Spanish officials report the indigenous population gone

In 1544 Spanish officials on Hispaniola reported that the indigenous population had effectively ceased to exist. Fifty-two years had passed since Columbus anchored off the northern coast. Inside one long lifetime a society of hundreds of thousands of people, organised into chiefdoms with their own leaders, farming systems, ceremonial centres and trade links across the islands, had been reduced to a handful of survivors absorbed into colonial households. Nothing on that scale had happened in the Atlantic world before. What the report meant in practice was that the labour question was settled. Spanish Hispaniola would run on Africans from then on, and it did, for the two and a half centuries that followed. The island's later history, French Saint-Domingue, the revolution and the republic, takes place on ground whose original population had been erased before the French arrived. Haiti keeps the Taino name for the island. It is the largest thing the Taino left in the world.

News of Afonso's death survives in a letter his brother Manuel wrote to the Queen of Portugal on 15 July 1543. Afonso had sent that brother on an embassy to the Pope in 1539 and the Portuguese had never let him travel beyond Lisbon; now he wanted only to go home. Afonso may have been in his eighties. A Portuguese priest, Rui d'Aguiar, had written in 1516 that the king knew the prophets and the gospels better than the visiting clergy did, fell asleep over his books, forgot to eat while talking about God, and preached to his people himself after mass. Some of that is flattery. It also fits the correspondence that survives across nearly thirty years. Kongolese tradition afterwards called him the apostle of the Kongo. His successors quarrelled with whatever missionaries they had, and none of them was ever described by a Portuguese priest as resembling an angel.

In 1494 the pope divided the earth between Castile and Portugal and handed them the trans-Atlantic sphere. A second agreement, which this account dates to 1542 and which is usually dated 1529, ran the same operation through the Pacific and produced the Indias Orientales, the eastern Indies, as a legal category standing beside the Indias Occidentales that contained South America, Mexico and the Caribbean. The division that organised the modern world therefore ran west to east. Everything later called the Orient begins here, as a line drawn by two Iberian crowns across water most of which nobody involved had sailed. Orientalism as a body of scholarship arrived two centuries afterward, once the lines of possession were fixed and the theological division had gone secular. The Caribbean islands entered European law in the same act, as one half of a planet assigned to owners who had not yet seen it.

The Lisbon Inquisition set up its commissioner's office in Salvador in 1549. Every case from the Portuguese empire was handled from the metropole, unlike the Spanish system with its regional tribunals at Lima and Cartagena. Anyone wishing to denounce a neighbour went to the commissioner, who investigated and sent his findings across the Atlantic. If Lisbon declined to prosecute, and it usually did, the report was copied into the prosecutor's notebooks, a standing record of the cases that went nowhere. The inquisitors cared about judaizing and heresy. Of the 143 Bahian cases that reached full trial between 1593 and 1687, not one concerned sorcery or anything close to it, and only two involved people of African descent at all. Denunciations of African healers existed in the notebooks well before that date. The gap between what colonists reported and what Lisbon would try is why the archive has the shape it has.