Portuguese ships land at Mpinda and meet the kingdom of Kongo

In April 1482 a Portuguese squadron under Diogo Cao was working its way south along the African coast in search of a sea road to India when it came on the mouth of a very large river. Cao took his ships in and landed at Mpinda, the chief port of the kingdom of Kongo. People of the coastal province of Soyo told him that the ruler of the country lived far inland, at Mbandza Kongo. Cao belonged to the Order of Christ, the Portuguese crusading order that Prince Henry the Navigator had directed and that paid for these voyages. Travelling inland the Portuguese found six provinces, well watered farmland, cattle herds, cloth woven locally, streets lined with orange and lemon and pomegranate trees, and a royal court whose ceremony they compared with their own. This meeting opened three centuries of traffic between Portugal and Kongo. The same coast later supplied a large share of the people shipped to Saint-Domingue, the colony that became Haiti.

The Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 and Daemonolatreiae libri tres of 1595 both described witches learning to make poisons through their pact with the Devil. That tied two ideas together for centuries. European elites already held that the Devil recruited women more readily than men, so poison became the crime the popular imagination gave to wives, servants and rivals, people striking from weakness at someone stronger. Village fear and clerical theory pulled apart. Neighbours accused local healers of causing harm and answered with counter magic, while churchmen held that a cure achieved by such means was itself demonic. The prosecutions at their height in the late sixteenth century swept up cunning folk for exactly that reason. The gendered script outlived the trials. Portuguese and French dictionaries of the early eighteenth century still explained sorcery as a female act of envy, and the assumption crossed the Atlantic on the same ships as the colonists.

Work on Sao Jorge da Mina began on 20 January 1482 on the Gold Coast of what is now Ghana, and the castle was finished the following year. Europeans had traded along this shore from ships and temporary posts. A square stone fort with steep stairways and deep dungeons said something else: the Portuguese intended to hold ground in Africa permanently. The building outlasted them. It passed to the Dutch and then to the British, and for more than three hundred years a large cistern under its base supplied fresh water to vessels loading for the Middle Passage. Water is what a slave ship runs out of first, and a captain who could fill his casks at Elmina could carry more people and sail further. Thousands of captives were driven through the opening in its wall that later generations named the door of no return, some bound for the Americas and others for ports elsewhere on the African coast. Elmina is the oldest European building still standing south of the Sahara.

En Bas Saline sits about a kilometre inland from Limonade Bord de Mer on the north coast of Haiti. Researchers including Kathleen Deagan have identified it as the village of the cacique Guacanagari and as the ground on which La Navidad stood. The case is circumstantial and rests on several strands at once. The site is unusually large and laid out in the pattern of a chief's town. It holds European objects, among them metal aglets, the small tips laced onto Spanish clothing, and bones of animals that were never native to the islands. Its distance from the shore matches contemporary descriptions of where the Santa Maria went aground. The mixture is what makes the place valuable. European material appears inside a Taino village that was still running as a Taino village, so the first weeks of contact can be read in the ground and not only in the admiral's journal. Keegan and Hofman call it a bridge between the pre-Columbian and colonial worlds.