Thirty nine men are left to hold a fort on Taino land

Columbus sailed for Spain on 2 January 1493, leaving thirty nine of his crew at La Navidad, the fort raised near present day Cap-Haitien out of the wreckage of the Santa Maria. They were the first Europeans posted to live in the Americas. Nothing about the arrangement had been planned. The men stayed because the flagship was gone and the two remaining vessels could not carry everyone home, so an accident of navigation produced the first colonial garrison in the hemisphere. They had no farms, no supply ships, no interpreter they could trust, and no orders beyond holding the ground and looking for gold. Their survival depended entirely on the goodwill of the chiefdom whose land they were sitting on. Every European settlement on this island for the next three hundred years rested on the same arithmetic, a small armed minority living off the labour of the people around it. This one had eleven months.

Christopher Columbus opened the Atlantic trade in human beings by shipping about five hundred indigenous people from the Caribbean to Spain for sale. He was not improvising. Italian merchants and bankers in the Atlantic ports had been financing sugar estates and dealing in enslaved labour for generations, and the men who backed his voyages knew what a new island with a workable climate was for. What followed was the collapse of the people already living there. Smallpox, influenza and other diseases reached populations with no prior exposure and no immunity, and epidemics of that kind kill adults as readily as children, so households lost the people who planted and fished. Spanish violence and the wrecking of local food systems finished what the pathogens started. Millions of Caribbean islanders died within a few decades. The labour supply the Spanish had counted on disappeared, and the shortage they made themselves is why ships began sailing to Africa for replacements.

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.

In 1492 Christians completed the expulsion of Moors and Jews from the Iberian peninsula and forced conversion on those who stayed. The quarrel between the three religions of the book was old, but from that year it was reorganised around a new principle. Christian theology located the difference between Christian, Moor and Jew in the blood, which made descent rather than belief the test, and made conversion insufficient. In the same years the ranking of Spanish, Indian and African began to take shape in the Americas. By the eighteenth century blood as the marker of race had been transferred to skin, which is the form in which it reached the plantations of Saint-Domingue and the colour laws of the 1760s and 1770s. The doctrine that classified free people of colour by the number of their African ancestors was worked out first in Spain, against Jews and Muslims, before there was a Caribbean colony to apply it in.