Every history is written in two languages: the language of events and the language of the land on which those events unfolded. The Istwanou Geoindex speaks the second language. It maps the physical terrain of the Haitian experience — every battle, every rebellion, every treaty, every act of marronage — to the precise coordinates where it occurred, building a living archive from the soil up.

The map below contains 64 verified locations extracted from 678 entries in the Written in Blood master file, spanning from the colonial encounter of 1492 through the democratic transitions of the 1990s. Each glowing point on the map represents a place where history was made, and every point links back to the primary source evidence in the Istwanou timeline.

This is not decoration. It is infrastructure — a historical GIS layer built from Bates-numbered citations, designed to make visible the patterns that text alone cannot reveal. A plantation where a marron fled in 1770 may be the same ground where a corvée crew was forced to labor in 1918. The map makes that continuity legible.

The sidebar on the left is your control panel. It has three sections:

Period filters let you isolate locations by historical era. Click “Colonial” to see only pre-1791 sites. Click “Revolution” to light up the battlefields of 1791–1804. Click “Occupation” to trace the geography of the American intervention from 1915 to 1934. You can activate multiple periods at once — clicking “Revolution” and “Kingdom of the North” together will show you the full arc from Bois Caïman to the death of Christophe. Click an active filter again to deactivate it.

Event type filters let you see the map through a thematic lens. Select “Battle” to trace the military geography of the revolution. Select “Religious / Vodou” to see the spiritual landscape from Bois Caïman to the Desounen of Duvalier. Select “Marronnage” to follow the routes of escape into the mountains. Select “Commerce” to see the economic nodes of the colonial and post-colonial eras. Like period filters, these can be combined — select “Massacre” and “Occupation” together to map state violence during the American intervention.

The search box finds locations by name, including historical variants. Type “Cap” and both Cap-Haïtien and its colonial-era variant Cap Français will surface. Type “Tortue” to find the island where the Brethren of the Coast built the buccaneer republic.

The location list below the filters ranks every visible location by the number of master file entries that reference it. Port-au-Prince leads with 276 entries — the capital has been at the center of nearly every political crisis since its founding. Click any location in the list and the map will fly to it and open its detail popup.

The glowing dots are sized by historical density — larger dots indicate locations referenced in more entries. Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien dominate because the history of Haiti has always been a dialogue between its two great cities.

The dot colors correspond to the primary event type at each location, following the color key in the legend at the bottom right of the map. Red tones indicate violence — battles, massacres, executions, rebellions. Blue tones indicate political and diplomatic events. Gold indicates commerce. Purple marks sacred and spiritual sites.

Click any dot to open a popup showing the location’s full record: its coordinates, the historical periods it spans, every event type tagged to it, and a list of the master file entries that reference it with their date ranges.

Zoom and pan using the + / − buttons in the upper left, your scroll wheel, or by pinching on mobile. The map is bounded to Haiti — you can explore the full territory from the Northwest to the Southern peninsula, but the view stays anchored to the island.

The textured layer beneath the dots is a custom topographic rendering of Haiti showing the mountain ranges, river systems, and coastal geometry that shaped every event on this map. The Massif de la Hotte and the Massif de la Selle are visible as elevated terrain in the southern peninsula. The Artibonite River valley — Haiti’s agricultural heartland and the site of countless struggles over land and labor — cuts through the center. This is the “crumpled sheet of foolscap” that was described to Napoleon, the terrain that protected marron communities for centuries and imposed immovable barriers to every occupying force.

The Geoindex is a living dataset. As new entries are extracted from the Marronnage corpus, from Michael Hall’s Historical Dictionary, from Christopher Ehret’s Ancient Africa, and from the other source texts in the Istwanou pipeline, their locations will be added to this same map. The goal is a single spatial layer spanning from the colonial Affiches américaines through the occupation period and beyond — a map where the full arc of the Haitian experience is visible in one view.