A letter to Genoa turns African numbers into a reason to buy

In 1447 a man called Antoine Malfonte sent a letter from Tuat, in the Sahara, to Genoa. Nothing is known about him beyond his name and that letter. He wrote that captives taken in wars among the people he called the blacks were sold at a very low price, and he explained the supply by describing a population without limits. Women bore up to five children at a birth. Fathers coupled with daughters and brothers with sisters. He added a charge of cannibalism and noted that these people had no books. He mentioned a heathen king with five hundred thousand men and said the country held so many people that almost any trade good would find a buyer. The letter is early and it already carries the whole argument that would justify four centuries of slaving. Africa was full, its fullness came from women whose fertility obeyed no rule, and people produced in such quantity could be treated as a resource to extract.

Morne Souffleur was found by walking La Desirade systematically rather than by chance, and what the survey turned up closely resembles Morne Cybele on the same high plateau. Both sites sit where the elevation shelters them from the currents, both are protected by the steep cliffs along the northern shore, and both look out over the channels canoes had to use. One site of that kind can be put down to local preference. Two of them, matching each other, make a pattern, and the pattern points to a deliberate move onto marginal ground late in the pre-Columbian period. The people who lived there had a view of everything passing to the north and east of Guadeloupe. Within a few decades of their settling, ships of a kind nobody on that plateau had seen would come up the same channel. The vantage they chose for their own reasons faced the direction the change arrived from.

Christopher Columbus was born at Genoa in the last days of October 1451. He spent years persuading the Spanish crown to pay for a westward crossing to India and got his answer in 1492, sailing from Spain on 3 August and raising the northern coast of Hispaniola on 5 December. On Christmas Eve the Santa Maria went aground. Thirty nine men stayed behind in a stockade called La Navidad, near where Cap-Haitien stands now, and he was back in Europe by March 1493. He returned that November to a burned fort and dead men, killed by the Taino whose welcome had been answered with violence. He crossed three more times and died at Valladolid on 20 May 1506. Haiti observes 5 December as Discovery Day, which is a curious thing for a country to keep. Several hundred thousand Taino were living on this island when he arrived, and within decades forced labour, disease and killing had finished them as a people.

At the feast of Mary in August 1449 the Emperor Zara Ya'iqob gathered the leaders of the Ethiopian church at the monastery of Dabra Mitmaq in Shoa. Two Egyptian metropolitans came, along with the abbots of Dabra Hayk, Dabra Libanos, Dabra Bizan, Dabra Damo and many other houses. The question was the Sabbath. One monastic party, the House of Ewostatewos, kept the Jewish Saturday and had been refusing ordination from the metropolitan for decades; the rest of the kingdom ignored it. The emperor, who had spent twenty years shut up in the mountain prison at Amba-Gishan before taking the throne in 1434, had thought the matter through and written books about it. The council agreed that both days would be kept and that the Ewostathians would accept ordination again. Ethiopians have observed two Sabbaths ever since. The province that mattered politically lay in the north, near the Red Sea coast the emperor was determined to control.