After 1300 one style of pottery spreads and roads are built to match

From about 1300 the northern Caribbean turns Chicoid. The style dominates the pottery over an enormous area, and it arrives alongside earthworks, causeways and built roads that tie settlements into networks a person could walk. Keegan and Hofman raise the possibility that what spread was a religion. Theocratic chiefdoms, in which the same figures direct the fields and address the spirits, would account for a uniform aesthetic taking hold across islands that had no single ruler. The same ceremonial objects and religious symbols turn up from Cuba to Puerto Rico, which supports the reading. This is the period the Spanish walked into. The caciques and cacicazgos their chroniclers describe, the chiefs and the territories they held, correspond closely to what the ground shows for these two centuries. The written account and the archaeology agree for once, and what they agree on is that the society Columbus met had been expanding under its own power for two hundred years.

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.

Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas on 7 June 1494. It ran a meridian down the Atlantic and awarded everything found west of the line to Spain and everything east of it to Portugal. The pope had already blessed the principle. Between them the two crowns assigned themselves Africa, Asia and the Americas, which is to say most of the inhabited world and nearly all of the people in it. Nobody living in those places was asked, informed or represented. The assumption underneath the document did the lasting damage. Land held by people who were not Christians counted as available, and the peoples on it counted as an asset attached to the soil. That premise licensed four centuries of conquest, the whole of the Atlantic slave trade, and every legal argument by which a European state later claimed a Caribbean island. When France took the western third of Hispaniola it was working inside a frame two Iberian kings had drawn on paper.

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.