Môle-Saint-Nicolas

Columbus came ashore here on the sixth of December 1492 and named the anchorage after the saint of the day, and it was his first landfall on the island he called Hispaniola. The bay behind its rocky headlands is deep, wide and sheltered from every wind, which is why the French, the British and later the Americans all wanted it. Frederick Douglass was sent in 1889 to lease it as a coaling station and Haiti refused. Colonial batteries and magazines still stand around the shore above beaches of fine white sand. Around four thousand people live in the town and twenty thousand more in the countryside around it.