Within fifty years of contact the island's people were gone

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.

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.

In 1492 the most celebrated samba on the island the Taino called Hayti was a woman named Anacaona. She came from a royal line, was the sister of the cacique Bohechio and the wife of Caonabo, who ruled the Maguana. Her poems, called areytos, delighted her contemporaries and pleased the Spaniards enough that they became her friends or acted the part. Poetry left her time for government. When her husband died she became sole head of Xaragua, whose old capital Yaguana later became the town of Leogane, and visitors were still shown the cave where she made her offerings to the zemis. She gave the Spaniards splendid festivals as an attempt to draw the two peoples together. One of the conquistadores carried off her daughter Higuenamota, the first of the betrayals that followed. At a military review Nicolas Ovando had her seized and hanged.