A royal appointment turns a squatter colony into French territory

The French had been living on Tortuga and along the western coast of Hispaniola for decades without any clear title to the ground. They were there because Spain, which claimed the whole island, had concentrated its people in the east and left the west thinly held. Naming a royal governor in 1664 changed the legal character of the settlement. It converted an unauthorised occupation into a possession the French crown was prepared to defend and administer. Sovereignty in this period was made by exactly such paperwork, backed afterwards by soldiers. The ground covered by that appointment is the ground of Haiti. Everything that followed, the land grants, the sugar estates, the Code Noir, the half million people shipped in to work the fields, rests on a claim announced by a single administrative act. Spain refused to concede the point for another thirty three years, and the French built the colony in the meantime anyway.

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.

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.