Dominica historical timeline

Dominica's history is that of an island too steep to conquer easily, which is why the Kalinago survived here and nowhere else in the eastern Caribbean, why the French and English first agreed to leave it alone, and why it ended up the poorest and least developed of the British Windwards, with the forest intact. What a visitor sees -- the Kalinago Territory, Fort Shirley on the Cabrits, the French street plan of Roseau spreading from the Old Market, the rebuilt roofs after Maria -- is the record.

Chronology

1. 5th century The Arawak arrive from South America; the Kalinago displace them by the 15th century, and the island is Waitukubuli, tall is her body.
2. 1493 Christopher Columbus sights the island on Sunday 3 November on his second voyage; daunted by Kalinago resistance and finding no gold, the Spanish never settle it.
3. 1660 After a French claim of 1632 that came to nothing, the French and English agree that Dominica and St Vincent should be left to the Caribs as neutral territory; the island is officially neutral for a century, though French settlers arrive from 1690 and France holds it as a colony from 1715, bringing enslaved West Africans for the coffee plantations.
4. 1763 The 1763 Paris Treaty cedes the island to Britain, which sets up a legislative assembly for the white population only;
5. 1778 France recaptures the island with local help, and the 1783 Treaty of Paris returns it to Britain. Dominica changed hands repeatedly because it sits between the two French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and that position explains both the French place names on a British island and the Creole most Dominicans speak alongside English.
6. 1805 A French naval raid burns much of Roseau to the ground on 22 February, after an earlier invasion attempt failed in 1795. It is the reason the capital has so little colonial architecture older than the 19th century, and why what survives is concentrated in a few streets rather than a whole quarter.
7. 1834 Slavery is abolished; the Brown Privilege Bill of 1831 had already enfranchised free nonwhites, three of whom entered the assembly in 1832, and by 1838 Dominica is the only British West Indian colony with a Black-controlled legislature. The planters win it back: Leeward Islands Federation in 1871, Crown Colony rule in 1896.
8. 1903 The British Crown grants the Carib Reserve, now the Kalinago Territory, 3,700 acres on the Atlantic coast, held communally.
9. 1967 After the West Indies Federation dissolves, Dominica becomes an associated state of the United Kingdom with full internal self-government.
10. 1978 Independence as the Commonwealth of Dominica on 3 November; the 1980 election brings in Eugenia Charles, the Caribbean's first female prime minister, who survives two unsuccessful coup attempts within a year of taking office.
11. 1979 Hurricane David strikes in August with winds of 150 mph, killing 42 people and destroying or damaging three-quarters of the island's homes, with further severe damage in 1980. Independence was ten months old. Dominica's habit of rebuilding to a hurricane standard, and the national conversation about resilience that a visitor will hear everywhere, starts here rather than with Maria.
12. 1997 Morne Trois Pitons National Park is designated a World Heritage Site. Established in 1975 and covering about 7,000 hectares under the 1,342-metre volcano it is named for, it holds the Valley of Desolation with its boiling mud ponds and small geysers, Titou Gorge, the Emerald Pool and the Boiling Lake -- a water-filled fumarole at 82 to 92 °C near the edge and hotter in the middle. This park, not a beach, is what most visitors come for.
13. 2017 After Tropical Storm Erika's 30 dead in August 2015, Hurricane Maria makes landfall as a Category 5 on the night of 18 September, the most powerful storm in the island's record, with losses of about US$930 million, 226 per cent of the economy.

What survived, and how

The Kalinago survived because the mountains and their own resistance made the island not worth the Spanish trouble, and because a treaty of neutrality, however badly kept, bought them a century. Roseau's French plan survived British rule and the fire of 1805. The forest survived because the terrain that stopped the planters stopped the developers too.

What did not survive Maria was almost everything with a roof, and the island's vegetation was, in the storm article's words, practically eradicated; it has grown back faster than the houses.