A Frankfurt workshop supplies Europe with its picture of the Indies

Between 1590 and 1634 the workshop of Theodore de Bry issued a long series of illustrated travel volumes that sorted the world into the Indias Occidentales, meaning South America, Mexico and the Caribbean, and the Indias Orientales, meaning the Moluccas and the Philippines. The engravings mapped the new territories in the literal sense and also fixed what readers in Europe expected to find there. Part of the same series covered the stretch of North America the English called Virginia and the Carolinas. The decades on either side brought Jesuits into Asia from 1582 onward, and Europe began assembling a body of knowledge about places whose inhabitants had little corresponding curiosity about Europe. Knowing a region and telling other Europeans what its people were like worked as a second form of possession running alongside the legal claims. The Caribbean islands appear in these books as part of a category invented by treaty and then filled in with pictures.

Kongo kings had been trying for a century to open a direct line to Rome that Portugal could not cut. In 1604 Alvaro II sent Antonio Nsaku ne Vunda, the Mani Vunda, holder of the oldest religious office in the kingdom and the authority that sanctioned the king's own. He was held up for years in Spain. He landed at Civita Vecchia mortally ill, attended by a few servants and a Spanish Carmelite who had visited the Kongo as a young man, and reached Rome on 5 January 1608, the eve of Epiphany, the feast that celebrates the kings of the world coming to Christ with gifts. Pope Paul V came to his room. The ambassador commended the king and church of the Kongo to him and died. The scene was painted into the frescoes of the Vatican Library and his bust stands in Santa Maria Maggiore.

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.