A ship sails from Africa to the Americas without touching Europe

In 1525 a slaving vessel crossed from the African coast directly to the Americas for the first time on record. Earlier voyages had run captives to Lisbon or Seville and re-shipped them west, which doubled both the time at sea and the cost. Removing that leg changed the economics, and the volume carried across the Atlantic began to climb and kept climbing for two and a half centuries. The route also had to obey the wind. Atlantic winds and currents circulate clockwise in the northern half of the ocean and anticlockwise in the southern, so a ship leaving the Bight of Benin runs naturally toward the Caribbean while a ship leaving Angola runs naturally toward Brazil. Two largely separate trading systems formed on either side of the equator, and a captive's African port of departure went a long way to fixing which side of the Americas he woke up on. Wind sorted human beings by destination for three hundred years.

Mocombe opens his historical chapter with Columbus claiming the island for Spain and the Spanish exploiting its gold mines with Taino labour. He puts the pre-contact Taino population at between three and four million and states that after fifty years of Spanish rule they had been destroyed by the hardship of enslavement, organised massacres and imported disease. He calls this one of the most brutal exterminations on record. The mechanism he then traces is the substitution that followed. A Spanish priest protested against the massacre of the indigenous population and demanded an end to the injustices against them, and advocated importing Africans to work the mines and plantations as a way of ending Indian slavery on the island. Mocombe treats the two populations as directly linked by that argument rather than as separate chapters. Where this account departs from the standard one: Mocombe adopts a pre-contact Taino population of three to four million, at the very top of a range where most current estimates for Hispaniola are far lower.

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.

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.