Hatuey chooses the fire rather than risk meeting Spaniards in heaven

Girard tells the extinction of the Taino through two men. The princess Anacoana was asked to hold a feast for Governor Ovando, and when the caciques had assembled the Spanish set the hall alight, destroying the island's leadership; she survived the fire and was tried and hanged. Hatuey fled to Cuba, was pursued by an expedition under Velasquez, and after years of guerilla fighting was captured in 1512 and sentenced to burn. A friar offered him strangling instead of fire and eternity in heaven if he converted, whereupon Hatuey asked whether Spaniards went there too. Told that the best of them did, he answered that the best were good for nothing and that he would not risk meeting one, and chose the fire. Las Casas, then an encomendero living off Taino labour, was so shaken that he took orders and became the first priest ordained in the Americas.

African captives may have reached the Americas as early as 1498, on Columbus's third voyage. For the first quarter century the traffic ran through Europe. Enslaved Africans were held in Seville and Lisbon and then shipped west with other cargo, which meant the earliest Black people in the Spanish Caribbean had already spent years on the Iberian peninsula and often spoke Spanish or Portuguese. Sailings direct from the African coast to the Americas became the normal arrangement around 1525, and that shift created the trade as it is usually pictured. Eltis and Richardson count roughly 10.7 million captives landed across the three and a half centuries that followed. Set beside the European migration of the same period, the figure reverses the ordinary picture of who peopled the hemisphere. Until the great European movements of the nineteenth century the Americas were, in demographic terms, an extension of Africa, and Saint-Domingue was among the most African places on earth.

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.

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.