Twelve friars land at Soyo and begin two centuries of Capuchin work in the Kongo

In 1640 the Dutch took Angola from Portugal, and Rome used the opening to create an Apostolic Prefecture for the Kongo answering directly to it rather than to Lisbon. The men chosen were Italian Capuchins. Twelve Italian and Spanish friars came ashore at Soyo in May 1645 under their prefect Bonaventura d'Alessano and were welcomed by the count and his people as priests of the great God. Soyo and the Kongo were at war, so the count tried to keep them there; the prefect threatened excommunication and got his porters. King Garcia II received them warmly at Sao Salvador precisely because they were not Portuguese, did not come from Loanda, and represented the direct link to Rome his predecessors had spent fifty years trying to open. Three years later the Portuguese retook Loanda, and a mission with no Portuguese in it became a liability.

Barbados began as a tobacco colony worked largely by indentured Europeans, and it did badly, undersold by Virginia. In the 1640s the planters changed crop. Sugarcane needs a mill, a boiling house, fuel and a large permanent workforce, so changing the crop changed everything else: land consolidated into estates, smallholders were bought out, and the workforce became African and enslaved. Dutch and Sephardic merchants trading out of Brazil and Amsterdam supplied the technical knowledge, the credit and the shipping. Within a generation Barbados was the most valuable ground in the English empire, and every other island copied it. Saint-Domingue copied it later than most and then outgrew all of them, producing more sugar by the 1780s than Barbados and Jamaica together. What the Barbadian model fixed was a ratio, a small planter class governing a large enslaved majority that it could neither replace nor reproduce. That ratio is the precondition for everything that happens in Saint-Domingue in 1791.

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.