Calling the colonists degenerate was the first step in taking their land

When English forces took Jamaica in 1655, observers described the Spanish inhabitants they found there as a debased and degenerate race. The phrase was doing a job. Spaniards born in the Caribbean, several generations away from Europe and mixed with Indigenous and African ancestry, were reclassified as something less than European, and a people who have degenerated can be dispossessed without the awkwardness of taking land from equals. British historians later applied the same description to the Spanish proprietors of Hispaniola, where an argument for expansion needed the same footing under it. The vocabulary outlived its first use. It was aimed at Spaniards in the seventeenth century and at Haitians in the nineteenth and twentieth, and the structure never varied: establish that the present occupants are incapable, and the transfer of their territory reads as a service performed for them. American officers wrote in exactly that register when they landed at Port-au-Prince in 1915.

The first great expansion of Atlantic slaving produced the longest voyages and the highest death rates in the whole history of the traffic, for the crews as much as for the people in the hold. Ships were slower, provisioning was worse, and nobody had yet worked out how to keep several hundred confined human beings alive for three months at sea. Within the period the regional differences were enormous. People embarked in the Bight of Biafra died at two to three times the rate of people embarked in Upper Guinea, a gap that reflects the length of the route, the disease environments at either end, and how long a captive had already been held on the coast before boarding. Faster ships and later regulation brought the overall figures down. The seventeenth century numbers stayed in the record as the baseline, and every improvement the eighteenth century claimed for itself was measured from here.

When England seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655, the invaders described the houses they found as having broad galleries, rear cabinet rooms and loggias. Old houses in Cuba and on Hispaniola show the same feature from early in the sixteen hundreds, well before the French settled the western end of that island. In the centuries when these colonies were founded the gallery was a universal feature of building along the Guinea coast of West Africa, and it was absent from the European villages the settlers came from. Through the fifteen and sixteen hundreds West African builders, many of them Mande speaking specialists, together with Portuguese sailors who had settled among them and their mixed descendants, supplied the entire architectural repertoire of the trading posts on that coast. That complex crossed the Atlantic, reaching Brazil first and then the Spanish Caribbean. The shaded outdoor room that defines a Creole house in Louisiana and in Haiti came to the Americas with the people who were being carried there in chains.

In the middle of the seventeenth century England set out to break Spanish control of the Caribbean by force, and Hispaniola was the target. The expedition of 1655 failed to take the island. It belonged to a wider policy of acquiring a Caribbean foothold by conquest, and the fleet went on to seize Jamaica, which England kept. Logan treats the failed attempt as the start of something that lasted. For the next century and a half British diplomacy and British war planning returned again and again to the value of the island, and particularly to its western harbours, the deep water that would later serve Saint-Domingue. That interest was acted on in 1793, when a British army landed in the middle of the Haitian Revolution and spent five years and tens of thousands of lives failing to hold the colony. The ambition declared in 1655 was still being pursued when Toussaint Louverture negotiated the British off the island in 1798.