A Capuchin in Kongo records that Europeans look ugly

Between 1663 and 1664 a Spanish Capuchin missionary named Antonio de Teruel wrote an account of the kingdom of Kongo. He described the people as black in varying degrees, some the colour of chestnut, some closer to olive, and recorded that the deepest black was held among them to be the most beautiful. Mothers, he wrote, rubbed their infants with an ointment and laid them out in the sun for long stretches, repeating this until the children darkened. He then set down what followed from that standard. Because a black skin was so highly regarded, Europeans appeared ugly in their eyes, and children in places where no white person had ever been seen ran from the missionaries in terror. He added that they refused the word negros and insisted on prietos, because among them only slaves were called negros, so that the two words had come to mean the same thing.

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.

Large planters in Virginia began buying enslaved Africans in quantity during the 1670s, as the flow of white indentured servants out of Britain thinned. The reversal took about twenty years. In the late 1670s white servants in the colony outnumbered enslaved black people four to one. By the early 1690s enslaved black people outnumbered servants by the same margin. What replaced indenture differed in kind. A servant served a term and then walked free. A slave served for life, so did the children, and the condition was fixed to skin. Virginia was writing that attachment into statute across these same decades. The pattern repeated across the North American mainland, and it had already taken hold in the Caribbean. I keep it on a Haitian timeline because Saint-Domingue was built on the same logic at greater scale, and because the racial law the mainland invented in the 1670s was still on the books of the United States when Haiti declared independence.