Las Casas arrives as a settler and leaves as the system's critic

Bartolome de las Casas landed on Hispaniola in 1502 as a young settler, holding land and indigenous labourers like everyone else of his standing. He watched the encomienda destroy the Taino at close range for a decade, then renounced his own holdings and began the campaign that made his name, arguing before the Spanish court that the conquest was unlawful and the treatment of the indigenous population a mortal crime. Dubois places him at the start of the story for good reason. Las Casas is the source for much of what is known about the destruction of the Taino, and he is also the man who proposed importing Africans to relieve them, a suggestion he later called the worst error of his life. One person stands at both ends of the substitution. The most eloquent defender of the island's first victims helped supply the argument for its second, and he lived long enough to understand what he had done.

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.

Daut retells the killing of the Xaraguan queen as nineteenth-century Haitian writers told it, which is the point of her whole method. Anacaona, whose name joined the Ayitian words for flower and for gold, accepted an invitation from the new Spanish governor Nicolas de Ovando along with three hundred of her people, was accused of treason once inside, and was hanged. Half a year of near indiscriminate slaughter of the Xaraguans followed, leaving orphans including her daughter Higuemota. Her husband Caonabo had already been seized in 1496 and, in the Haitian accounts, died aboard the ship deporting him to Spain. Daut stresses how Vastey drew the parallel that mattered to him, comparing Caonabo's end to Toussaint Louverture's death in a French prison. For these writers the island's Indigenous dead were not a separate prehistory but the first chapter of the same continuing crime.

Spanish vessels began the traffic in African people to the Americas in 1501, selling their captives in the Greater Antilles. Those put ashore had already been enslaved on the Iberian peninsula, where a domestic slave population had existed for generations through Portuguese voyages down the African coast after 1441. What happened in 1501 was the extension of a working European institution across an ocean. That matters for how the Atlantic system should be understood. Slavery in the Americas arrived with precedents, contracts, a body of law and merchants who already knew how to value a human being. The scale changed beyond recognition once sugar took hold, and the racial doctrine hardened over the following century into something the medieval Mediterranean would not have recognised. The machinery, though, sailed west in the first years of the sixteenth century, fully assembled, and it came ashore on this island first.