Depopulated islands are the opening the other empires use

Spain claimed the whole Caribbean and occupied very little of it. Its first century in the islands destroyed the indigenous population of the Greater Antilles and left the Lesser Antilles largely alone, so by the 1620s there was a great deal of unattended ground. Britain, France and the Netherlands moved into it. They planted settlers on islands nobody was defending, and once established they became expensive to remove. The results were permanent. Britain took Jamaica from Spain in 1655. France took the western third of Hispaniola, which Spain formally conceded in 1697. Both became sugar colonies worked by Africans, and one of them became Haiti. There is a hard sequence here worth stating plainly. The destruction of the Taino and the other island peoples emptied the land. The empty land drew rival empires. The rival empires wanted plantations and had no local workforce, so they bought one on the far side of the ocean. Each step in the Caribbean followed from the one before it.

The Jesuits opened a college at Sao Salvador in 1624, and its first rector, Mattheus Cardoso, arrived in August 1625 carrying hundreds of copies of a catechism he had translated into Kikongo and had printed in Portugal in a bilingual edition. He gave twelve to the young king and handed others to chiefs who could read as he travelled. It was very likely the only printed book in the language, and no other appeared for centuries, so its authority was enormous and much of the literate elite is likely to have known it by heart. What it carried was doctrine in question and answer form with no narrative and not one gospel translated. What it enabled was a class of lay teachers, the maestri, who handed the material on from one generation to the next through long stretches when there was no priest anywhere. Without them Kongolese Christianity would not have survived at all.

Mocombe dates the French arrival to a landing on the island of La Tortue off the northern coast of what is now the Republic of Haiti. From there the newcomers began exploring and settling the mainland and eventually pushed the Spanish out of the western part of the island through warfare. He connects this directly to the diplomatic settlement that followed, in which Spain, worn down by French attacks and by the results of war in Europe, signed a treaty ceding the western portion, which the French renamed. The point of the sequence for his argument is that the colony was built on displacement twice over, first of the indigenous population and then of a rival European power, before the plantation system made it the richest colony of its day and imported the population whose descendants would take it back.

The French colony planted on Tortuga in 1625 was made of pirates, adventurers and outcasts. They raided Spanish shipping from the island, then crossed the channel to hunt and settle the coast of western Hispaniola, and French colonisation spread from there south and east until it held the western third of the island and Spain conceded the point. That territory became Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest possession in the French empire, worked by more enslaved people than any comparable place in the Caribbean. The island closes the story as well as opening it. In 1802 Napoleon sent his brother in law Charles Leclerc with an army to retake the colony and restore slavery. The campaign broke on Haitian resistance and on yellow fever, and Leclerc died of the fever on Tortuga in November of that year. The French presence began on that island and the French attempt to hold the country ended there, one hundred and seventy seven years apart. Little in Haitian history is that tidy.