Between 1688 and 1695 at least sixteen women who described themselves as natives of Veracruz married in the young parishes of Léogâne, L'Ester, Petite Rivière and Croix-des-Bouquets, and each was entered in the register as free. Sierra Silva shows that a sacramental record could do for these women what a letter of manumission did elsewhere, at a moment when French colonial law had not yet fixed slave status through the mother. They had arrived in Saint-Domingue five years earlier as captives of the 1683 buccaneer raid on Veracruz, which carried off close to 1,500 people of African descent from a city of six or seven thousand. Spanish court papers, contraband files and the digitised Saint-Domingue registers carry the account. The closing pages weigh what the record cannot hold, since women held in bondage, in brothels or in unrecognised unions left no sacramental trace at all.