Columbus is taken off Jamaica after a year marooned

Columbus spent a year stranded on the northern coast of Jamaica after the last of his ships became unseaworthy, and a relief vessel finally took him off in the autumn of 1504. He got back to Spain seriously ill and died in 1506, still pressing his claim to the hereditary titles and the share of revenue the crown had promised him in 1492 and had no intention of honouring. He also died believing he had reached the eastern edge of Asia. Rouse ends his account of the voyages here, and the ending is worth noting for what it says about how history assigns credit. The man whose four crossings opened the Atlantic to Europe finished marooned, litigating, and wrong about where he had been. What he set going ran on for four centuries without him and remade three continents. That is the ordinary relation between one person and the machinery he starts.

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.

By the 1780s the French colony of Saint-Domingue, occupying the western third of Hispaniola, shipped out more sugar than any other territory in the world, along with most of Europe's coffee and a great deal of its indigo. Bordeaux and Nantes were built on that traffic. All of it descends from a decision taken in 1505, when Spanish settlers first planted cane on the island. Sugar cannot be produced at scale without a large disciplined workforce held in place for years, and the Taino who had farmed this land were being destroyed by European disease and Spanish labour drafts. Over the following three centuries more than half a million Africans were carried across the Atlantic to the western third of this island alone. Working lives on the estates were short enough that the population had to be replaced by fresh arrivals rather than sustained by births. The rising of 1791 grew directly out of that arrangement.