Other Sails, and the Middle Passage

The race to Asia

While Columbus searched the Caribbean for Asia, Portugal kept sailing the other way. On May 20, 1498, the Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, in India, by sailing around Africa. [1] The sea route to Asia had been found, and it did not run west.

A continent named for someone else

A Florentine merchant named Amerigo Vespucci sailed along the coast of South America on voyages around 1499–1500 and 1501–1502. Printed letters under his name told Europeans that these lands were not Asia at all, but a New World. [4]

In 1507, the mapmakers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann, working at Saint-Dié in Lorraine, printed a world map. On the southern continent they wrote the name "America," from the Latin form of Vespucci's first name. [4]

Marooned

On his fourth voyage, Columbus ended up stranded on the island of Jamaica. When the local people stopped bringing food, he consulted an astronomical almanac that predicted a total eclipse of the moon on February 29, 1504. He told the chief that his God was angry, and would darken the rising full moon as a sign. [5]

The eclipse came on schedule. [5]

Replacing the Taíno

The story did not end with Columbus.

The first enslaved Africans arrived on Hispaniola in 1501, brought as household slaves by the entourage of the new governor, Nicolás de Ovando. [6] As the Taíno population collapsed and gold ran short, colonists turned to sugar, and demanded more enslaved Africans to grow it. [6] By 1520, more than 2,000 had arrived. [7]

Remember the proposal from Chapter 5: Bartolomé de las Casas, trying to spare the Taíno, suggested bringing Africans instead. He later changed his mind after seeing what slavery did to them. [8]

The first revolt

On December 26, 1521, enslaved Africans rose up on a sugar estate near Santo Domingo. The estate belonged to the island's governor, Diego Colón, Columbus's own son. Many of the rebels were Wolof, from West Africa. [6][9]

It is the earliest recorded slave revolt in the Americas. Diego Colón crushed it. On January 6, 1522, he issued what are believed to be the first laws in the Americas written to control enslaved Africans. [9]

Read that again. The first recorded revolt of enslaved Africans in the Americas broke out on the estate of Christopher Columbus's son.

The scale

Between 1501 and 1867, slave ships carried about 12.5 million captives out of Africa. About 10.7 million survived to land in the Americas. [10]

Full circle

In 1697, Spain accepted French control of the western third of Hispaniola. [11] The French colony there, Saint-Domingue, became the richest French colony in the West Indies. By the 1780s it produced about 40 percent of Europe's sugar and 60 percent of its coffee. Between 1681 and 1791, an estimated 790,000 to 860,000 enslaved Africans were brought there. [11]

In late August 1791, the enslaved people of the northern plains rose up. [12] On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence and gave the nation the island's Taíno name: Haiti. [13] It became the first independent Black nation in the Western Hemisphere. [14]