Columbus sails a fourth time and is barred from Santo Domingo

Columbus was released from custody in Spain and given permission for one more voyage in the spring of 1502, on condition that he stay away from Santo Domingo. The crown wanted his navigation and had no further use for his government. He crossed to the mainland and worked the Central American coast from Honduras down to Panama, hunting for a passage through to the ocean he was certain lay beyond it. No passage exists at that latitude, and shipworm ate the hulls until the vessels could no longer be sailed. Rouse's account of the final voyage reads as a study in obsolescence. The man who had opened the route was now an inconvenience to the administrators running the colony he had started, forbidden the port he had founded, searching for a strait that is not there. The Caribbean had moved on to the business of extraction and no longer had a use for an explorer.

Africans were on the island from about 1500. King Ferdinand sent the first official consignment in 1510, to work the mines and the sugar. Bishop Las Casas argued for the substitution in the hope of sparing the indigenous population, and lived long enough to regret having said it. The Heinls call the result a hecatomb. The system Las Casas helped licence ran for three centuries and consumed millions of lives. Two dates inside this span matter more than the rest. By 1503 enslaved Africans were already going into the mountains and building free settlements there, which makes marronage on this island older than its sugar industry and almost as old as slavery itself. In 1518 Charles the Fifth issued a formal slaving monopoly with an annual ceiling of four thousand captives, many of them taken from the coasts of Dahomey and Guinea. Those coasts became the ancestral ground of the people who took the colony back in 1804.

In the autumn of 1503 Ovando went into Xaragua, gathered the district chiefs into a single building on the pretext of a meeting, and had it set alight with eighty of them inside. Anacaona, who governed the province, was hanged in public. Rouse states the result plainly: this destroyed the last independent chiefdoms on Hispaniola and gave Spain complete control of the island. Eleven years had passed since the first European ship anchored off the coast. In that time a society of several hundred thousand people organised into five polities had been reduced to a labour supply with no leadership of its own, and the killing of a chief had become an administrative act performed by a governor holding instructions from Madrid. Everything that followed came out of a decision to leave nobody standing who could negotiate: the encomienda, the gold tribute, the collapse of the population, and the shipping in of Africans to replace it.

In 1492 an Italian navigator sailing for Spain reached a green Caribbean island and named it La Isla Espanola. Africans came to the Americas on that first voyage, but the year normally cited as the official entry of African slaves into Hispaniola is 1502. They were taken from villages and cities along the Gulf of Guinea and brought in to replace the Taino and Arawak, whom the Spanish had subjugated and enslaved and who were disappearing fast. Fleurant's point about what arrived with them is precise. They carried their religion, and the religion carried the historical memory of where they had come from, preserved in a form that could survive transport. A people can be stripped of language, lineage and name and still keep a working account of its own origin, provided the account is lodged in ritual rather than in writing. That is what happened on this island.