The southern islands kept talking to the mainland and built a pidgin

While the northern Lesser Antilles were emptying into lookout stations, the southern part of the chain stayed full. Those islands held dense populations and kept up heavy exchange with communities on the South American mainland, and the traffic ran on into the colonial period. What comes of that much contact between groups who do not share a language is a working solution. A Carib pidgin developed and spread, a simplified common tongue used across a mosaic of distinct communities so that trade, marriage and alliance could be conducted. Cultural traits and vocabulary were shared out along the same routes. Colonial writing split the Caribbean into the gentle Taino and the savage Carib, a pair of labels that did a great deal of work in justifying what was done to both. The evidence in the ground and in the languages describes a network of societies in constant negotiation, each holding its own shape.

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.