Tortuga becomes a base, and the raiding turns into a colony

Tortuga is a small island lying off the northwest coast of Hispaniola, separated from it by a channel a few kilometres wide. From 1625 French and English buccaneers used it as a permanent base rather than a stopping place. The distinction matters. Crews that had been raiding Spanish shipping and retiring to Europe or to other islands now held a harbour all year, within easy reach of the Windward Passage, through which Spanish traffic between Havana and the rest of the Caribbean had to pass. They could refit there, store what they took, grow food and recruit. The emptied western coast of Hispaniola lay across the channel, full of wild cattle and watched by nobody, and the buccaneers crossed to hunt it and then to settle it. Everything French in the western third of the island runs back to that arrangement. A pirate anchorage became a settlement, the settlement was claimed by France, and the claim became Saint-Domingue.

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.

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.