Back home, the gallery is the porch where everybody ends up. 7000 is how many years ago the first people crossed into the Caribbean.

The first people cross into the islands. Up from the Orinoco through Trinidad, where the oldest camp in the Caribbean, Banwari Trace, still sits. And across the sea from Central America into Cuba and Hispaniola. Nobody discovers the Caribbean. People are already home.

The Arawak peoples sail up from the Orinoco with pottery, cassava, hammocks and canoes, island by island, all the way to Puerto Rico. Over centuries they become the Taíno of Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and the Bahamas. Taíno means good people. That is what they called themselves. They lived in round houses around a central plaza, played ball games in the batey, danced the areíto, and kept an open door and a plate for the stranger. The warmth was there on every island before any flag was.

The Kalinago come up the same road from the Orinoco and take the small islands: Dominica, St. Vincent, Grenada, St. Lucia, Martinique, Guadeloupe and St. Kitts. Sailors and fighters, they will hold Dominica against the British and the French for two hundred years, and they still hold their own Territory there today.

The invasion. On October 12, Columbus lands on Guanahani in the Bahamas and claims it for Spain. The Lucayan Taíno swim out to the ships with gifts, feed his men and tell him who they are: taíno, good people. When the Santa María sinks off Haiti on Christmas Eve, the cacique Guacanagarí's people carry everything to shore and give the crew their own homes. Columbus writes in his log that they would make good servants. Within thirty years almost every Lucayan has been shipped to Hispaniola as a slave. The islands opened the door. That is the heart of this place, and it was answered with chains.

Hispaniola. The Spanish force the Taíno to dig gold under a quota system called the encomienda. Hundreds of thousands die from the work, the killings and the diseases. The Taíno fight: Anacaona is hanged in 1503, Hatuey is burned alive in Cuba in 1512, and Enriquillo holds the mountains for fourteen years until Spain signs a treaty with him in 1533. Not everyone dies. Taíno blood is in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic today, and so are their words: hurricane, hammock, canoe, barbecue, tobacco.

The first enslaved Africans are landed on Hispaniola in 1503. In 1518 the Spanish crown licenses ships to carry people straight from Africa. The first sugar mills go up on Hispaniola at the same time. The two things that will shape the next three hundred years arrive together.

The sugar islands. England takes St. Kitts in 1624, Barbados in 1627, Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat in the 1630s, and Jamaica in 1655. France takes Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635, St. Lucia and Grenada after, and the west of Hispaniola, Saint-Domingue, in 1697. The Dutch take Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire in 1634, Sint Eustatius and Saba in the 1630s, and Suriname in 1667. Curaçao becomes a slave market for the whole region. Around four million Africans are landed in the Caribbean, more than anywhere on earth except Brazil. On Jamaica and Saint-Domingue the enslaved outnumber the free ten to one.

San Andrés and Providencia. English Puritans settle Providence Island, then Jamaican planters and the Africans they enslave make it a Creole-English world off the coast of Nicaragua. Colombia takes it in 1822. The Raizal people, Black, English-speaking and Baptist, are still there, and still not Colombian in the way Bogotá would like.

Sephardic Jews, run out of Spain and Portugal by way of Amsterdam and Brazil, land on Curaçao, and then Jamaica and Barbados. They build the oldest synagogues in the Americas, and their names are still on the shops and the streets.

The Miskito. On the Caribbean coast of Honduras and Nicaragua, Indigenous people and shipwrecked and escaped Africans become one people, the Miskito, with their own kings from 1687. For two hundred years they run their own coast and keep the Spanish out. Nicaragua annexes it in 1894. The people are still there.

The Maroons. Africans who escape into the mountains of Jamaica fight Britain for eighty years under Nanny and Cudjoe, and in 1739 Britain signs a treaty and gives them their land. In Suriname the Ndyuka and the Saramaka beat the Dutch in the forest and win their own treaties in 1760 and 1762. Their villages are still there.

Tacky's War. Tacky, a Coromantee from the Gold Coast, leads an uprising across Jamaica at Easter that takes months and thousands of soldiers to put down. It is the biggest revolt in the British islands before Haiti, and it is not the last.

The small islands find their place. Sint Eustatius, the Golden Rock, becomes the busiest port in the Atlantic and in 1776 fires the first salute to the American flag. Anguilla, Saba and Turks and Caicos rake salt. Bermuda builds the fastest sloops at sea. Cayman turns turtles. Trinidad passes from Spain to Britain in 1797, Guyana from the Dutch to Britain in 1814, and on every one of them the same thing is true: people who were brought as property make a home anyway, and make it warm.

Haiti begins. The revolt starts at Bois Caïman in August 1791. Toussaint Louverture builds an army out of the enslaved and beats the Spanish, the British and the French in turn. Napoleon sends 40,000 men to put slavery back. Toussaint is tricked, captured and dies in a French prison in 1803.

The Garifuna. On St. Vincent the Black Caribs, Kalinago and African together, fight the British under Joseph Chatoyer until he is killed in March 1795. Britain rounds up about 5,000 of them on the islet of Baliceaux, where half die of hunger and disease. In 1797 the 2,000 who are left are shipped to Roatán, off Honduras. From there they walk the coast to Honduras, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua, and they are still there.

Haiti wins. Dessalines finishes what Toussaint started. On January 1, 1804, Haiti becomes the first free Black republic in the world and the first country anywhere to end slavery for good.

Haiti pays it forward. Twelve years after winning, President Pétion gives Simón Bolívar ships, thousands of rifles, gunpowder, money, a printing press and Haitian soldiers, on one condition: free the enslaved everywhere he wins. Bolívar does, and Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia follow. Haiti also writes into its constitution that any enslaved person who sets foot on its shore is free. The first thing a free island did was help the next one.

Bussa and Demerara. In 1816 Bussa leads Barbados in revolt. In 1823 Quamina and Jack Gladstone lead 10,000 people on the Demerara coast of Guyana. Both are crushed and hundreds are executed, but every revolt makes slavery cost Britain more, and the abolitionists in London use them.

France comes back. King Charles X sends fourteen warships and demands 150 million francs, or war. Haiti has to borrow the money from French banks to pay France. The last payment is made in 1947. Economists put what Haiti lost at more than 21 billion dollars in today's money. This is why Haiti is poor. It paid for its own freedom.

Sam Sharpe's Baptist War. At Christmas 1831, 60,000 enslaved people across western Jamaica stop work and rise. Britain hangs Sharpe and more than 300 others. Two years later Parliament passes the Abolition Act. It is not a coincidence.

Freedom in the British islands, on paper. On August 1, 1834, slavery ends in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana, St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cayman, Anguilla, the Virgin Islands and Turks and Caicos. Only Antigua frees its people outright. Everywhere else the freed are made to work four more years unpaid under a system called apprenticeship. Britain pays 20 million pounds to 46,000 slaveholders for their loss. The people who were enslaved get nothing. British taxpayers were still paying off that loan in 2015.

Indenture begins. The planters go looking for people to replace the ones they freed. About half a million Indians are brought to Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Suriname, Guadeloupe and Martinique on five-year contracts, most signed with a thumbprint. The first ship to Trinidad, the Fatel Razack, lands in May 1845. About 125,000 Chinese go to Cuba under conditions the Cubans themselves call slavery. 40,000 Portuguese come from Madeira to Guyana. 33,000 Javanese go to Suriname. In Trinidad and Guyana, where African and Indian families meet, a new people is born: the Dougla. The system ends in 1917.

Freedom, island by island, and each time it is pushed. On St. Croix, General Buddhoe leads 8,000 people to the fort in July 1848 and the Danish governor frees St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John that day. Martinique rises in May 1848 and France frees Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana. The Dutch wait until 1863 for Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, Saba, St. Maarten and Suriname, and in Suriname make people work ten more years. Puerto Rico in 1873. Cuba, last, in 1886.

Two wings of one bird. Máximo Gómez, a Dominican, commands Cuba's army of independence. Puerto Rico's Betances and Hostos and the Dominican Luperón call for one Antillean Confederation, the islands for the islanders. In 1895, Cuban and Puerto Rican exiles in New York design Puerto Rico's flag as Cuba's with the colours swapped. Lola Rodríguez de Tió writes that Cuba and Puerto Rico are two wings of the same bird.

Limón. Jamaicans build Costa Rica's railway from the capital to the coast and stay for the banana farms. Limón becomes a Jamaican town inside Costa Rica, with its own English, its own food and its own saints. The diaspora begins inside the Caribbean.

Syrians, Lebanese and Palestinians arrive from the Ottoman empire with a suitcase of cloth, walk the roads selling it, and open the shops that still carry their names in Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and the Dominican Republic. They come on their own, and they stay.

The Americans arrive. In 1898 the US beats Spain, takes Puerto Rico and Guantánamo, and occupies Cuba. In 1917 it makes Puerto Ricans citizens, weeks before the draft for the First World War, and buys St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix from Denmark for 25 million dollars. Nobody who lived there was asked.

The Panama Canal. Between 1904 and 1914 about 150,000 West Indians, 20,000 of them from Barbados, dig the canal. They are paid on the silver roll, white workers on the gold roll, and more than 5,000 of them die doing it. In the 1910s and 20s another 300,000 Haitians and Jamaicans go to cut cane in Cuba.

Garvey. Marcus Garvey, from St. Ann, Jamaica, works in Limón and Panama, sees how West Indians are treated on the silver roll, and founds the UNIA in 1914. From Harlem it grows to millions of members in forty countries, with its own shipping line, the Black Star Line. It is the first time every island, and the whole diaspora, joins one thing. The US deports him in 1927.

Occupation. The US Marines occupy Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, and bring back forced labour on the roads. Charlemagne Péralte leads the resistance in Haiti and is killed in 1919. The Marines leave Trujillo in charge of the Dominican Republic.

One team. From 1928 the West Indies play cricket as one side, eleven men from ten islands under one flag. From 1980 to 1995 they do not lose a Test series for fifteen years: Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Michael Holding, Brian Lara. For millions of people it is the only time the Caribbean has ever been one country, and it is unbeatable.

The islands stand up. Strikes and riots run through St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica. Uriah Butler in the Trinidad oilfields in 1937. Clement Payne in Barbados in 1937. Bustamante at Frome in Jamaica in 1938. Out of them come the unions and the parties that will win independence.

Two massacres. In March the police shoot 19 people at a Nationalist march in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and Pedro Albizu Campos will spend most of his life in American prisons. In October Trujillo's army kills somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 Haitians along the Dominican border in one week, with machetes, so it could be blamed on farmers.

The road abroad. In London, after the 1958 race riots, Claudia Jones from Trinidad starts the carnival that becomes Notting Hill. In New York the Harlem carnival of 1947 moves to Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn in 1969 and becomes the biggest parade in the city. Toronto starts Caribana in 1967. Out here every island is on one road, one day a year. That is the idea.

We leave. Britain asks for help rebuilding after the war and on June 22, 1948, the Windrush docks at Tilbury with 802 Caribbean passengers. In 1962 Britain shuts the door with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. In 2018 it comes out that the Home Office has been deporting and detaining some of those same families. America opens up in 1965 and Canada in 1967. Puerto Ricans fill the Bronx and El Barrio in the 1950s, Cubans fill Miami after 1959, Dominicans fill Washington Heights after 1965. Between 1963 and 1981 France moves 160,000 people from Martinique and Guadeloupe to the mainland, and Paris becomes an island city too. Brooklyn, Toronto, London, Paris and Miami become ours.

Trying to be one country. In 1958 ten British islands form the West Indies Federation, one flag and one parliament in Trinidad, with the University of the West Indies already shared since 1948. Jamaica votes to leave in 1961, Eric Williams says one from ten leaves nought, and it falls in 1962.

Independence, won at the ballot box. Jamaica and Trinidad in 1962, Barbados and Guyana in 1966, the Bahamas in 1973, Grenada in 1974, Suriname in 1975, Dominica in 1978, St. Lucia and St. Vincent in 1979, Antigua and Belize in 1981, St. Kitts in 1983. Not everyone. Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are still American. Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana are still France. Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Sint Maarten and Saba are still the Netherlands. Anguilla, Bermuda, Cayman, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands are still Britain. In October 1983, six days after Maurice Bishop is shot, the US invades Grenada.

CARICOM. The islands try again at Chaguaramas in Trinidad and found the Caribbean Community. Today it is fifteen countries with one passport line, one court, and since 2013 one joint claim for reparations from Europe.

When it hits, the diaspora shows up. The earthquake of January 2010 kills more than 200,000 people in Haiti. In 2013 the Dominican court strips citizenship from some 200,000 people of Haitian descent, born in the country. In 2017 Hurricane Maria kills nearly 3,000 people in Puerto Rico and the island goes dark for months. Each time it is the cousins abroad who send the money, fill the planes and make the noise.

Millions of us live far from home. Raised by the ones who left. Sorted by island, by flag, by language. Still one family. We have stood together before. It is time to do it again, out here. Gallery 7000 is where we find each other.