A cacique holds the Bahoruco for fourteen years and wins a treaty

Enriquillo led the longest indigenous resistance in the history of Hispaniola. From 1519 he held the Bahoruco range in the southwest of the island with a few hundred people, striking Spanish settlements and withdrawing into country that cavalry could not enter. Expeditions sent against him failed one after another. By 1533 the colonial government had spent fourteen years and a great deal of money on the problem and agreed to terms. Charles the Fifth granted a pardon, recognised the freedom of Enriquillo and his followers, and gave them land. Very few treaties on those conditions were signed by any European power with an indigenous leader in the sixteenth century. The mountains matter as much as the man. That same broken country on the southern peninsula sheltered communities of escaped Africans for the next three centuries, and the Haitian word for such people, mawon, names a strategy that was already old on this island before the first African ships arrived.

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.

Until 1518 enslaved Africans reaching Spanish America generally came by way of Spain, landed first in Iberian ports and re-shipped from there, which was slow and expensive and kept the numbers small. In that year the Spanish crown issued the first asiento, a contract granting its holder the right to deliver a fixed number of captives from the African coast to the Caribbean without an intervening European stop. Spain held no trading posts in Africa, having conceded that coast to Portugal by treaty, so the asiento was always a licence sold to foreigners. Portuguese, then Dutch, then French and finally British contractors held it in turn, and possession of it became a prize in European wars; Britain took the asiento from Spain at Utrecht in 1713. The instrument matters because it turned the traffic into routine business with quotas, prices, insurers and standing in law, which is the condition under which a trade grows large.

Daut follows Vastey and Ardouin in treating the revolt of Enrique, known also as Enriquillo and rendered by Haitian writers as Henri, as the island's founding act of successful resistance. Raised in a convent and formed by admiration for Bartolome de las Casas, Enrique broke with the son of his late protector Valenzuela in 1519 and took to the mountains. He gathered weapons, then persuaded hundreds of Ayitians and dozens of enslaved Africans to follow him, and sustained a fourteen year war from a maroon state in the Bahoruco range in what is now the Dominican Republic. Ardouin's conclusion, which Daut foregrounds, is that the Indians and Africans of Ayiti set the honourable example that others later followed. Nineteenth-century Haitians saw no accident in the shared name of Enrique and their own King Henry, and used the resemblance to knit indigenous and African resistance into one lineage.