White indentured labour builds the islands and is then priced out

Before the trade in Africans reached full volume, the French islands were worked by engages, indentured labourers recruited in Europe among vagabonds, beggars, the idle, former convicts and people who did not fit. Tobacco, cotton, indigo, cacao and cattle needed hands, and colonists and merchants took them wherever they could be found. Shipped to the Antilles, an engage owed thirty six months of service to a planter. His conditions were those of a slave, with the single difference that his servitude ended. A few who survived the term set up afterwards as managers or overseers. Others had come as ruined artisans, coopers, masons, carpenters and blacksmiths hoping for a new start, and most were disappointed. Toward the end of the seventeenth century the arithmetic changed. Large sugar works needed only a thin layer of white supervision plus abundant unskilled labour that was cheap and permanent, and the white emigration was stopped.

In the seventeenth century, speakers of Civili and related languages north of the Congo river created an institution called Lemba. It governed the markets and the trade routes running from Malebo Pool to the ports at Loango and Cabinda, and it also healed. Its members were the healers, merchants and chiefs most deeply involved in selling people to Europeans, and what qualified a person for membership was an affliction understood to come from angered ancestors. Initiation meant a public purification and payment to the society in palm wine and manioc root, a plant that had arrived from the Americas and become a staple. The vocabulary came from an inherited verb meaning to calm, to soothe, to turn away the anger of a spirit. Leaders in the region faced a real paradox. The imported cloth they needed in order to hold their followers could be bought only by selling some of those followers. Lemba was the ritual answer to it.

In 1605 and 1606 the colonial authorities in Santo Domingo destroyed the settlements along the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola. The aim was to stop the contraband trade that those towns carried on with foreign shipping. The result was a further fall in a population that was already shrinking, since many Spaniards on the island left for the American mainland, drawn by stories of rich indigenous kingdoms and by a crown that now cared more about its continental colonies. New settlers from Spain saw no reason to come to the Caribbean. The nineteenth century Dominican historian Jose Gabriel Garcia, a doctrinaire liberal, called the operation a violent answer to a problem the government could not win by law, and held that a freer trade policy would have prevented it. He also drew the longer line. Emptying the north and west of the island opened the door for French colonists to settle there.

In 1605 the Spanish authorities on Hispaniola ordered the settlers of the western part of the island to abandon their towns and move east, and burned what they left behind. The reason was contraband. The western settlements had been trading with French and English smugglers for a generation, and Madrid concluded that the cure was to remove the population doing it. The order worked as policy and failed as strategy. Trade with foreigners stopped in those places because the places had ceased to exist. What remained was several hundred kilometres of empty coastline, with harbours, fresh water, and cattle running wild across the abandoned country. French and English crews who had been raiding Spanish shipping now had a shore they could use without opposition, and within twenty years they were living on it. The line Spain drew in 1605 by pulling its own people eastward runs close to the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic today. It began as an anti smuggling measure.