A mound near Limonade is probably Guacanagari's town

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.

On 5 December 1492 Columbus came ashore on the island the Spanish would name Hispaniola and declared it the property of the Spanish crown. The act consisted of words spoken in a language nobody present understood, a banner, and a notarial record carried back to Europe. Several hundred thousand Taino were living on the island that afternoon. Nothing in the ceremony required their agreement, their presence, or any knowledge on their part that it had happened. The legal fiction outlived the man who performed it. Spain, and France after it, went on treating the western Atlantic as vacant ground that Europeans could assign to one another by treaty, and every later argument about who owned Saint-Domingue traced back to a document written on that premise. The people already there entered European law as an obstacle to be cleared. Haiti spent the next three hundred and twelve years arguing with a claim made in a single afternoon.

The reconquest of the Iberian peninsula was completed in January 1492. The Spanish crown held a papal mandate to overcome unbelievers wherever it met them, and Pope Alexander VI tied that mandate directly to the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Muslims who had accepted baptism in Spain were called Moriscos. A number of them returned to Islam once they were across the ocean and set about preaching it among the indigenous people they found, with enough success to bring a series of anti Muslim decrees from King Ferdinand. Those decrees still reserved that Moors were not to be taken as slaves. Later the French applied the same religious reasoning to enslaving Muslims of the Barbary coast, and then Muslims of any origin at all. Toleration in Iberia had covered only those willing to convert, and only until about 1500. Suppression of Islam in the Americas continued into the last decades of the twentieth century.

The island Europeans came to call Hispaniola was Taino country. Something like five hundred thousand people lived there in 1492, organised into five chiefdoms, each under a cacique, feeding themselves mainly on manioc. They had a long standing rivalry with the Carib peoples of the Lesser Antilles, and older scholarship confused them with the Arawak of Trinidad and Guyana, relatives who lived somewhere else entirely. Within a few decades of contact almost none of them were left. Disease did part of the work, forced labour in the mines did more, and Spanish violence finished it. The speed matters as much as the total. Spain destroyed its own workforce faster than it could use it, and the colonists then declared themselves short of hands. Africans were bought to fill the gap. So the first shipment of enslaved people to this island was a direct consequence of the killing that had gone before it. One catastrophe wrote the order for the next.