A brass crown sent to the king of Allada ends up as a Dutch war trophy

The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa was chartered in England at the beginning of 1663, and for the first time the buying of people was written into its purpose. In February it authorised cargoes for 1,620 captives, of which 900 were to be taken at Allada. The ship Zebulon carried the goods and a set of resident factors under Henry Clarke, and reached Allada that September. On its return a letter went out in the name of James, Duke of York, then governor of the company and later king, thanking the king of Allada and sending him a brass crown. Four ships were fitted out in April 1664 for 1,800 more people. Almost all of them were taken by a Dutch squadron under Admiral de Ruyter, who swept the English off the coast. The letter and the crown were captured with them and are now exhibits in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

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.

Columbus sighted Dominica on Sunday 3 November 1493 and named it for the day, then sailed on because the windward coast offered no harbour. Spanish ships watered there through the sixteenth century without settling. France planted a flag in 1635, made a treaty with the island's people in 1640, sent in a missionary in 1642 and ordered in 1643 that no strangers be allowed to settle. None of it held. The terrain was steep and the Caribs held the forests. In 1660 Britain and France jointly agreed to abandon Dominica and Saint Vincent to them. Both powers went on violating that agreement and the treaties that followed it until 1805, when British possession finally became undisturbed. Trouillot reads the long stalemate as strategic. Dominica lies between Guadeloupe and Martinique, and for France keeping the British out of it mattered more than anything the island itself was likely to produce.

Historians of the Atlantic traffic divide it into two systems. The southern one linked Portugal and Brazil to Angola and the Bight of Benin. The northern one ran from ports in northwestern Europe to the coast of West Africa and on to the Caribbean islands and the mainland colonies of North America. From 1660 the English led that northern circuit and held the lead for a century and a half. Nothing about this was settled in 1600, when the Dutch carried more and the Portuguese carried more still. Sugar decided it. English planters in Barbados and later Jamaica bought labour faster than anyone could supply it, and English shipping grew to meet the demand it had itself created. The French built their own version of the same circuit, and Saint-Domingue became its largest customer. The English lead also explains why so much surviving paperwork of the trade, and therefore so much of what can be counted today, is written in English.