The first Africans are landed to replace Indian labour

The first Africans were brought to Hispaniola around 1506 to replace Indian labour the Spanish had exhausted. Some of them worked as gold seekers in the gorges of the Cibao under the shelter of the conquistadors. Others arrived later through the contraband traffic of the Dutch, the Normans and the Bretons, and took part in founding the first French establishments on the western side of the island, mixing their lives with those of the buccaneers and freebooters. They were few. Behind them came the uninterrupted flood of the slave trade, which over more than two centuries poured in about two million people, whom the plantation regime consumed at a terrible annual rate. Those clearers of the ancient forest made Saint Domingue habitable and made it profitable, and the deaths they paid were the condition of the colony's wealth. Everything in the Haitian people comes out of that sediment, from the gold seekers of 1506 to the last cargo landed before the revolution.

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.

Dupuy opens his account of the colony with a demographic collapse and the labour policy that followed it. He cites Madiou and Nau for a population estimated at more than a million in 1492 which had been reduced to sixty thousand by 1507. Unable to attract more emigrants from Spain, including convicts, the colonial settlers turned first to enslaving Lucayans from the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos and Caribs from the Lesser Antilles, and only then exclusively to Africa. As Spanish settlers left for South America and Mexico in search of quicker fortunes, the western third of the island became virtually abandoned, which made it easy for France to take it and to secure the transfer at Ryswick in 1697. Dupuy treats this as the beginning of a system whose only purpose was to produce commodities for profit.

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.