Columbus writes new names over Quisqueya, Bohio and Babeque

Columbus first made out the north coast of the island from the deck of the Santa Maria on 5 December 1492 and recorded that it was a very great island. The next day, the feast of Saint Nicholas, he entered an empty harbour and named it for the saint. Tortuga was named in the same days. The words went onto parchment in a neat firm hand, and those sheets survive in Madrid in the library of the Dukes of Alba. The people already living there had names for their country. Quisqueya, Bohio and Babeque appear in the early Spanish records and then stop appearing, because a name survives only while somebody with authority keeps using it. Naming is cheap, and it is also the first administrative act of a conquest. Once a harbour is Puerto de San Nicolas on a Spanish chart it can be granted, garrisoned and defended by people who have never seen it. Mole Saint-Nicolas is still called that today.

In the 1490s the Portuguese planted sugar on Sao Tome, an island in the Gulf of Guinea a few hundred kilometres off the African mainland. The island had no population of its own before they arrived, so everyone who worked there was brought there. Captives came from the nearby coast and from the kingdom of Kongo, and within a generation Sao Tome was among the largest sugar producers anywhere. Every element of the system that would later run Saint-Domingue was present: a single crop grown for a distant market, a mill and a boiling house at the centre of the estate, an enslaved African workforce with no prospect of returning home, a small European management class, and revolt. Enslaved people escaped into the island's interior and raided the plantations from it. Sugar built the wealth and marronage answered it, on an African island, before any Caribbean plantation existed. Planters who later crossed the Atlantic did not arrive as beginners.

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 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.