A wall of piled cobbles watches the passage between Cuba and Haiti

At Pueblo Viejo in eastern Cuba people raised a bank of mounded gravel and cobble three metres high and four to five metres thick at the base, closing a space of about 250 metres by 135. It sits on a mesa above the Windward Passage, the channel that separates Cuba from Hispaniola and carried the canoe traffic between them. Building it meant gathering stone, hauling it uphill and holding a workforce to the task long enough to complete the circuit. Nothing on that scale gets done without someone able to direct labour and feed the people doing it. The position carries the other half of the argument. A settlement placed to overlook the crossing between two islands is a settlement concerned with what moves along it. The eastern end of Cuba was a place of consequence in the centuries before 1492, and the reason was the water in front of it.

Gomes Eannes de Azurara wrote a chronicle of the Portuguese voyages down the West African coast. In it he reports that in 1441 sailors, one of them probably Antam Goncalves, carried the first Africans and a quantity of gold dust back to Portugal. Getting there had meant working past Cape Bojador, whose reefs and shoals had turned earlier ships back. Tiffany Lethabo King uses that date to slow down a habit of scholarship. Studies of colonialism reach almost automatically for 1492 and the Caribbean as the moment conquest begins. Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers both put the beginning earlier and elsewhere, on the shore of Guinea, where the category of Blackness was being made before there was an American colony to apply it in. Haiti sits at the far end of a line that starts on a stretch of Senegalese coast fifty years before Columbus sailed.

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.

Italian and Iberian merchants carried sugarcane out to the Atlantic islands during the fifteenth century, planting it on Madeira and in the Canaries. Sugar was not a new business for them. They had been growing and refining it around the Mediterranean for generations, using bound labour on estates in places like Cyprus and Sicily. What the islands changed was the setting. Here was land nobody in Europe held a prior claim on, a climate that suited the cane, and a workforce that could be shipped in from elsewhere. That is the plantation as it would later stand in the Caribbean, complete except for scale. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of how often Saint-Domingue gets described as something new, an invention of the eighteenth century and a French one. It was a model that had been running for three hundred years by then. What the French did was move it west and make it enormous.