Iberian merchants assemble the three-legged Atlantic voyage

By the 1530s merchants in Lisbon and Seville were organising the Atlantic crossing as a single commercial operation with three legs. A ship left Europe loaded with textiles, iron bars, brandy, firearms and cowrie shells. On the African coast that cargo was exchanged for captives. The ship then crossed to a Spanish American or Brazilian port, sold the people it carried, took on sugar, hides or silver, and returned to Europe. Every leg paid. Nothing sailed empty. This is the structure every later colonial power adopted, the Dutch, the English and the French copying an Iberian design with little modification, and it explains how fast the traffic grew. An investment with a calculable return, financed by banks, covered by insurers and protected in law, expands in a way that raiding never does. Understanding Saint-Domingue in 1789 means seeing its plantations as the middle stage of a machine that had already been running for two hundred and fifty years.

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.

During the 1530s Spanish colonists built the first real sugar works on Hispaniola: cane fields, a mill driven by oxen or water to crush the stalks, and a boiling house to reduce the juice. Cane had been growing on the island since 1505, though a mill is a different order of commitment. It costs a great deal, it cannot be moved, and it earns only if a large workforce is available in the same place every year for decades. That requirement is what fixed African slavery on the island. Indigenous labour was gone, and it had in any case been held under grants that were legally temporary and personal. Planters wanted a workforce they owned outright and could replace, and the Atlantic trade could supply one. Spanish Hispaniola never became a great producer; the mills were modest and the colony was soon overshadowed by Mexico and Peru. The system built here was carried to Brazil and later to the French west of the island.

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.