Black Crown: Henry Christophe, the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean’s Forgotten Kingdom
In January 1804 the West Indian island of Saint-Domingue became the world’s first black republic after the slaves toiling on the sugar fields rose up against their French masters and, at the end of a thirteen-year insurgency, proclaimed independence. Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti (an aboriginal Taino-Arawak Indian word meaning “mountainous land”) and the Haitian flag …