A Dutch agent buys 1,277 people at Allada across three seasons

Journals kept at the Dutch castle of Elmina record the trading seasons at Allada in detail. The Dutch worked the coast on a seasonal basis, sending small vessels in the dry months and staying away in the rains, when the surf on those beaches was dangerous. An agent named Geerlofsen ran the purchases. Across three years he bought about 1,277 people, an average of around 425 a year. The market had shrunk. The Brazil trade had collapsed after the revolt against Dutch rule there, and the company was told to send its captives to Sao Tome instead. In 1646 that island was reckoned good for only 200 people a year, though the buyers there asked that all of them come from Allada, because they preferred Allada captives and would pay more for them than for people from Calabar. The Portuguese took Sao Tome back in 1648 and even that outlet closed.

The French and English driven out of Saint Kitts settled on Tortuga, taking it off the small Spanish garrison holding it. A contemporary called them smoked out hornets, which is close to accurate. What they built had no chief and no formal articles beyond the agreements men made with one another case by case, and an early writer described them as amphibious, since they lived half on land and half at sea. They hunted the wild cattle of northern Hispaniola and cured the meat on wooden frames over slow fires, a method taken from the indigenous people of the islands. The French word for the frame produced boucanier, which English turned into buccaneer, and the same practice gave every language the word barbecue. They called themselves the Brethren of the Coast. By 1667 their way of life had been written down by the first historians of the Antilles, so a stateless community of hunters and sea raiders was described in print while it was still going.

Dorothe Angola took in an orphaned boy called Anthony, the child of half free parents in New Netherland, and became his adoptive parent. Maria Portogys apprenticed her daughter as a household servant to a Dutch family. Both arrangements went through the colonial authorities, which is the only reason the two women have names that survive. Almost everything else about them is missing, including their presence in the freedom petition their husbands signed, where the wives are referred to and never listed. Placing a child in a Dutch household tied the adult to the colony and kept the family within the colony's reach, which suited the Dutch. In the paperwork the children exist as use value. What the two women were doing was working the only instrument within reach, the colony's own record keeping, to hold on to children whom the law had already assigned to somebody else.

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.