The slave trade to Brazil is run out of Brazil

Ships carrying captives to Brazil were fitted out in Brazil. The first voyages left Portugal, and within a few decades the merchants who owned the business lived in Recife, Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. Geography paid for the shift. The winds and currents of the South Atlantic turn in a loop between the Brazilian coast and West Central Africa, so a vessel could cross to Angola, buy, and come home without ever touching Europe. That made the Brazilian route shorter, cheaper and independent of Lisbon. When the Dutch seized Pernambuco in 1630 they learned the same lesson and began fitting out their slaving voyages at Recife instead of sending them south from the Netherlands. By the middle of the seventeenth century the South Atlantic had its own commercial system, with its own capital, its own credit and its own captains, running alongside the northern European trade rather than inside it. Two legs of the famous triangle turn out, in this half of the ocean, to be one straight line worked in both directions.

The ship Santiago left Sierra Leone for Puerto Rico in 1566 carrying captives who were probably taken during the Mane invasions from the east. It stopped at the Los Islands off Conakry for fresh water. People on the island, themselves refugees from those same wars, attacked the ship and killed a crewman. The Santiago sailed on. Ninety two people came ashore in Puerto Rico and fifteen of them were male. Mortality on comparable ships in the early 1560s ran between ten and forty per cent, so more had been loaded than were landed. That same year almost half of the two hundred and sixty eight captives on another ship out of Sierra Leone died before it reached Cartagena. Women made up majorities on many sixteenth and seventeenth century crossings. The image of the slave ship as a hold full of men belongs to later centuries and to the historians who did the counting.

Guaman Poma de Ayala was a Quechua living in Tawantinsuyu while the territory of the Inca was being replaced by the Viceroyalty of Peru. His Nueva coronica y buen gobierno, of 1616, addressed Philip the Third of Spain directly, and its last forty or so drawings are given over to labour in Tawantinsuyu, a conception of work that had nothing to do with the European medieval idea of labour and was being displaced by it. He wrote from inside the world under discussion. The Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria, arguing at the same period about the rights of the Indians, wrote from Salamanca about people he had never met, and de Vitoria has been praised, criticised and enthroned as a founder of international law ever since. Guaman Poma was ignored until recently, and his book is still treated as a document rather than as a political treatise. Both men wrote about the same conquest.

The first small party of French settlers reached Tortuga, the island lying off the north coast of what is now Haiti, in 1629. They were pirates, cattle rustlers and buccaneers who lived by raiding Spanish shipping and by hunting the wild cattle that roamed the larger island. Hides were their trade and their food. From that base they fought the Spanish and gradually pushed onto Hispaniola itself, where they began planting cacao, cotton and indigo. Farming was what let the settlements hold their ground, since a camp that grows food does not have to move. The fort on Tortuga became the pivot of the fighting between European powers for the island. Nothing about this beginning suggested a colony. Within seventy years the western third of Hispaniola would be French territory, and within a hundred and sixty it would be the most profitable piece of ground in the Atlantic world.