The court at MC-6 is level to ten centimetres over thirty one metres

The centre of MC-6 on Middle Caicos is a court about 31 metres long, lined along its northern and southern edges with double rows of undressed limestone set into earthen ridges. The surface is the remarkable part. It was levelled with marl brought up from the nearby salina and finished so carefully that the fall across the whole length comes to ten centimetres. Getting a surface that flat without instruments means checking it over and over, adding and taking away, and having enough people willing to stay at the job. The court is the focus of a wider plaza defined by ridges of midden and by pits lined with stone. Somebody wanted a large flat open space at the middle of this settlement badly enough to import the material for it. What went on there, dancing, ball play, judgement, assembly, is not recorded. That it mattered is not in doubt, because nobody carries that much marl for a place they mean to walk past.

Bartolome de las Casas had spent years on Hispaniola teaching Christianity and had watched the island's original population die under Spanish rule. In 1517 he obtained a royal edict authorising the importation of four thousand Africans a year from the west coast of Africa. The monopoly of that traffic went to a Flemish nobleman who served as chamberlain to Charles V, and he sold it on to a commercial house in Genoa for twenty three thousand ducats. Portuguese traders had landed some Africans on the island as early as 1505, and others arrived at odd times afterwards, but no recognised trade of the kind existed across the Atlantic before this edict. Years passed after the warrant was issued before the traffic settled into a regular system. The man remembered as the friend of the Indians opened the transatlantic slave trade, and the licence was treated from the start as a commodity to be resold at a profit.

Laurent Dubois opens his history of the Haitian Revolution with the arrival of Columbus on the northern shore of the island on 5 December 1492 and with the name he gave it, La Isla Espanola. Europeans had touched other islands in the preceding weeks and sailed on. This time they stayed, and no year since has passed without a European or a European derived state claiming authority over some part of this ground. The island now carries two countries with different languages, different histories and a shared border running some three hundred and eighty kilometres. Haiti holds the western third and speaks Kreyol and French. The Dominican Republic holds the east and speaks Spanish. Both date from what happened after this landing, and the line between them was drawn later by European powers dividing the island between Spain and France. One afternoon on a beach in December is the common ancestor of two national histories that spend much of their time insisting they are unrelated.

An estimate of 1551 put the population of Lisbon at 100,000 people, a tenth of them enslaved. Arrivals were running at several thousand a year and the city held sixty to seventy slave marts. By the 1590s a well-placed observer claimed Lisbon was more black than white, and the yearly black festival was one of the high points of the city's social calendar. The treatment matched the numbers. In 1515 the king ordered that the bodies of enslaved Africans be thrown into a separate common ditch known as the poco dos negros. Free black people in Lisbon, Barcelona and Seville founded religious and welfare associations that bought freedom for others and paid for burials. In 1580 thousands of Lisbon blacks, most of them enslaved men fighting on a promise of freedom, defended Antonio of Crato against Philip of Spain. Portugal did not abolish slavery inside its own borders until 1773.