A treaty converts a pirate coast into a French colony

After Spain killed off the Tainos, took what gold there was and moved on to Mexico and Peru, the western part of the island reverted to forest full of the cattle and pigs the Spanish had introduced. French arrivals, a mixture of gentlemen avoiding the courts, naval deserters and runaway servants, lived off that meat, adopting the Taino method of slow cooking over an open fire, or boucan, and selling dried beef to passing ships, which is where the word buccaneer comes from. When they worked out that taking a Spanish galleon paid better than hunting, the French crown licensed them with letters of marque. Spain's hold weakened until France appointed Bertrand d'Ogeron as first governor of the French settlements in 1665, and the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 formally handed the western third to France. Girard notes the sequel, that once France had colonies of its own it turned against privateering and its former agents became pirates.

The Treaty of Ryswick, signed on 20 September 1697, ended nine years of war between France and the Grand Alliance of England, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic. The negotiators met at a country house near The Hague and traded fortresses, ports and colonies. One clause among many awarded France the western third of Hispaniola. Nothing changed on the island that day. French buccaneers had been established on Tortuga and along the northern coast since the 1620s, and by 1697 they had cleared land, planted tobacco and indigo, imported Africans, and installed a governor and a council. The treaty attached a legal name to a settlement already in place. That is generally how colonies come into being. Someone occupies ground, and a document drafted afterwards in Europe converts the occupation into title. The territory took the name Saint-Domingue and went on to earn more from sugar and coffee, worked by enslaved people, than any comparable piece of ground on earth.

Thornton uses the movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita to show how far Kongolese ideologues could rework Christian material. Claiming to be permanently possessed by Saint Anthony, she set out to end the civil wars and restore the kingdom, and in defining her position she retold Christian history so that the nativity happened at Nsundi, the province traditionally tied to Afonso, which she named as Bethlehem, while the capital São Salvador became Jerusalem and the place of the baptism. Thornton's point is that Macaya's later description of the kings of Kongo, France and Spain as descendants of the Magi was not eccentric improvisation but an established Kongolese habit of mind. Kongolese, he argues, viewed kings much as northern European thinkers did, as necessary but potentially limited.

In 1700 the Jesuit missionary Jean Baptiste Labat described St Vincent as the centre of the Carib republic, the island where the Amerindian population was largest, with Dominica nowhere close. Living among them he found a great number of runaway Africans, most of them from Barbados, which sits upwind and gave escapees a straightforward passage by boat or on rafts of light wood. A second French observer that same year wrote that the crossing required nothing beyond letting the currents carry you. Labat noted that the Caribs had once handed such arrivals back to their owners, or sold them on to the French and Spanish, and said he did not know what had made them change. Also in 1700 the Caribs asked the governor of Martinique to settle a boundary dispute among themselves. They were conducting their own diplomacy with a European colony, on terms they set, a century and a half after the Spanish first labelled them hostile.