Each island produced its own society and the ground still shows it

As people dispersed across the Greater Antilles they encountered a wide range of environments, and the environments pushed back. Local conditions on each island encouraged particular ways of working, particular arrangements for living together, particular habits that hardened into identity. The result was a mosaic, and it is legible today in how sharply the material remains differ from one island to the next. Keegan and Hofman argue that the pre-Columbian Caribbean should be read as a region in constant motion, with communities articulating with one another and expressing themselves regionally over several thousand years. This matters for what comes afterward. The colonial account of indigenous Caribbean life reduces it to a single undifferentiated people awaiting discovery. The archaeology shows dozens of distinct societies with their own trajectories, and the reduction was performed by writers who arrived at the very end and stayed a short time.

Work on Sao Jorge da Mina began on 20 January 1482 on the Gold Coast of what is now Ghana, and the castle was finished the following year. Europeans had traded along this shore from ships and temporary posts. A square stone fort with steep stairways and deep dungeons said something else: the Portuguese intended to hold ground in Africa permanently. The building outlasted them. It passed to the Dutch and then to the British, and for more than three hundred years a large cistern under its base supplied fresh water to vessels loading for the Middle Passage. Water is what a slave ship runs out of first, and a captain who could fill his casks at Elmina could carry more people and sail further. Thousands of captives were driven through the opening in its wall that later generations named the door of no return, some bound for the Americas and others for ports elsewhere on the African coast. Elmina is the oldest European building still standing south of the Sahara.

Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Caribbean and the ground on which several of the most consequential events in the hemisphere took place. Haiti holds the western third and the Dominican Republic the eastern two thirds. Columbus named it La Isla Espanola in 1492, the Spanish island, and the Latin form of the shortened version became the standard name in English. Together with Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico it makes up the Greater Antilles. The colonial names still cause confusion in print. Saint-Domingue was the French colony in the west and Santo Domingo the Spanish colony in the east, and writers applied both loosely to the whole island, blurring the distinction between two territories that were already becoming separate countries. The Taino had their own words for the place. Those words appear in a few early Spanish documents and then vanish. A name is a small thing to lose, and it is usually the first thing taken.

Less than twelve months separate the founding of La Navidad from its destruction. Columbus left the garrison on the north coast of Hispaniola in January 1493, and the Taino of the surrounding country burned the place before the year was out. Geggus is direct about the cause. The Spaniards left there preyed on the people around them, and the people around them answered. That reading matters because of what the standard chronology usually does with the episode, which is to file it under indigenous treachery and move on. The men in the fort had no supply line, no authority over anyone and no restraint. They took food, they took women, and they went looking for gold in country whose owners had agreed to none of it. The response was local, organised and effective. The first act of armed resistance to European settlement anywhere in the Americas happened here, and it worked.