Forty house mounds sit behind a wall on a Cuban mesa at 250 metres

Pueblo Viejo occupies a flat hilltop in eastern Cuba, 250 metres above the sea, with steep cliffs doing most of the defensive work. Where the cliffs stop, a bank of earth and stone three metres high closes the gap, and the wall encloses roughly 3.4 hectares. Inside stand at least forty earthen mounds that carried houses. A settlement placed this high, this hard to approach and this thoroughly walled is answering a problem. It might be a stronghold, or a ceremonial precinct kept apart from ordinary ground, or both at once, and archaeologists have argued each case. Either reading points at the same background condition. Somewhere in the two centuries before the Spanish arrived, the eastern end of Cuba held enough tension, or enough consolidating power, for a community to spend that much labour on height and enclosure. People do not carry stone up a hill for no reason.

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.

On 5 December 1492 Columbus came ashore on the island the Spanish would name Hispaniola and declared it the property of the Spanish crown. The act consisted of words spoken in a language nobody present understood, a banner, and a notarial record carried back to Europe. Several hundred thousand Taino were living on the island that afternoon. Nothing in the ceremony required their agreement, their presence, or any knowledge on their part that it had happened. The legal fiction outlived the man who performed it. Spain, and France after it, went on treating the western Atlantic as vacant ground that Europeans could assign to one another by treaty, and every later argument about who owned Saint-Domingue traced back to a document written on that premise. The people already there entered European law as an obstacle to be cleared. Haiti spent the next three hundred and twelve years arguing with a claim made in a single afternoon.

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.