The Taino disappear as a people and survive as ancestry

By 1524 there was no longer a Taino population on Hispaniola that colonial officials counted as a group of its own. The category drops out of the paperwork. That is what the end of a people looks like in an administrative record, and it repays careful reading, because two different things happened at the same time. Taino society was destroyed. The chiefdoms, the tribute systems, the ceremonial centres, the language as a language of daily life, all of it stopped. Taino descent continued. Children born to Taino mothers and Spanish or African fathers were registered as something else and went on living. Studies of mitochondrial DNA in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic find indigenous maternal lineages in a substantial share of the population today, which is the genetic trace of exactly those households. The words Haitians and Cubans still use for hammock, hurricane, canoe and tobacco come out of the same disappearance, and so does the name Ayiti.

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.

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.

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.