Enslaved Africans on Hispaniola take up arms thirty years after Columbus

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.

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.

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.

Thomas Malliard, an English merchant working out of Spain, secured a licence in 1521 to sell two enslaved Africans in Santo Domingo, on the island that would later hold Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He was the first English slave trader. John Hawkins, who usually carries that title, made his slaving voyage in 1562, and what he did there was a series of assaults on towns and villages along the African coast. Portuguese merchants regarded his method as bad practice, since civil relations with coastal peoples were a condition of trading profitably. Malliard belonged to a set of English merchants already embedded in the Spanish slave trade at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, working both inside Spain and across the Atlantic. Two people sold on Hispaniola is a small transaction. It marks the entry of English capital into a Caribbean traffic that England would come to dominate.