Sixty thousand Tainos remain, and forty years later fewer than five hundred

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.

In 1510 the Spanish crown authorised the shipment of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola and the first of them came ashore. The reason was arithmetic. Colonists had been extracting gold and food from the island using Taino labour under the encomienda system, and the Taino were dying, from overwork, from hunger when their fields went untended, and from smallpox and other diseases against which they had no immunity. The colony's output depended on bodies it no longer had. Africa offered a supply that could be bought and shipped, and Portugal already held the trading posts and the vessels. That decision stood for nearly three hundred years. It moved more than ten million people alive across the Atlantic, and it built the sugar economy that made the western third of this island the most valuable colony in the world. It also assembled, on the same ground, the population that abolished slavery there by force in 1793 and founded Haiti in 1804.

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.