Nine in ten islanders are dead within sixty years

Between 1492 and 1550 the indigenous population of the West Indies fell by about ninety percent. Three causes worked together. Epidemic disease reached bodies that had never met smallpox, measles or influenza and killed at rates no European community experienced. Spanish massacres and punitive expeditions killed directly. The encomienda system, which assigned islanders to settlers as labour, worked people to death in mines and fields and broke up the households that fed them, so hunger finished the job. Numbers on this scale are hard to hold in the head. Whole languages, chiefdoms and religious systems ended inside two generations, and the archaeological record for the islands goes quiet. The economic consequence drove the next three centuries. Spanish and later French colonists had claimed territory whose value depended entirely on labour, and the labour was gone. They turned to Africa. The transatlantic slave trade grew in the hole this collapse left, and Saint-Domingue was built in it.

In 1503, and possibly a few years before that, ships carrying enslaved Africans reached Hispaniola. They were the first to arrive anywhere in the Americas. Columbus had landed on the island in 1492 and set up a short lived regime that put the Taino people to work pulling gold out of the rivers. The gold gave out. Fighting, overwork and imported sickness killed almost the entire indigenous population inside about fifty years, and neither the removal of Columbus from command nor a series of royal orders issued by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile slowed the dying. Officials and settlers now wanted two things, a workforce and a crop that paid. They found the crop in the sugar estates of the Canary Islands, which had already shown how cane fields, a mill and captive labour could be assembled anywhere warm enough. The two answers arrived together, and Hispaniola became the ground on which the Atlantic plantation was first built.

Bartolome de las Casas had spent years on Hispaniola teaching Christianity and had watched the island's original population die under Spanish rule. In 1517 he obtained a royal edict authorising the importation of four thousand Africans a year from the west coast of Africa. The monopoly of that traffic went to a Flemish nobleman who served as chamberlain to Charles V, and he sold it on to a commercial house in Genoa for twenty three thousand ducats. Portuguese traders had landed some Africans on the island as early as 1505, and others arrived at odd times afterwards, but no recognised trade of the kind existed across the Atlantic before this edict. Years passed after the warrant was issued before the traffic settled into a regular system. The man remembered as the friend of the Indians opened the transatlantic slave trade, and the licence was treated from the start as a commodity to be resold at a profit.

The Lisbon Inquisition set up its commissioner's office in Salvador in 1549. Every case from the Portuguese empire was handled from the metropole, unlike the Spanish system with its regional tribunals at Lima and Cartagena. Anyone wishing to denounce a neighbour went to the commissioner, who investigated and sent his findings across the Atlantic. If Lisbon declined to prosecute, and it usually did, the report was copied into the prosecutor's notebooks, a standing record of the cases that went nowhere. The inquisitors cared about judaizing and heresy. Of the 143 Bahian cases that reached full trial between 1593 and 1687, not one concerned sorcery or anything close to it, and only two involved people of African descent at all. Denunciations of African healers existed in the notebooks well before that date. The gap between what colonists reported and what Lisbon would try is why the archive has the shape it has.