The first European settlement in the Americas lasted under a year

Less than twelve months separate the founding of La Navidad from its destruction. Columbus left the garrison on the north coast of Hispaniola in January 1493, and the Taino of the surrounding country burned the place before the year was out. Geggus is direct about the cause. The Spaniards left there preyed on the people around them, and the people around them answered. That reading matters because of what the standard chronology usually does with the episode, which is to file it under indigenous treachery and move on. The men in the fort had no supply line, no authority over anyone and no restraint. They took food, they took women, and they went looking for gold in country whose owners had agreed to none of it. The response was local, organised and effective. The first act of armed resistance to European settlement anywhere in the Americas happened here, and it worked.

Columbus sailed from Cuba on 5 December 1492 convinced that Cuba was part of a mainland. The next day he brought his ships into a harbour at the northwestern tip of the island now called Haiti, the place later known as Nicolas mole and then Mole Saint-Nicolas. Its entrance lies between two capes about three quarters of a mile apart. Inside, the water narrows, bends to the northeast, and ends in a basin cut off from the open sea by a low neck of land half a mile across. It is deep throughout, sheltered from every wind, and holds an anchor well. Columbus recorded how safe the place was and also how dry and poor the country around it looked. Both judgements held. For the next four centuries the harbour was the best on that coast and the land behind it stayed thin, and in the eighteen eighties foreign governments opened negotiations to acquire the port.

The reconquest of the Iberian peninsula was completed in January 1492. The Spanish crown held a papal mandate to overcome unbelievers wherever it met them, and Pope Alexander VI tied that mandate directly to the exploration and conquest of the Americas. Muslims who had accepted baptism in Spain were called Moriscos. A number of them returned to Islam once they were across the ocean and set about preaching it among the indigenous people they found, with enough success to bring a series of anti Muslim decrees from King Ferdinand. Those decrees still reserved that Moors were not to be taken as slaves. Later the French applied the same religious reasoning to enslaving Muslims of the Barbary coast, and then Muslims of any origin at all. Toleration in Iberia had covered only those willing to convert, and only until about 1500. Suppression of Islam in the Americas continued into the last decades of the twentieth century.

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.