Constantinople falls and Europe's slave supply turns African

The Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 closed the route that had carried captives from the Black Sea and the Balkans into Christian Europe. That traffic was turned toward buyers in Islamic territory. Two things went short in Europe at once: sugar, and the European captives who had been made to grow and mill it. Portuguese merchants were already trading down the African coast, and they answered the shortage by buying more black Africans and shipping them north. Within a few decades the enslaved populations of Sicily, of Naples and of southern France had changed colour. Historians of the trade call this the blackening of Mediterranean slavery, and it happened four decades before Columbus sailed. Sugar and African labour were bound to each other in the Mediterranean before either of them crossed the Atlantic. The plantation complex that eventually reached Hispaniola did not have to invent that pairing. It carried it west already assembled.

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.

Morne Cybele occupies La Montagne, the steep limestone plateau that rises to 275 metres on La Desirade. The occupied core is small, somewhere between 200 and 300 square metres. The height buys shelter from the strong currents and unpredictable winds that make the surrounding water difficult, and the northern cliffs make the site hard to approach from that side, which cuts both ways for the people living on it. A shell of Cittarium pica taken from the deposit was radiocarbon dated to the middle of the fifteenth century, so the community was in place a few decades before Columbus sailed. That date is what makes the site useful. It shows what people in the eastern Caribbean were doing immediately before the arrival that would define everything written about them afterwards. Morne Souffleur, on the same plateau, belongs to the same pattern. Small, high, difficult to reach, and chosen on purpose.

Alvise da Cadamosto, a Venetian working for the Portuguese, sailed to Senegambia in 1455 and opened his first negotiation with Budomel, a Jalof lord who promised captives in exchange for horses. To show good faith Budomel handed over a girl of about twelve. Cadamosto wrote that she was given for the service of his chamber, that he accepted her, and that he sent her to the ship. He recorded no objection to any part of the transaction and said nothing further about her. What she understood of it, and what the women and girls left behind under Budomel understood, went unwritten, though the terms would have been plain enough to all of them. Cadamosto came back to the Gambia river in 1456. His narrative was printed in Italian in 1507 and translated into Latin, German and French within eight years, which made it one of the first accounts through which European readers learned that people on that coast could be bought.