The first colonial complaint about marronage is dated 1503

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.

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.

Anacaona ruled Xaragua in the southwest of Hispaniola, the country around what is now Leogane. She had been the wife of one cacique and the sister of another, and after both were destroyed she governed in her own name, known for the poetry and the ceremonial dances of her court. In 1503 Spanish soldiers came into her territory with an invitation to talk. She received them with a feast. They seized her, killed the chiefs who had come with her, and hanged her. Dubois offers the episode as the emblem of what happened to indigenous leadership under Spanish rule, and it earns the role. There was no battle. The Spanish worked the protocol of hospitality that Taino politics ran on, the same protocol Guacanagari had extended to Columbus eleven years earlier. Her name survives in Haiti as the memory of a sovereign the island lost.

An estimated forty per cent of all the people carried across the Atlantic as slaves came from the Kongo and Angola region, a share far out of proportion to how many people lived there. One reason is that this was the only stretch of the coast where Europeans went inland themselves to seize captives directly instead of buying them from African traders at the shore. That method killed many more people in the taking, though by the height of the trade in the eighteenth century African entrepreneurs were running the inland end of it. The large functioning states that existed on this coast in the early sixteenth century were replaced by smaller and more frightened ones, and the region went backwards socially and politically for centuries. Europeans liked to describe Africans as cannibals. Africans watching neighbours carried off by the tens of thousands to an unexplained destination came to say the same thing about Europeans.