Ten point seven million people survived the crossing

Counts assembled from ships' papers, port records and customs returns put the number of Africans who came ashore alive in the Americas at just over ten point seven million between 1534 and 1867. Something like a million and a half more died at sea. The distribution surprises most readers. Brazil received close to forty-five percent of all arrivals, the British and French Caribbean the next largest shares, and mainland North America about three and a half percent. The United States nevertheless held one of the largest enslaved populations in the hemisphere by 1860, because there the enslaved population grew by natural increase, while in the sugar colonies it did not. Sugar killed people faster than they were born and the shortfall was covered by buying more. Saint-Domingue was landing roughly forty thousand people a year in the late 1780s simply to hold its numbers steady. That is the sentence behind every figure on this page.

In March 1529 Ahmed Gran, who led the armies of the Muslim sultanate of Adal, destroyed the Ethiopian army at Chembra Koure. He then worked through the country year by year, starting in the east and moving north and west, targeting churches and monasteries. Dabra Libanos went up in flames on 14 July 1532 and a number of its monks threw themselves into the fire. The cathedral of St Mary of Zion at Aksum, which probably dated from the sixth century, was reduced to rubble. Early in 1540 the royal fortress of Amba Geshen fell with the treasury and the state archives inside it. Tens of thousands of people accepted Islam and many more were marched off into slavery. Almost no Ethiopian manuscript survives from before 1530. By 1540 Gran considered himself king of the country and much of the population obeyed him. His soldiers had brought their wives from Adal and settled.

In 1605 the Spanish authorities on Hispaniola ordered the settlers of the western part of the island to abandon their towns and move east, and burned what they left behind. The reason was contraband. The western settlements had been trading with French and English smugglers for a generation, and Madrid concluded that the cure was to remove the population doing it. The order worked as policy and failed as strategy. Trade with foreigners stopped in those places because the places had ceased to exist. What remained was several hundred kilometres of empty coastline, with harbours, fresh water, and cattle running wild across the abandoned country. French and English crews who had been raiding Spanish shipping now had a shore they could use without opposition, and within twenty years they were living on it. The line Spain drew in 1605 by pulling its own people eastward runs close to the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic today. It began as an anti smuggling measure.

About 1670 buccaneers crossed from the island of Tortuga and founded the settlement on the northern coast of Hispaniola that became Cap Francois and is now Cap-Haitien. They had been trading with the Spanish towns of the north since the middle of the previous century. The houses they put up were rectangular and built by a method the French called the Indian style: forked posts driven straight into the earth, carrying the plates and the ridge, with walls of wattle or of split palm bark and roofs of thatch. Almost everything in the town was made of plant material. When Pere Labat passed through in 1701 he found a place laid out on a rectangular grid holding about three hundred houses. The city that a century later would be the richest in the Caribbean, with its theatre, its printing presses and its learned societies, began as a row of earthfast huts thrown up by men who lived off raiding.