Captives land at Buenos Aires and walk to the silver mines

Merchants at Buenos Aires were buying captives in Angola as early as 1585, and the Rio de la Plata went on receiving Africans into the middle of the 1830s. For most of that time the estuary was a way in rather than a destination. People landed there were marched inland and uphill to the silver districts of what are now Bolivia and Peru, a journey of thousands of kilometres ending above four thousand metres. The silver they were sent to dig was the currency of the entire early modern world, paying for the Asian trade and the European wars alike. In the eighteenth century the Portuguese post at Colonia do Sacramento, planted directly across the water from Buenos Aires, ran a steady clandestine traffic with Brazil that no Spanish official managed to close. Arrivals continued long enough that the last of them supplied labour to the new republic of Uruguay, the final deliveries the Atlantic trade made to the southern cone.

Arrested in 1758 and sentenced to burn, Makandal was taken to the square in front of the church at Cap-Francais. Accounts agree that he got clear of the flames, in front of a crowd that had come to watch him die. He was retaken and executed shortly afterwards. What the colony remembered was the leap. Haitian painters have returned to the scene since, showing the rebellious slave with magical powers astonishing the spectators, and the episode went on troubling masters and administrators for years after the man himself was ash. For the enslaved population the reading was straightforward: fire did not hold him, so the power he claimed was real, and the authorities that had promised a public death had failed to deliver one in front of witnesses. Executions are performed in order to be seen. This one was seen, and it taught the opposite of what it was staged to teach.

France established a colony on Tortuga, the island off the northwestern coast of Hispaniola, in 1625. It was a modest thing. A rocky island a few kilometres offshore, occupied by buccaneers, adventurers and men with reasons to be a long way from Europe. What made it consequential is that the French crown claimed it. A crew of raiders becomes a settlement, a settlement becomes a possession, a possession acquires a governor, and the governor's remit reaches across the channel to the mainland coast Spain had abandoned twenty years earlier. From that beachhead France worked its way into the western third of Hispaniola, which Spain conceded formally in 1697 and which became the colony of Saint-Domingue. Within a century Saint-Domingue was producing more sugar and coffee than any other territory on earth and returning more profit than any colony in the history of European empire. All of it traces to a claim staked on an island most maps do not bother to name.

The most violent of the rural codes written by the Haitian state was the one promulgated by President Jean Pierre Boyer in 1826. It bound peasants who owned nothing, or owned a fragment of land, to three years of compulsory labour on a large estate. It forbade them to move freely outside their rural section. It placed their work under the supervision of the army. The estates in question had belonged to French colonists who were killed or fled, and after independence they were divided among the black and mulatto generals and the senior officials of the new state. A succession of Haitian governments issued codes of this kind and they resembled one another closely, because they all answered the same problem: how to make people who had just stopped being slaves produce export crops on somebody else's land.