Sugar for export starts moving west across the Atlantic islands

In the 1460s planters on the islands of the eastern Atlantic began growing sugarcane for sale abroad. Madeira and the Canaries lie off Africa and Iberia, close enough to European markets to ship a heavy crop and far enough out to be worked as private estates. Sugar is not an ordinary farm product. It demands land cleared in blocks, a mill, a boiling house, fuel, and a workforce large enough to cut and crush the cane within hours of harvest before the juice sours. An operation of that shape needs people who cannot leave. Eltis and Richardson mark this decade as the first long step in the westward march of the sugar plantation complex, a package of crop, machinery, capital and coerced labour that travelled as a unit. From these islands it went to Sao Tome, then to Brazil, then to the Caribbean. Saint-Domingue was the last and richest stop on a road that opened here.

Anacaona was born in 1464 at Yaguana, the place we now call Léogâne. Her name in Taíno means Golden Flower. She was a cacique, meaning a head of state, and she was also a composer of areítos, the sung poems that carried Taíno history. She ruled Xaragua, negotiated with the Spanish, hosted them, and was hanged by Governor Nicolás de Ovando in 1504 after a massacre of her nobles at a banquet. Now follow the chain, because this is where the timeline stops being a list and starts being an argument. With Taíno labor destroyed and Taíno leadership executed, the colonial administration needed a replacement workforce. The importation of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola accelerates directly out of that gap. Anacaona's death is not only the end of one story. It is the procurement decision that begins another.

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.

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.