Enslaved Africans rise at Christmas, twenty years into the traffic

Daut dates the earliest general uprising of enslaved Africans on the island to Christmas week of 1521, two decades after 1501, when Spain began trafficking Africans to Ayiti for chattel slavery. The rising was broad and quickly suppressed. What survives of it is mostly the reaction: an ordinance issued by Diego Colon on 6 January 1522 complaining that the enslaved of the island were acting without fear despite earlier punishments of those who fled. Daut uses the episode against the habit of treating 1791 as the beginning of Black revolt in Ayiti. Emile Nau described the events on Diego's plantation without giving a date, and she supplies one. Placing an African revolt in 1521 alongside Enrique's mountain war lets her argue that the Haitian Revolution grew from three centuries of accumulated refusal rather than from French revolutionary ideas arriving by ship.

The first armed conspiracy of enslaved people recorded anywhere in the Americas took place on Hispaniola in 1522, while the island was still under Spanish rule alone. About twenty men, many of them Wolof from Senegambia, rose on a sugar estate belonging to Diego Columbus, killed several Spaniards and set out to gather other captives from neighbouring estates. Mounted colonists ran them down within days and executed the survivors, hanging bodies along the roads. The authorities then restricted the import of Wolof captives, on the theory that people from a Muslim region with a tradition of military organisation were too dangerous to buy. Every slaveholding power in the hemisphere would repeat that reasoning for three centuries, and it never worked. What the episode establishes is timing. Armed resistance appears twelve years after the first Africans were landed on the island. It was there from the beginning, and it did not stop until 1804.

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.

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.