The year usually given for the official entry of African slaves into Hispaniola

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.

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.

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.