At Guadeloupe the Spanish find what they take for Carib ritual

The second fleet raised land at Dominica, near the northern end of the Windward Islands, on 3 November 1493, then turned northwest along the island arc toward Hispaniola. It stopped briefly at Guadeloupe, where the crews went ashore and returned describing what they understood as evidence of Island Carib ritual, including human remains they read as the leavings of a meal. That reading did enormous work over the following centuries. The word cannibal comes from the Spanish rendering of Carib, and the crown eventually built a legal distinction on it, ruling that peoples classed as cannibals could be enslaved outright while others could not. Every colonist with an interest in labour therefore had an interest in finding cannibals. Rouse presents the Guadeloupe stop as a routine note in a sailing log. It is also the moment a category was manufactured that justified slave raiding across the Lesser Antilles for the next hundred years.

The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 rested on an imaginary line created by Pope Alexander the Sixth which divided the Atlantic from north to south and settled the dispute between Spain and Portugal over the possessions of the New World. The Treaty of Saragossa of 1529 performed the same operation for the Indias Orientales, dividing them between the same two emerging empires. These two documents are the beginning of the practice of partitioning the planet on paper, which ran without interruption to the scramble for Africa among western European states at the end of the nineteenth century and into the First World War. The line drawn in 1494 is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and the rest of South America speaks Spanish. It also established that the earth could be allotted by agreement between Christian monarchs, with the people living on it treated as part of the property being divided.

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.

Returning to the northern coast of Haiti on 28 November 1493, Columbus found La Navidad wrecked and the men he had left there dead. Guacanagari, the cacique of Marien who had helped build the fort, told him Caonabo had done it. Caonabo ruled Maguana, a chiefdom in the interior, and the explanation offered was that his people had been abused by the Spaniards and that he had struck back on their account. Rouse reports the accusation as Guacanagari's, which is the correct way to handle it. The one man with a motive to steer Spanish anger elsewhere was the ally on whose territory the fort had stood. Columbus took the story. The Spanish later seized Caonabo by a trick and put him on a ship for Spain, and he died at sea. Guacanagari kept his alliance and lost his chiefdom anyway. Both routes arrived at the same place inside twenty years.