One landfall fixes the sailing route between Europe and the Antilles

Arriving off Dominica on 3 November 1493, the second fleet had done something the first voyage had not. It had found the efficient crossing. Running south from Spain to the Canaries and then west on the northeast trades put a ship in the Lesser Antilles in about three weeks, and the westerlies further north carried it home again. Rouse credits this passage with establishing the route, and ships used it for the next four hundred years. That counts for more than any single landing. A reliable sea road is what converts a discovery into a system. Sugar, captives, wine, salt fish, soldiers and orders from Paris and Madrid all moved along the line laid down in 1493. Saint-Domingue could become the richest colony on earth because a ship leaving Nantes or Bordeaux knew exactly where to find the wind. The Atlantic economy that carried twelve million Africans across the water ran on a route worked out on this crossing.

Columbus came back to Hispaniola on his second voyage and found that the Spaniards he had left on the north coast had vanished, with nobody left alive to explain it. What followed was a policy. Short of food, short of gold and short of hands, the Spanish drove the indigenous population into the mines and the fields under compulsion, and within roughly fifty years of the first landing there was almost nobody left to drive. Logan cites estimates putting the island's population as high as a million people before the Europeans came. Whatever the true figure, the direction is not in dispute. He opens his diplomatic history of Haiti with this episode, and the choice is deliberate. Logan published in 1941, when the United States had recently ended a nineteen year occupation of the country, and he wanted his readers to grasp that the violence they were reading about in the twentieth century had a starting date in the fifteenth.

On 4 June 1491 one of the king's sons, Mvemba Nzinga, then governor of the northern province of Nsundi, was baptised along with his mother and given the name Afonso. A month later the first church in Mbanza Kongo was blessed. Within three years his father had given the whole thing up. The missionaries wanted the village charms destroyed and the king restricted to one wife, and both demands cut at the working order of the country. The charms secured rain and health and guarded against witchcraft. The king's many wives tied him to different sections of his people. A few foreign priests chanting in an unknown language inside a hastily built shed did not replace either. So Nzinga Nkuvu returned to the practices of his ancestors, as many quickly baptised African rulers did. His son in Nsundi refused to follow him, and for the next twelve years that province held the only Christian community in the kingdom.

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.