The sugar ingenios of Hispaniola (1510s–1530s) — the first plantation complex of the Americas

The water-powered sugar mill reached Hispaniola in the 1510s and by the 1530s the island had twenty of them and four horse-driven trapiches. Oviedo, a royal official resident there, priced one at ten to twelve thousand ducats and specified that it needed eighty to a hundred and twenty enslaved Africans working continuously. The same book records what that produced: the first slave revolt in the Americas, at Christmas 1521, and the gibbets set along the road afterwards.