The Caribbean imported nine times more Africans and ended level

By 1750 the Caribbean had received nine times as many African captives as the North American mainland. By 1830 the Black populations of the two regions were roughly the same size. The gap between those two facts is a death rate. On the mainland the enslaved population grew by natural increase, because food was more plentiful, the disease environment less lethal, and the work regime, brutal as it was, did not consume people at the same speed. In the islands the population fell every year and was topped up by fresh shipments from Africa. Sugar accounts for the difference. Cutting and milling cane in a tropical climate under the whip killed adults faster than children were born, and planters treated replacement by purchase as an ordinary cost of production. Saint-Domingue was the extreme case. Its half a million enslaved people in 1789 needed constant importation to hold that number, which is why so many of those who made the revolution had been born in Africa.

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.

Vasco da Gama's voyage around Africa to Asia, following Columbus, forced Rome to decide in a hurry who controlled the church in newly reached lands. Pope Leo X settled it for Portugal in the brief Praecelsae Devotionis of 1514, granting the crown authority over the church overseas greater than the authority it held over the church at home. At the time there was almost no organised Catholic missionary work anywhere, so the grant may have looked harmless. It was not. For the next two centuries Lisbon used it to keep missionaries of other nations out of every coast it claimed, and Rome, which rarely admits an error, lived with a weakened version of the arrangement into the twentieth century while chipping away at it. When Italian and Spanish friars finally reached the Kongo in the seventeenth century, they got there because the Dutch had temporarily taken Angola and Spain and Portugal were at war.

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.