A ship where the crew will not go below the deck

A description written in 1627 sets out what the inside of a slave ship was. Captives were packed under the deck in chains, the men linked to one another at the neck and at the feet, so that a row of people had to move together or not at all. They were kept below for the length of the crossing and did not see the sun or the moon. There was no ventilation to speak of, and the account records that the Spanish crew were themselves afraid to go down through the hatches because of what came up out of them. Food was a bowl a day of uncooked maize flour or millet, with a little water. None of that was the accident of one bad voyage. The packing, the irons and the ration all follow from a single decision, to move the greatest number of people at the lowest cost with a rate of death agreed in advance. The arithmetic was done in offices, by men who never went below.

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.

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.

Alphonsus Mendes reached the Ethiopian court in February 1626, sent as patriarch by the King of Spain. He was a professor of scripture at Evora with no missionary experience. Six governors carried a canopy over his head as he processed into the church, and four days later the Emperor Susenyos knelt in public and swore allegiance to the Pope. Mendes then announced that Ethiopian sacraments were of doubtful validity. The faithful were to be baptised again, the clergy ordained again, feasts and fasts moved to the Roman calendar, Saturday made a fast day, circumcision banned. Rebellions followed, led by members of the royal family and finally by peasants. Susenyos crushed them one after another and then gave way. In June 1632 he restored freedom of worship and handed power to his son Fasiladas. Crowds danced and smashed their rosaries. The Jesuits were expelled, the last of them executed in 1640, and Ethiopia shut itself off from Latin Europe for two centuries.