A Franciscan's report becomes the key to the Maya script

The Franciscan Diego de Landa wrote his Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan in 1556. Since that report, the decipherment of the Maya script has been a constant preoccupation of European and American scholarship, a story told in full by Michael Coe in Breaking the Maya Code. Landa is a double figure. He destroyed Maya books as idolatrous and he also recorded enough of the writing system for later scholars to work from, so the record of a civilisation survives inside the document of its suppression. That pattern repeats across the Caribbean. Almost everything known about the Taino of Ayiti comes through the writings of the men who were destroying them, from Columbus and Las Casas onwards, and the questions those men thought worth asking determine what can now be recovered. A script takes four hundred years to read again once the people who read it have been killed or forbidden to teach it.

Maize most probably crossed the Atlantic on one of Columbus's return voyages in the 1490s. By the 1560s it was being grown on the west coast of Africa and in the Hunan province of China, places far from the Americas and far from one another. In those same years Spanish friars set up the first wineries of Chile, Peru and California, and people in Mexico who had never seen cattle before the conquest were working ranches that ran to 150,000 head. Communities on the Angola and Congo coastline took up maize in the late sixteenth century faster than espresso moved inland from the two coasts of the United States four hundred years later. There was nothing mysterious in that speed. The grain accounting of that stretch of coast, down to the calories one person needed in a day, made maize the practical crop, so people planted it. Crops, animals and diseases had been crossing oceans for a century before anyone called the traffic new.

In 1556 Henry the Second of France issued an edict enfranchising the remaining serfs of the Dauphine, the province in the southeast around Grenoble. Serfdom was already residual in France and the measure was largely administrative. Lawyers made more of it later. It became one of the texts cited in support of what French jurists called the freedom principle, the doctrine that the soil of France made free anyone standing on it, so that an enslaved person brought to a French port could sue for liberty and expect to win. That doctrine collided with the colonies. Saint-Domingue produced the wealth keeping the French treasury solvent and it produced it with slave labour, so French law had to hold two positions at once: no slavery in France, slavery everywhere France profited. The edict of 1716 and the declaration of 1738 were attempts to manage the contradiction by regulating masters who brought slaves to Paris. In 1791 it was settled from the other end.

By the late 1560s Spanish Santo Domingo held roughly twenty thousand enslaved people, about six thousand Spanish colonists and some five hundred surviving indigenous inhabitants. The captives worked the sugar mills, other farms and the households of the town. This lopsided ratio of enslaved to free was the first of its kind in the tropical Americas, and every later plantation colony in the Caribbean reproduced it. The colony had become a serious sugar exporter by the middle of the century, with output put by some accounts at several thousand tons a year. The wealth rested on a machinery of coercion that was still new in the hemisphere and that would be copied for the next three hundred years. It did not last long here. Within a generation the Dominican sugar economy was finished, undone by Spanish trade restrictions, by the pull of silver in Mexico and Peru, and by cheaper Brazilian sugar reaching the same European buyers.