The French Caribbean took one African in seven, nearly all to Saint-Domingue

Roughly twelve million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, the largest forced migration ever recorded. A separate traffic run out of the Muslim world moved people across the Sahara and the Indian Ocean over the same period. Portugal dominated the early Atlantic business and sent most of its captives to Brazil. At the peak, from 1650 to 1800, Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia and the young United States were all in it. Most captives came from West Africa and the Congo and Angola coasts and were sold to sugar planters. Roughly one African in seven brought to the Americas in chains was landed in the French Caribbean, and nearly all of those went to Saint-Domingue, where planters worked people to death and bought replacements. That practice produced the colony's fortune and the revolution that ended it. Britain and the United States closed the traffic in 1807 and 1808, Brazil in 1850, and slavery itself continued long afterwards.

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.

About 1670 buccaneers crossed from the island of Tortuga and founded the settlement on the northern coast of Hispaniola that became Cap Francois and is now Cap-Haitien. They had been trading with the Spanish towns of the north since the middle of the previous century. The houses they put up were rectangular and built by a method the French called the Indian style: forked posts driven straight into the earth, carrying the plates and the ridge, with walls of wattle or of split palm bark and roofs of thatch. Almost everything in the town was made of plant material. When Pere Labat passed through in 1701 he found a place laid out on a rectangular grid holding about three hundred houses. The city that a century later would be the richest in the Caribbean, with its theatre, its printing presses and its learned societies, began as a row of earthfast huts thrown up by men who lived off raiding.