Spain kills the cattle to starve out the men hunting them

Cattle had run half wild across Central America and the Caribbean islands since the sixteenth century, some of it owned, much of it not. As the mining economy contracted in the seventeenth century, poor Creoles and men of mixed descent found fewer openings in the towns and moved into the countryside, and some of them lived by killing these animals. They smoked the meat on iron racks known by an indigenous word, boucan, and were called boucaniers for it. Runaways from ships joined them, and Dutch captains started buying hides, which drove the slaughter higher. Around 1640 Spanish authorities set out to clear the islands and the Central American coast of these men, and one method was to kill the cattle themselves so there would be nothing left to hunt. The English killed cattle too, to spoil the Spanish effort. The herds went. The boucaniers took to the sea as pirates and sold what they seized in Dutch Curacao, in the French settlements of western Hispaniola, and above all in English Jamaica.

For most of the sixteenth century the Atlantic slave trade was organised from Seville, Lisbon and the Portuguese islands off Africa. From 1640 its centre of gravity moved sharply north and stayed there. Liverpool, London, Bristol and Nantes took over the outfitting, the credit and the insurance, and merchants in nearly every northern European port with a serious Atlantic commerce began sending out slaving expeditions of their own. Within a few decades those cities held the place the Spanish and Portuguese centres had held in the century before. This matters for Haiti because Nantes is where Saint-Domingue's labour supply was arranged. A merchant house on the Loire fitted out a vessel, sent it to the African coast for captives and on to Cap Francais for sugar and coffee, and settled the accounts back in France. The colony that became the richest in the world was fed by a machine assembled in northern Europe after 1640, and the men who ran it never had to look at what it did.

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.

In 1641 French buccaneers based on Tortuga, the small island off the north coast of Hispaniola, began settling on the mainland opposite. Nothing about it was official. They were men who hunted the wild cattle and pigs that had bred out of control since the Spanish herds were abandoned, cured the meat, sold hides, and took ships when the chance came. Spain had drawn its population into the east of the island decades earlier and left the west empty, and an empty coast attracts exactly this kind of settlement. What the buccaneers created was a fact on the ground. France had claimed nothing and administered nothing, yet Frenchmen were living, working and defending themselves on Hispaniola, and by the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 Spain conceded the western third to France. Saint-Domingue begins here, and Haiti after it. The richest colony in the Atlantic world grew out of a camp of armed squatters that no government had sent.