl. Blue crabs scurry away at my footsteps. Directly across the bay, the pale beige buildings of Fort Liberté shine in the sunlight. To the east, the blue-grey mountains rise abruptly from the flat expanse of the endless fields of sisal. Robert L. Pettigrew, the founder of Dauphin Plantation, thought that in 1492 Cacique Guacanagari's main settlement was located right here, in this Bay of Fort Liberté. He was only off by about thirty miles in his assessment of the spot where Columbus's men built Fort Navidad with the remains of the sunken Santa Maria and where the town of Puerto Real, the first Spanish settlement in the so-called New World, was established.

For the first ten years of my life I lived on Dauphin Plantation, an American-owned sisal plantation that spread over thousands of acres around the Bay of Fort Liberté. Dauphin had processing plants and residential areas in Derak, Caracol, and Phaeton. Phaeton Point, where I lived, was a peninsula jutting into the bay from the southwest corner, facing north. But most of the houses were built so that their view was of the bay, the old fort, and the town of Fort Liberté. On Phaeton Point, two roads reached the land's end. The high one went to the house of the plantation's first manager, then past three other houses to the absentee owner's house, at the end of a long driveway. The low road went past six other houses along the shore and was connected to the higher one by two short, [End Page 146] perpendicular roads. The first one was paved with cobblestones and provided thrills for children careening down its bumpy hill on bicycles.

My parents' house was about a hundred yards west of the building where the dried sisal was baled, and a similar distance from the wharf where the bales were loaded onto barges to be taken to awaiting ships, outside the shallow waters of the bay. Farther west, past another residence, was a saltwater swimming pool, a tennis court, and a modest wooden clubhouse that boasted the only bowling alley on the island. The land around the bay was parched, but it was suitable for the sisal plants that thrived in the dusty soil. Around the plantation managers' houses, better soil had been imported from more fertile areas to grow rich green grass, colorful hibiscus and oleander hedges, crimson sprays of bougainvillea vines, mango and other fruit trees, and, of course, coconut and royal palm trees.

We're told that the first sketch Columbus made of the "New World" was of the north coast of Haiti.1 This coast was important to him because he had been told, by the natives he had already encountered, that this island had much gold. Today, this coast is important for the history that ensued. With the remains of the sunken Santa Maria, Columbus and his men built Navidad, where Columbus left forty men while he returned to Spain. When Columbus returned, he found the burnt remains of the fort and no signs of the sailors; he blamed the native Tainos for their slaughter and unleashed his vengeful might against them. Navidad is, then, both the site of the first European settlement and of the first conflict and violence between the conquering Europeans and the conquered Tainos. Later, subsequent Spanish settlers built Puerto Real, only a few miles upstream, and this settlement allowed for full social, cultural, economic, and personal exchanges between old and new inhabitants of this area of northern Hispaniola—exchanges that included the first black slaves brought to the Caribbean. One-sided and exploitative, these exchanges modeled what happened next under Spanish colonial expansion into...

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