The crop planted in 1505 made the richest colony on earth

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.

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.