French adventurers land on Tortuga and begin working west

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 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.

Before the seventeenth century opened, Europeans controlled few of the islands in the Caribbean. Spain held Trinidad and the large islands, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, where it raised cattle, grew food and a little tobacco and sugar, and above all watched the sea lanes running to the silver of the mainland. Between 1604 and 1640 the English, the French and the Dutch came in and took all the minor islands. The Dutch held part of Brazil from 1625 to 1654. England seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655. Wallerstein sets this rush inside a long slump in the European economy, when appetite for sugar in the wealthy countries was still climbing and each state moved to secure a source before its rivals could. Where taking territory outright was too expensive, as it was against Spain and Portugal, the same states fed off existing colonies through contraband. After the 1650s the division of the Caribbean stayed largely fixed until 1763.

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.