Twenty-two years after Columbus, 29,000 people are left

By 1514 the indigenous population of Hispaniola stood at about twenty-nine thousand. Estimates of what it had been in 1492 vary widely, from a few hundred thousand to more than a million, and the disagreement among historians is genuine, turning on how much land the islanders farmed and how many people that land could feed. No figure in the range makes the fall look like anything other than a collapse inside one human lifetime. Two forces did it. The first was disease. Smallpox, influenza and measles had circulated in Eurasia and Africa for centuries and the people of the Caribbean carried no resistance to any of them. The second was the labour system. Men were sent to pan gold in river gravel and women were set to work in Spanish fields, which broke up households, stopped the planting of the cassava and maize the islands lived on, and pushed the birth rate down while it pushed deaths up. Famine follows when the farmers are somewhere else.

Vasco da Gama's voyage around Africa to Asia, following Columbus, forced Rome to decide in a hurry who controlled the church in newly reached lands. Pope Leo X settled it for Portugal in the brief Praecelsae Devotionis of 1514, granting the crown authority over the church overseas greater than the authority it held over the church at home. At the time there was almost no organised Catholic missionary work anywhere, so the grant may have looked harmless. It was not. For the next two centuries Lisbon used it to keep missionaries of other nations out of every coast it claimed, and Rome, which rarely admits an error, lived with a weakened version of the arrangement into the twentieth century while chipping away at it. When Italian and Spanish friars finally reached the Kongo in the seventeenth century, they got there because the Dutch had temporarily taken Angola and Spain and Portugal were at war.

In 1516 the chronicler Peter Martyr described the peoples of the New World as white, setting them against black Ethiopians. The comparison did more than note complexion. It placed the two groups on a ladder, and the ladder held. When Francois Bernier made the first attempt at a formal classification of human races in 1684, he assimilated the peoples of the Americas to the white race, which his scheme treated as the normal one, and left Africans at the far end of it. By the late fifteen thirties Spanish law had declared the indigenous peoples of the Americas free in principle and vassals of the crown like Spaniards, if secondary ones, while Africans remained the only openly enslaved labour force in the Spanish empire. The legal difference and the classificatory difference held each other in place for the next three centuries. A theological scheme and a natural historical one arrived at the same ranking.

Mocombe opens his historical chapter with Columbus claiming the island for Spain and the Spanish exploiting its gold mines with Taino labour. He puts the pre-contact Taino population at between three and four million and states that after fifty years of Spanish rule they had been destroyed by the hardship of enslavement, organised massacres and imported disease. He calls this one of the most brutal exterminations on record. The mechanism he then traces is the substitution that followed. A Spanish priest protested against the massacre of the indigenous population and demanded an end to the injustices against them, and advocated importing Africans to work the mines and plantations as a way of ending Indian slavery on the island. Mocombe treats the two populations as directly linked by that argument rather than as separate chapters. Where this account departs from the standard one: Mocombe adopts a pre-contact Taino population of three to four million, at the very top of a range where most current estimates for Hispaniola are far lower.