Twenty people paddle from Jamaica to Cuba and are granted asylum

In 1699 twenty enslaved people took a canoe from Jamaica to Cuba. The Spanish authorities who received them granted asylum on religious grounds, under a crown policy of accepting fugitives from Protestant colonies and instructing them in Catholicism. The policy was a weapon. Spain could not match English or French naval strength in the Caribbean, so it worked at the seams of its rivals' plantations instead, and freedom for anyone who could reach Spanish ground drained labour from colonies that had none to spare. For the twenty people in the canoe the theology was beside the point. What they had was a boat, a night, and knowledge of where the current would take them. Julius Scott records this as the earliest documented case of a practice that went on for more than a century, people crossing between islands in small craft to get out from under whoever held them. Our own century calls them boat people. The phrase has been describing this stretch of water for three hundred years.

The Treaty of Ryswick ended the Nine Years' War in 1697 and, among many other provisions, handed France the western portion of Hispaniola. The territory was named Saint-Domingue. Within fifty years it led the world in sugar, coffee and indigo, and by the 1780s it earned France more than any other colony earned any other European power. All of it rested on one input. The enslaved African population of that third of an island passed five hundred thousand, against roughly forty thousand whites and a similar number of free people of colour. The link between those two facts is what makes the colony worth understanding. Extreme output was bought with extreme mortality, and the deaths had to be covered by continuous imports, which is why the ships never stopped arriving. Saint-Domingue held its place as the most valuable European possession in the Americas until the people producing the wealth destroyed the machinery that produced it.

The Italian Capuchin Luca da Caltanisetta, travelling in Kongo, set down what happened on 10 February 1701. An officer holding the title Mani Lumbo came back with fifty eight people taken as slaves on the king's orders, having destroyed the village of a vassal accused of treason. Among those fifty eight, the priest noticed, were a number of free people: some who lived in the village, and others who had simply been there on business. This is how a large share of the Atlantic trade was actually supplied. Armies moved on a settlement and everyone inside it became merchandise, whatever their standing that morning. Caltanisetta recorded a second case in the same years. A woman already enslaved learned that her master had decided to sell her on to a trader with connections to the coast. She killed her baby and then herself rather than be deported. Kongo before 1665 had been orderly enough that few of its own people were enslaved. After the civil wars began, that protection was gone.

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.