Lucayan potters had no good clay so they tempered with burnt shell

The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos were settled by people coming north out of Hispaniola and Cuba, and those settlers are known as Lucayans. The pottery they made is called Palmetto Ware, thick walled and tempered with crushed burnt shell. The recipe was forced on them. These are low limestone islands without the fine clays of the Greater Antilles, so potters worked the carbonate soils available and found a temper that would hold a vessel together through firing. That is a technical solution reached on the ground, in a place where the familiar materials were missing. The Lucayans did not lose touch with the islands they came from. Chicoid and Meillacoid sherds made in the south turn up in Bahamian sites beside the local ware, which means canoes kept crossing and goods kept moving. A colony on poor ground stayed tied to its parent communities and engineered around everything it could not carry.

At the feast of Mary in August 1449 the Emperor Zara Ya'iqob gathered the leaders of the Ethiopian church at the monastery of Dabra Mitmaq in Shoa. Two Egyptian metropolitans came, along with the abbots of Dabra Hayk, Dabra Libanos, Dabra Bizan, Dabra Damo and many other houses. The question was the Sabbath. One monastic party, the House of Ewostatewos, kept the Jewish Saturday and had been refusing ordination from the metropolitan for decades; the rest of the kingdom ignored it. The emperor, who had spent twenty years shut up in the mountain prison at Amba-Gishan before taking the throne in 1434, had thought the matter through and written books about it. The council agreed that both days would be kept and that the Ewostathians would accept ordination again. Ethiopians have observed two Sabbaths ever since. The province that mattered politically lay in the north, near the Red Sea coast the emperor was determined to control.

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.

Returning to the northern coast of Haiti on 28 November 1493, Columbus found La Navidad wrecked and the men he had left there dead. Guacanagari, the cacique of Marien who had helped build the fort, told him Caonabo had done it. Caonabo ruled Maguana, a chiefdom in the interior, and the explanation offered was that his people had been abused by the Spaniards and that he had struck back on their account. Rouse reports the accusation as Guacanagari's, which is the correct way to handle it. The one man with a motive to steer Spanish anger elsewhere was the ally on whose territory the fort had stood. Columbus took the story. The Spanish later seized Caonabo by a trick and put him on a ship for Spain, and he died at sea. Guacanagari kept his alliance and lost his chiefdom anyway. Both routes arrived at the same place inside twenty years.