Iberian ports organised nearly every early slaving voyage

Through the first century and a half of the Atlantic trade, ports in Spain and Portugal fitted out ninety seven percent of the slaving voyages leaving Europe. The earliest ships to carry Africans to the Americas sailed from Spanish harbours in 1501 with captives who had already been brought to Spain from the African coast, so the first crossings were re-exports of people held on the peninsula. By the 1530s Iberian merchants had reorganised the business. One voyage now sailed from Europe to Africa, bought captives there, carried them to Spanish America, and loaded produce for the return leg, which is the triangular pattern the Dutch, the English and the French all copied afterwards. Eltis and Richardson stress the continuity. The system that eventually delivered several hundred thousand Africans to Saint-Domingue was designed in Seville and Lisbon before any northern European nation held a colony worth the name.

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.

When the Compagnie Francaise des Iles d'Amerique was set up in 1635 to carry on the traffic in enslaved Africans, Louis XIII laid down that everyone the company took had to be baptised and instructed in the Catholic faith. Conversion was the stated purpose of the commerce, and one of the earliest missionaries in the French islands, Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre, wrote plainly that saving the souls of black people was the reason the business existed. In practice the rule produced an effect nobody in Paris had planned. Enslaved people treated baptism as a source of power rather than a change of allegiance, and presented themselves for it three, four, five and six times over. Planters grew suspicious of the priests, whom they thought capable of preaching that black and white were equal before God, and did what they could to keep religious instruction away from the work gangs.