A Spanish catechism translates the Christian God as vodun

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.

In 1659 Jeremie Deschamps took Tortuga, the small island off the north coast of Hispaniola, and held it for Louis XIV under royal commission. Control of the place had been passing between European powers for decades. This time it stuck, and it began a hundred and thirty years of French rule over the western third of Hispaniola, the territory that became Saint-Domingue. Five years later the machinery arrived. In March 1664 Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister running French finance and trade, chartered the French West India Company and handed it a monopoly over colonial commerce. That charter is the point at which the enterprise stopped depending on buccaneers who answered to nobody and became an administered project with accounts, officers and an owner in the metropolis. Everything that followed ran through the framework laid down here. Within a century the colony was producing more sugar and coffee than any other, on the labour of enslaved Africans, and it was the most profitable possession any European state held anywhere.

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.

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.