Sugarcane reaches Hispaniola and sets the island's next three centuries

Sugarcane is not native to the Americas. It travelled from Asia to the Mediterranean, then out to the Atlantic islands, and Columbus carried it west from the Canaries. In 1505 colonists put it in the ground on Hispaniola. Cane is a demanding crop. It has to be cut in the right week, hauled quickly to a mill, crushed, and boiled the same day, which makes a sugar estate a factory with a farm attached, and it runs on people. Spanish colonists had already worked the Taino population of the island down toward nothing through forced labour in the goldfields and through disease. The arithmetic that followed was simple, and it was done by men who had choices. A crop that pays needs workers; the workers on hand are dying; buy more. Within five years the first captives from Africa were landed here. Everything the western third of Hispaniola later became, the wealth and the killing together, begins in that field.

Afonso I, king of Kongo, said that during a battle in 1506 he saw Saint James the Greater above the field, and that the saint assured him of a victory his numbers did not justify. He won. Saint James became the working patron of the kingdom, and many Kongolese came to treat him and Afonso as one figure, a royal ancestor carrying a sword. Catholic practice in Kongo was already old by then, and it kept the saint at the centre of royal display for two more centuries. In the last decades of the eighteenth century tens of thousands of Kongolese were sold into Saint-Domingue, most heavily onto the northern plain. They arrived knowing Saint James. West Africans working the same fields matched the armed saint to Ogou, the spirit of iron. The July pilgrimage that fills Plaine-du-Nord with drums and mud baths inherits both lines at once.

Estimates of the population of Hispaniola in 1492 run from about one hundred thousand to eight million, and the spread does not much matter for what followed. By 1508 no more than sixty thousand Tainos remained. Forty years after that fewer than five hundred were left. Within a single generation the native population of the island had for practical purposes ceased to exist, killed by European diseases and by forced labour. The gold that had sealed their fate ran out quickly, and when word of the riches of Mexico and Peru reached the island the Spanish began to leave. Those who stayed concentrated on the eastern side around Santo Domingo, and the western third, the future Haiti, stood almost empty for close to a century. The Spanish also combed the neighbouring islands for replacement labour and emptied the Bahamas of people in the process. The first African slaves reached Hispaniola early in the sixteenth century.

Sugar cane is not native to Hispaniola. The first plant reached the island in 1506, brought from the Canary Islands by a Spaniard named Pierre d'Atenza. The first mill for crushing it was put up by a proprietor in the eastern part of the island, Gonzalez de Veloza. The plant took to the ground with a completeness that surprised later observers. There are tracts where cane went on reproducing itself by spontaneous growth for fifty years at a stretch, reaching twenty four feet in height and five inches through, and needing nothing beyond cutting when it ripened. In other sugar countries of good repute the crop has to be replanted every three, four or five years, and in Florida every year. Everything that followed on this island for three hundred years, the plantations, the forced labour, the ships, the wars over who owned the ground, ran on the crop that arrived in 1506 in one man's baggage.