Planters driven off Saint Christopher take Tortuga instead

A Spanish force cleared the French and English planters out of Saint Christopher in 1629, and the accounts of it dwell on the barbarity of the operation. The survivors left in open boats with whatever they could carry. They made for Tortuga, the small island off the northwest coast of Hispaniola, found it unoccupied, and took possession. Men who had been farmers a few weeks earlier now had no land, no capital and no protection, and they were sitting on a rock beside the main sea lane of the Spanish empire. What they became was the band of adventurers known afterwards as the buccaneers. There is a straight causal line here that tends to get lost in the romance of the subject. Spain destroyed a settlement of rival Europeans in order to keep them out of its sea. The act of destroying it produced a stateless armed community whose whole purpose was preying on Spanish shipping, planted permanently within sight of the island Spain most wanted to keep.

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.

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.