England tries to take Hispaniola and does not get it

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.

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.

The catechism prepared for the Allada mission had to find local words for Christian ideas. For God it used vodun, the general term for the deities of the region, in place of Mawu, the name recorded there later for a single creator who lives in the sky. For Jesus it used Lisa, a deity who in accounts collected in Dahomey comes down from heaven after the first creation to give human beings order and skill. Robin Law reads the choice of the general term as a sign that in Allada in the 1650s a supreme god had not yet been sharply separated from the rest. The detail matters a long way from Africa. Vodun is the ancestor of the Haitian word Vodou, and people from Allada and Whydah were shipped in large numbers to Saint-Domingue. Here the word is being written down in Madrid in 1658, inside a book meant to convert them, with a sense wide enough to hold the Christian God.

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.