The first Africans in the Americas came by way of Europe

African captives may have reached the Americas as early as 1498, on Columbus's third voyage. For the first quarter century the traffic ran through Europe. Enslaved Africans were held in Seville and Lisbon and then shipped west with other cargo, which meant the earliest Black people in the Spanish Caribbean had already spent years on the Iberian peninsula and often spoke Spanish or Portuguese. Sailings direct from the African coast to the Americas became the normal arrangement around 1525, and that shift created the trade as it is usually pictured. Eltis and Richardson count roughly 10.7 million captives landed across the three and a half centuries that followed. Set beside the European migration of the same period, the figure reverses the ordinary picture of who peopled the hemisphere. Until the great European movements of the nineteenth century the Americas were, in demographic terms, an extension of Africa, and Saint-Domingue was among the most African places on earth.

Nicolas de Ovando reached Hispaniola in 1502 as governor, bringing two thousand five hundred colonists, among them the first European families to settle anywhere in the Americas. Families change what a colony is. Single men on a gold expedition can leave. Households with children, tools and livestock intend to stay, and they need land, which has to come from somebody. Ovando's answer was policy. Rouse records that he set out to eliminate the independent caciques so the expanding settlements would be secure, and over the next two years he carried it through with a thoroughness that ended Taino political life on the island. This is the administration that fixed the shape of Spanish colonisation everywhere it went afterwards: a royal governor, a settler population holding land grants, a subject population assigned to work those grants, and the removal of any indigenous authority capable of saying no.

By 1502, when Nicolas de Ovando arrived as governor, Xaragua was the only part of the island still outside Spanish control. Ovando sent word that he would pay a visit. Anacaona, who had ruled since her brother's death, called in everyone her kingdom could muster and prepared the ceremonial welcome for which she was famous. The Spanish turned the gathering into a killing. The massacre carried out by an officer named Alcantara spared neither women nor children nor the old, and the chiefdom was burned. Anacaona herself was taken by trickery, put in chains, subjected to every kind of humiliation and dragged to Santo Domingo, where she was tried for conspiracy, condemned and hanged in 1503. Her daughter Higuenamota lived a little longer. A Spanish officer named Fernando de Guevara paid with his life for loving her. Contemporaries who wrote about Anacaona, among them Las Casas and Oviedo, called her a very noble person and a great lady.

Bartolome de las Casas had spent years on Hispaniola teaching Christianity and had watched the island's original population die under Spanish rule. In 1517 he obtained a royal edict authorising the importation of four thousand Africans a year from the west coast of Africa. The monopoly of that traffic went to a Flemish nobleman who served as chamberlain to Charles V, and he sold it on to a commercial house in Genoa for twenty three thousand ducats. Portuguese traders had landed some Africans on the island as early as 1505, and others arrived at odd times afterwards, but no recognised trade of the kind existed across the Atlantic before this edict. Years passed after the warrant was issued before the traffic settled into a regular system. The man remembered as the friend of the Indians opened the transatlantic slave trade, and the licence was treated from the start as a commodity to be resold at a profit.