A fort called Christmas rises from the wreck of a ship

The crew pulled timber, nails and fittings out of the grounded Santa Maria near what is now Cap-Haitien and built a small fortified post on shore. They called it La Navidad for the day. Roughly thirty nine men stayed in it when Columbus sailed for Spain, provisioned with what the ship had carried and told to look for gold and to keep on good terms with the local cacique, Guacanagari, whose people had come out in canoes to help salvage the wreck. Girard treats this as the first European settlement of the Americas, and it stood on Haitian ground. It did not last a year. When Columbus returned in November 1493 the fort had been burned and every man in it was dead, killed by islanders who had endured their demands for gold and for women. The first European colony in the New World was destroyed by the people it was planted among, eleven months after it went up.

The island its inhabitants called Ayiti was baptised Hispaniola by Columbus in 1492. What followed there was genocide, and it belongs to the same sixteenth century transformation that connected European ventures across the Atlantic, carried enslaved Africans into the Americas and dismantled Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac. Out of that came a structure for controlling authority, economy, subjectivity and the norms of gender and sexual relations, driven by the Atlantic Europeans of the Iberian peninsula, Holland, France and England, in their quarrels with each other as much as in their exploitation of labour and their seizure of land. Africans and the peoples of the Americas took no part in setting the rules. The name Ayiti was recovered in 1804 by people who had been brought to the island in chains three centuries after its first inhabitants were destroyed, and who chose the word the destroyed had used.

On 4 June 1491 one of the king's sons, Mvemba Nzinga, then governor of the northern province of Nsundi, was baptised along with his mother and given the name Afonso. A month later the first church in Mbanza Kongo was blessed. Within three years his father had given the whole thing up. The missionaries wanted the village charms destroyed and the king restricted to one wife, and both demands cut at the working order of the country. The charms secured rain and health and guarded against witchcraft. The king's many wives tied him to different sections of his people. A few foreign priests chanting in an unknown language inside a hastily built shed did not replace either. So Nzinga Nkuvu returned to the practices of his ancestors, as many quickly baptised African rulers did. His son in Nsundi refused to follow him, and for the next twelve years that province held the only Christian community in the kingdom.

In 1492 Christians completed the expulsion of Moors and Jews from the Iberian peninsula and forced conversion on those who stayed. The quarrel between the three religions of the book was old, but from that year it was reorganised around a new principle. Christian theology located the difference between Christian, Moor and Jew in the blood, which made descent rather than belief the test, and made conversion insufficient. In the same years the ranking of Spanish, Indian and African began to take shape in the Americas. By the eighteenth century blood as the marker of race had been transferred to skin, which is the form in which it reached the plantations of Saint-Domingue and the colour laws of the 1760s and 1770s. The doctrine that classified free people of colour by the number of their African ancestors was worked out first in Spain, against Jews and Muslims, before there was a Caribbean colony to apply it in.