Cane reaches the easternmost island first, and the wind explains why

Barbados sits on its own, east of the arc of the Lesser Antilles and about a hundred miles to windward of them. In the 1640s sugarcane was planted there. The island that took the crop first was also the first piece of land a vessel running before the trade winds out of Africa would meet, which made it the natural point of arrival and the natural distribution point for the eastern Caribbean. What followed was a transfer of labour and capital on a scale the region had never seen. Money came from Amsterdam and London, milling and boiling technique came from Brazil, and people came in irons from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin. Every later sugar colony in the Caribbean, Saint-Domingue included, is a variation on a system worked out on four hundred square kilometres of ground. The crop itself had reached the Atlantic from New Guinea by way of India, Persia, the Mediterranean and the Portuguese islands, and it arrived in the Americas already attached to a labour regime.

When the Compagnie Francaise des Iles d'Amerique was set up in 1635 to carry on the traffic in enslaved Africans, Louis XIII laid down that everyone the company took had to be baptised and instructed in the Catholic faith. Conversion was the stated purpose of the commerce, and one of the earliest missionaries in the French islands, Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre, wrote plainly that saving the souls of black people was the reason the business existed. In practice the rule produced an effect nobody in Paris had planned. Enslaved people treated baptism as a source of power rather than a change of allegiance, and presented themselves for it three, four, five and six times over. Planters grew suspicious of the priests, whom they thought capable of preaching that black and white were equal before God, and did what they could to keep religious instruction away from the work gangs.

A Dutch fleet sent from Brazil captured Luanda in August 1641 and held it for seven years. Nzinga, who had gone to Luanda in person in 1623 to offer peace and trade and had been fighting the Portuguese since, suddenly had a powerful and unexpected ally. In Kongo, Garcia II came to the throne the same year, and his reign to 1661 was the last stretch of effective Kongo unity. In 1645, while Portugal was tied up in war with Spain and Angola was under Dutch occupation, the first Capuchin mission slipped into Kongo over Portuguese objections. In 1648 Salvador Correia de Sa was sent from Brazil to drive the Dutch out, and the Portuguese came back to Luanda intent on subduing the kingdom that had backed their enemies. Nzinga did not negotiate again until 1656. By her death in 1663 Matamba had become a major broker in the slave trade.

On the last day of 1640 a public sale in Dutch Brazil was written up line by line. The captives had arrived on the Wapen van Delf and had been taken at Guinea, at Ardra on the Slave Coast and at Calabar in the Niger delta. The clerk recorded who bought what. Gaspar Dias Ferreira took several lots of ten people, paying between 161 and 205 patacas a head. Moses Netto, Simon van der Neese and Jacob Aboaff appear as purchasers alongside him. Some lots ran past five thousand guilders. The document survives because the Dutch West India Company kept proper accounts, and it is worth more than a hundred pages of description: it names the buyers, fixes the prices, and shows a market in northeastern Brazil where Dutch and Sephardic merchants dealt in human beings by the batch of ten. Not one of the people sold that day is named. The ledger preserves the side of the transaction that somebody expected to need later.