A Flemish cartographer gives Europe its first planetary view

In 1587 the Flemish cartographer Rumold Mercator produced one of the maps by which European men reached, for the first time in the history of the species, a view of the whole planet. Before 1500 there had been no reference point of that kind. People of different languages, religions and territories dealt with one another, and there were conflicts, and the conflicts stayed local because no centre claimed to speak for the earth. A single planetary picture makes a single hierarchy possible, since everything on the sheet can now be ranked against everything else. Within two centuries of Mercator, the Caribbean islands on the edge of his map had been depopulated, restocked with captives from Africa and organised for the production of sugar for European consumption. The map did not cause that. It supplied the frame in which planning it at that scale became thinkable.

Spanish Carmelites opened a mission in Kongo in the middle of the 1580s. A daughter of King Alvaro I learned from them about the Carmelite nuns and about Teresa of Avila, and said she wished to see an order of nuns founded in her own country. Diego de la Encarnacion, who led the mission, was moved by the request and passed it to Jean de Quintanuenas, a senior French member of the order. Carmelites in Spain and France both worked at it. Nothing came of it and no woman in Kongo ever took holy orders. Since the church reserved ordination to men, elite Kongo women had been confined to paying for chapels, feeding missionaries and supporting schools, which they had done since the first baptisms. The princess was probably the Leonor Afonso whom a Jesuit found still sitting on the royal council forty years later, describing her as most devoted to the Society of Jesus and a maker of many offerings.

The Jesuit Jose de Acosta published his Historia natural y moral de las Indias in 1590. In Christian European cosmology nature was something to be known, and understanding it meant understanding its creator. The Aymara and the Quechua had no metaphysics of that shape and no concept comparable to the European one, since they did not place human beings outside the world they lived in. Acosta was therefore describing a nature that existed in his own categories and not in theirs. The habit of treating human beings as separate from and above the rest of creation was carried to the Americas as part of the equipment of conquest, and it survives in the scholarship that grew from books like his. Anyone reading Vodou or Andean practice through that separation will find superstition where the practitioners find an ordinary account of how the world is arranged.

Francis Drake sacked Santo Domingo in 1586, and the ease of it announced that Spain could no longer hold what it claimed. The deeper trouble was commercial. Spain required its colonists to buy and sell only through Spanish channels at Spanish prices, and the settlers of Hispaniola were poor, remote and badly served. English and French ships began arriving to trade with them directly, undercutting the licensed merchants, and the colonists dealt with them gladly. In 1599 Samuel de Champlain saw thirteen foreign merchantmen working at Mole Saint Nicolas on the northwest coast, in open defiance of an embargo whose penalty was execution or the galleys. The island had become a cost to the Spanish crown instead of a source of revenue. Then in September 1629 the Spanish admiral Federico Toledo Osorio cleared the French and English out of Saint Kitts. The men he expelled had to land somewhere. They went to the north coast of Hispaniola and the small island lying off it.