As the gold runs out, cane arrives from the Canary Islands

By 1515 the placer gold of the Greater Antilles was largely worked out. There had never been much of it. The metal came from river gravel, it was recovered by washing, and once the accessible deposits were gone the mining economy that had justified the conquest had nothing left to run on. Sugarcane was brought in from the Canary Islands, where Portuguese and Spanish planters had spent decades learning to grow and mill it with enslaved labour, so the Atlantic islands supplied the model along with the plants. Sugar is a different enterprise from mining. It needs land cleared and planted years ahead, a mill with rollers and boiling houses, and a workforce that stays in one place and is large. The indigenous population used for the goldfields was almost gone. Planters turned instead to the trade in African captives, and the demand created in these years is what turned an occasional shipment into a permanent commerce.

By 1514 the seizure of Kongo people for sale to Portuguese buyers had become common enough in West Central Africa to threaten public order and the authority of the king. In 1526 Afonso, king of Kongo, wrote to Portugal to say that traders were everywhere in his country, that they were ruining it, and that people were being enslaved and kidnapped daily, nobles among them and relatives of his own. The letter is one of the earliest written protests against the Atlantic trade by a reigning head of state, and it came from a Christian monarch whose kingdom had received the Portuguese as guests a generation before. The breakdown of law and order it describes helped weaken and eventually bring down a state that had been among the strongest in the region. Many of the people taken through this traffic reached the Caribbean, and Kongo names, spirits and vocabulary are still present in Haiti.

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.

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.