Three quarters of the world's sugar came off this one colony

By the late eighteenth century the western third of Hispaniola produced around three quarters of the sugar sold in the world, along with a large share of its coffee, and it did so on the labour of enslaved Africans imported in numbers that had to be replaced constantly because the work killed them. The wealth left the island. It paid for town houses in Bordeaux and Nantes, for country estates, and for the ships and the credit that carried the next cargo. What stayed behind was cleared forest, worn soil and a population held down by law and by violence. The same mountains that made the plantations awkward to police gave the enslaved somewhere to run, and marronage became a permanent feature of the colony. By 1788 the arrangement was carrying more pressure than it could hold: an enslaved majority of several hundred thousand, a free population of colour with property and no rights, and a white minority quarrelling with Paris. Everything that followed came out of that pressure.

Leaving the king's camp, Beatrice led a group of ordinary people back to Sao Salvador and made her home beside the cathedral, on the ground where the bishop had once lived. She sent out messengers, called little Anthonies, across the country to summon people to the capital. Soyo and Nsundi threw them out. Elsewhere the movement caught, and another Capuchin met it near the sea in mid 1705. The city filled up. Beatrice was hailed as the true nganga, the one restoring the kingdom, and Bernardo da Gallo was mocked as little Bernardo, the cowardly nganga who had lacked the nerve to lead the people home. Her teaching grew: Christ had been born at Sao Salvador, the true Bethlehem, and baptised at Nsundi in the river Zaire. Marriage, baptism, confession and prayer counted for nothing in themselves, she said, because God looks at the intention.

The ship Santiago left Sierra Leone for Puerto Rico in 1566 carrying captives who were probably taken during the Mane invasions from the east. It stopped at the Los Islands off Conakry for fresh water. People on the island, themselves refugees from those same wars, attacked the ship and killed a crewman. The Santiago sailed on. Ninety two people came ashore in Puerto Rico and fifteen of them were male. Mortality on comparable ships in the early 1560s ran between ten and forty per cent, so more had been loaded than were landed. That same year almost half of the two hundred and sixty eight captives on another ship out of Sierra Leone died before it reached Cartagena. Women made up majorities on many sixteenth and seventeenth century crossings. The image of the slave ship as a hold full of men belongs to later centuries and to the historians who did the counting.

Daut retells the killing of the Xaraguan queen as nineteenth-century Haitian writers told it, which is the point of her whole method. Anacaona, whose name joined the Ayitian words for flower and for gold, accepted an invitation from the new Spanish governor Nicolas de Ovando along with three hundred of her people, was accused of treason once inside, and was hanged. Half a year of near indiscriminate slaughter of the Xaraguans followed, leaving orphans including her daughter Higuemota. Her husband Caonabo had already been seized in 1496 and, in the Haitian accounts, died aboard the ship deporting him to Spain. Daut stresses how Vastey drew the parallel that mattered to him, comparing Caonabo's end to Toussaint Louverture's death in a French prison. For these writers the island's Indigenous dead were not a separate prehistory but the first chapter of the same continuing crime.