Slave raiders empty the Bahamas to feed the mines of Hispaniola

The Bahamas were the first land Columbus touched in 1492. The people living there were called Lucayans, a Taino population spread across the low limestone islands north of Cuba and Hispaniola. Between 1509 and 1513 Spanish ships worked through that archipelago taking human beings. More than forty thousand were carried south and put into the mines of Hispaniola, where the gold was running out and the local labour force had already been consumed. The raiding was thorough. When it finished there was nobody left in the Bahamas at all, and the islands stayed empty for well over a century until English settlers arrived from Bermuda. This is the clearest early case of an entire inhabited region being emptied to supply another one, and it shows what the mining economy on Hispaniola had come to require by 1509. It could no longer be fed from the island itself, so it reached out and took the neighbours.

Nzinga Nkuvu died in 1506. He was said to have named Afonso as his heir, but the great chiefs at Mbanza Kongo picked another son who had not converted. Afonso marched on the capital with the Portuguese who had been with him in Nsundi, defeated and killed his brother, and took the throne. His supporters claimed a vision of St James had helped, in the Iberian manner. He ruled until 1543. He fought few wars and expanded no borders, spending his reign instead on schools, churches, craftsmen and medicine, and Lisbon treated him as an independent Christian king to be trained in the habits proper to one, including living in a house with two storeys. From the moment he won that fight the Kongo monarchy never publicly renounced Christianity again for more than three hundred years. Afonso had made a new kind of legitimacy, and it became part of what the kingdom understood itself to be.

In 1510 a house was built on the bank of the Ozama river at Santo Domingo for Diego Colon, son of Christopher Columbus and governor of the Spanish Indies. It was an Italian Renaissance villa, and it is known as the Casa del Almirante, the admiral's house. Its three part symmetrical plan fixed the style and the proportions of smaller Spanish country houses across the island from the fifteen thirties onward. The first of those houses had open loggias without full galleries. Galleries began to be added around the end of the fifteen hundreds and grew steadily more popular through the following century. When French planters started building in the western part of the island a hundred and fifty years after that, they were working on ground where the Spanish pattern was long established. The plantation house of Saint-Domingue, one room deep with a broad gallery in front and small cabinet rooms behind, descends from a governor's villa on the Ozama.

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.