Four point nine million people are landed in South America

Roughly 4.9 million captive Africans were landed in South America across three centuries. Where they came from was largely decided by the weather. The South Atlantic turns in a great clockwise loop, and a ship leaving Rio de Janeiro or the Rio de la Plata is carried toward the coast of West Central Africa and carried home again. So West Central Africa, the largest single source for the hemisphere as a whole, was overwhelming for the southern markets in particular. The same currents made the Brazilian coast one continuous marketplace. A vessel bound for Rio could put in at Pernambuco or Bahia and sell part of its cargo on the way past, and the Brazilian ports traded people among themselves and southward to the mainland in a busy internal traffic that touched neither Africa nor Europe. Ocean physics rarely appears in accounts of the slave trade. It determined which languages were spoken in which American cities, and which parts of Africa lost their populations to which parts of the New World.

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.

France declared sovereignty over western Hispaniola in 1664. The declaration covered a place French settlers and buccaneers had already been living in for decades, so the novelty lay in the claim rather than in the occupation. Spain rejected it. Madrid had held the island since Columbus and regarded every French farm on it as a trespass, and thirty three years passed before Spanish recognition came in a European peace treaty. Through those years the French planted, imported captives, and fought. The ground in question is the western third of the island, and it became Saint-Domingue. By the 1780s that strip of land was producing more wealth than any comparable territory on earth, more sugar and coffee than all the British West Indies together, and every unit of it was produced by people carried across the Atlantic in chains. A claim made on paper in 1664 is the legal ancestor of that arrangement.

Faustin Soulouque, head of the Haitian state and a committed servant of the spirits, made himself emperor in 1850 and ruled without mercy. The European newspapers had been waiting for a figure like him. They called him the sum of every recollection of aboriginal savagery and announced that he had set Haiti on a course of complete regression to African barbarism. Honore Daumier produced a caricature the same year showing the emperor in his regalia about to drop a journalist who had criticised Haitian politics into a pot of boiling water. Racist theory was gaining ground across Europe in these decades and it found in Haitian religion an inexhaustible supply of material. Soulouque fell in 1860. What is worth noticing is how little the coverage had to do with him. The caricature was about the existence of a black state, and the emperor merely gave it a face.