MC-6 was run by the Lucayans, not planted there by Hispaniola

MC-6 sits on Middle Caicos beside a salina, a flat that floods with the season. Nine tenths of the pottery there is Palmetto Ware, made locally from the poor clays of the islands. The remaining tenth is Chicoid, high status vessels and the specialised bottles used for manioc beer, brought north from Hispaniola. The setting appears to have been chosen for access. When the water rose, canoes could be paddled in close to the middle of the village, which is a considerable advantage for a place that lives by moving goods. For years the site was read as an outpost planted by Taino from the Greater Antilles in order to work the small islands from outside. That reading has been given up. MC-6 was a Lucayan settlement, run by the people of the Caicos, trading upward into the bigger islands on their own account. Who owns the warehouse is the difference between a colony and a partner.

In the same year that Sao Tome was colonised, an expedition under Diego Cao reached the mouth of the river the Portuguese called the Zaire and took a few hostages back to Lisbon. Further voyages went out in 1485 and 1487 with more gifts and more hostages, and each one strengthened the impression that the people on that coast belonged to a large kingdom, called Kongo, whose rulers were unusually willing to talk. By the time of the fourth expedition in 1491 both sides had prepared. A handful of Portuguese had already been living in the Kongo, probably including a priest at Soyo, and Kongolese had been living in Lisbon for some years. That last detail matters. The first sustained contact between Europe and central Africa ran in both directions from the start, and men who had seen Portugal were standing on the beach when the ships that mattered arrived.

The ship Santiago left Sierra Leone for Puerto Rico in 1566 carrying captives who were probably taken during the Mane invasions from the east. It stopped at the Los Islands off Conakry for fresh water. People on the island, themselves refugees from those same wars, attacked the ship and killed a crewman. The Santiago sailed on. Ninety two people came ashore in Puerto Rico and fifteen of them were male. Mortality on comparable ships in the early 1560s ran between ten and forty per cent, so more had been loaded than were landed. That same year almost half of the two hundred and sixty eight captives on another ship out of Sierra Leone died before it reached Cartagena. Women made up majorities on many sixteenth and seventeenth century crossings. The image of the slave ship as a hold full of men belongs to later centuries and to the historians who did the counting.

The Lisbon Inquisition set up its commissioner's office in Salvador in 1549. Every case from the Portuguese empire was handled from the metropole, unlike the Spanish system with its regional tribunals at Lima and Cartagena. Anyone wishing to denounce a neighbour went to the commissioner, who investigated and sent his findings across the Atlantic. If Lisbon declined to prosecute, and it usually did, the report was copied into the prosecutor's notebooks, a standing record of the cases that went nowhere. The inquisitors cared about judaizing and heresy. Of the 143 Bahian cases that reached full trial between 1593 and 1687, not one concerned sorcery or anything close to it, and only two involved people of African descent at all. Denunciations of African healers existed in the notebooks well before that date. The gap between what colonists reported and what Lisbon would try is why the archive has the shape it has.