The Citadelle Laferrière is the largest fortress in the Americas, raised on a 900-metre peak in northern Haiti by people who had just freed themselves. Haiti became the first free Black republic in 1804, after the only slave revolution that ever succeeded, and Henri Christophe, a general of that war, was sure the French would return. So he built for them. The walls run up to four metres thick, and the front of the fortress is a wedge, sloped back so that cannonballs would glance off instead of punching through. From the plain it reads like the prow of a stone ship cutting through the peak. The curved outer walls are pierced with brick-lined gun ports, each angled to rake the single approach from above.
The track up from Milot is cobbled and steep, through coffee plots and cloud forest, and you can ride it as the garrison once did. The fortress stays out of sight until the last bend, when its walls come up out of the ridge ahead of you. Inside, a long vaulted armoury holds rows of iron cannon on wooden carriages, with pyramids of cannonballs beside them stacked as they were left. No two of the guns are alike. They were taken or salvaged from the British, French and Spanish forces that fought over this island, and along the pitted barrels you can still read the crowned monograms of the kings whose armies cast them. The galleries climb to a rooftop terrace where, on a clear morning, the plain of Cap-Haïtien runs out below you to the Atlantic; by early afternoon cloud usually closes over. Christophe crowned himself king in 1811. A stroke left him half-paralysed in 1820, his soldiers turned on him, and he shot himself; his followers buried him up here in quicklime, in an inner courtyard where no enemy could reach him. The guns are still in their rows, pointed down the approach, and not one of them was ever fired in the war they were hauled up here for.