A Portuguese map shows African women outside the fort

The Cantino planisphere of 1502 is the earliest map of Portuguese geographic discoveries, and it charted the African coast with unusual accuracy for its date. Along that coast the mapmaker drew small black silhouettes of women, curved figures moving about outside the Portuguese fort that dominates the interior of the African section. They are naked apart from tools at the waist and, on one figure, a cloth over the hips. Other maps of the period filled unknown ground with mythical animals. This one filled it with working women. The choice states what the Portuguese expected to take from the coast and what they assumed women would do once taken. By the year the map was drawn the traffic in African captives into Iberia was about fifty years old, and somewhere between eighty thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand people had already been brought to Portugal.

In 1503, and possibly a few years before that, ships carrying enslaved Africans reached Hispaniola. They were the first to arrive anywhere in the Americas. Columbus had landed on the island in 1492 and set up a short lived regime that put the Taino people to work pulling gold out of the rivers. The gold gave out. Fighting, overwork and imported sickness killed almost the entire indigenous population inside about fifty years, and neither the removal of Columbus from command nor a series of royal orders issued by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile slowed the dying. Officials and settlers now wanted two things, a workforce and a crop that paid. They found the crop in the sugar estates of the Canary Islands, which had already shown how cane fields, a mill and captive labour could be assembled anywhere warm enough. The two answers arrived together, and Hispaniola became the ground on which the Atlantic plantation was first built.

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.

Governor Ovando sent Spain a report in 1503 warning that Africans escaping into the interior of Hispaniola had become a danger to the colony. Fick takes the document as a marker. Africans had been on the island perhaps three years, and already enough of them had gone into the mountains and stayed free there for the administration to treat it as a standing threat needing a policy. Marronage on this island is therefore as old as African slavery on it. No period of acceptance can be found before resistance begins. The same mountains sheltered maroon communities continuously for three centuries, through the Spanish period and the whole of French Saint-Domingue, and the leaders of the 1791 rising drew on a tradition of flight, concealment and armed refusal running back to the first decade of the sixteenth century. Fick built her history of the revolution on that continuity.