Saba is isolated on the map and connected in the evidence

Saba is thirteen square kilometres of volcanic rock with no harbour and no beach, and by any map it is isolated. Network analysis of its Late Ceramic Age sites by A. A. A. Mol, M. L. P. Hoogland and C. L. Hofman describes it as remotely local: geographically out of the way and socially well connected. The islanders maintained what the authors call ego networks, the personal and household ties that reach off the island and are kept alive by visits, marriages, gifts and obligations. Those ties show in the material, which resembles that of the neighbouring islands closely enough that the northeastern Caribbean looks culturally continuous despite the water between its parts. Small islands cannot afford isolation. A population of a few hundred needs partners for marriage, for exchange, and for relief in a bad year, and getting them takes sustained deliberate effort across open sea. Distance in the Caribbean was a problem people solved.

Antam Goncalves sailed to western Africa in 1441 and opened his expedition by seizing a single man and a single woman. A companion told him that by carrying off those two captives he would allow Prince Henry to learn something about these people. The chronicle of the voyage was written by Gomes Eannes de Zurara, who returned again and again to the pleasure the prince took in each arrival of captives and to the hope of taking more. The pair matter because of what they were for. A man and a woman together do not make a sample. They make a demonstration that the coast could supply people who would go on producing more people, and that an owner's holdings could grow through the reproduction of the people he owned. The Portuguese traffic in African captives that opens here reached the Caribbean within a lifetime and eventually delivered most of the ancestors of Haiti.

Portuguese speakers built their sorcery vocabulary out of a Latin root meaning manufactured or artificial. A feitico was a made thing, a charm or a spell, and feiticaria was the practice of making them. The earliest surviving records of both words are legal, in anti sorcery legislation of 1385 and 1403. The root carries two ideas at once. One is doubt over whether the thing is real or only constructed to deceive. The other is seduction, the swaying of another person against their will. In the late middle ages Portuguese speakers made protective charms from broken mirrors and pieces of hangman's rope. Three centuries afterwards, in Bahia, the same word was applied to objects and illnesses that Africans described in entirely different terms, and the Lisbon Inquisition tried people for feiticaria on the strength of it. Colonial officials used feitico and veneno almost interchangeably, which is how an illness became a poisoning.

Through the fifteenth century Portuguese and Spanish builders produced ships made for the open ocean, and their navigators learned to use the compass and to read the Atlantic's currents and prevailing winds well enough to sail out and get home again. That combination opened the Atlantic islands. Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde were reached and settled. Italian merchants, who had financed and run sugar around the Mediterranean for generations, worked with the Iberian colonisers to establish the crop on those islands, grown by enslaved people. The plantation of the Americas was assembled there first, in miniature and offshore. The ships did something else as well. Until then the winds and the distances had kept the Western Hemisphere out of contact with Africa and Eurasia. Once the route was solved that barrier was gone for good, and everything that followed for the people of the Caribbean followed from a set of technical problems being solved in Lisbon and in Seville.